2026 Team Previews: Tampa Bay Rays
A detailed fantasy baseball oriented team preview of the 2026 Tampa Bay Rays
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Podcast
Intro
The Rays are going BACK to Tropicana Field next year, and that’s a pretty big deal. The Trop is a very pitcher-friendly environment. Not only are the dimensions more favorable (to pitchers) than the minor league park they were playing in, there’s also an element that boosts pitcher “stuff”. I’m not going to dive into it at this point, but I’ve done the research in the past, and when you compare Stuff+ in and outside of Tropicana Field for pitchers who have pitched in both, you notice that their marks are almost always higher in Tampa Bay. There’s some sea-level business going on there.
And not only that! Remember the Willy Adames thing? He said he couldn’t see the ball well out of the pitcher’s hand in the Trop? His home/road splits always favored the road, and his career really took off when he got traded.
I assume they’re doing massive remodeling in the stadium, so maybe the batter’s eye stuff won’t be the same anymore. But the elevation isn’t changing, and the park dimensions are without doubt more favorable to pitchers as the Rays go from Steinbrenner back into Tropicana.
So we want to slightly/generally downgrade hitters and upgrade pitchers. This will be a major theme of the write-ups below.
Hitters
Junior Caminero
Age: 22
Pos: 3B
It wasn’t hard to see the Caminero breakout season coming in 2025, and it happened. The kid hit 45 homers in 653 plate appearances while playing 154 games and driving in 110.
We can just get to the main point right away. The guy has elite power.
His league-best bat speed led to a 109.5 EV90, one of the highest marks you’ll see. The guy is crazy strong. As long as he’s healthy, he’s going to be hitting homers. Caminero is the type of guy who doesn’t even need the proper launch angle profile to pile up homers. But if he ever does perfect that (like Aaron Judge has), he’s a 60+ homer threat.
The separator with Caminero and plenty of other elite power bats is the contact ability. He’s never posted a strikeout rate above 22% in any season.
He was the only hitter in the league with a PA/HR under 15 and a K% under 23%.
But when we view the fScores, we see a pretty low 91 hit tool and a “take it or leave it” 98 discipline.
The guy doesn’t take many walks. His walk rate, when taking out intentional walks, was just 6.1% last year. It’s stupid to take out intentional walks, of course. They count as much as anything else, but it tells you a little bit more about his actual eye at the plate this way. Caminero swung 50% of the time, which is higher than the league average (47%), but not so high that it’s a problem. His chase rate was high at 32%, and that explains a bit of it.
He makes enough contact (82% in zone, 75% overall) to not turn that high chase rate into a bunch of strikeouts, but he does end up making suboptimal contact quite a bit. And pitchers don’t always have to give him something to hit. They’re already incentivized to stay away from the zone with him, and he doesn’t do quite enough to force them back into the zone.
He ended up with a .260 BABIP due to a very poor 19% line drive rate (or you can take the 29% Sweet Spot rate if you prefer; that’s always a very low number). His air pull rate is also nothing astounding.
This is all pretty exciting, actually. The dude just hit 45 homers while having these issues. Imagine if he makes gains in swing decisions and launch angle stuff. The ceiling for Caminero would be an Aaron Judge-type hitter. League-leading home run potential with a high batting average at the same time. So let’s do some comparison on the plate discipline tab of the main dashboard.
No pitcher wants to throw Judge a strike. You’d think he’d have a very low zone rate (47% is the league average), but Judge forces guys into the zone with that low chase rate. A 47.6% Zone% is way higher than you’d expect for a guy like Judge, and that’s a credit to him.
The ten-point chase rate gap is bigger than the six-point swing rate gap. Caminero swings a lot more frequently, but also does not have the pitch discrimination skills that Judge has. You’d like to see a much lower chase rate and a much higher ball rate from Caminero as he progresses. And he has a lot of time to progress; he’s almost 11 years younger than Judge.
If he makes even moderate gains in these things (which I think is likely), there’s another level he can go to.
The park stuff, as mentioned at the top, cancels out some of the extra upside. According to the expected homers by park stuff, there were plenty of parks he would have hit 35 or so homers in last year. Going to Tropicana is a significant ding to hitters. So he’ll be fighting against that.
I don’t really see a world where a guy with this low of a strikeout rate and this much raw power doesn’t get to 35 homers, though. The floor is very, very strong. You can bank on elite homer and RBI production while very possibly getting a good batting average as well (.270 xBA last year). And there’s real 50-homer, .300 batting average upside with the kid.
The steals aren’t really there. His 30th percentile sprint speed makes the seven bags he stole last year seem about right. But he’s no snail out there either, so there’s some hope for a double-digit steals season.
Projection
519 PA, 80 R, 33 HR, 89 RBI, 5 SB, .280/.327/.545
Ranking
Chandler Simpson
Age: 25
Pos: OF
From Caminero to Simpson. Thunder and lightning. Two hitters that couldn’t be more different.
Caminero has two barrels before he gets out of bed in the morning, Simpson didn’t get one in 441 trips to the plate.
Here are the numbers on Simpson from all levels each year:
261 steals and one home run. And that home run was an inside-the-park homer.
There are two questions with Simpson for 2026. One has to do with him, one has to do with the actual math of the fantasy game.
Will he play every day?
Simpson’s final call-up was on June 24th. After that date, he started 71 of 81 games. He led off in 52 of them. After the trade deadline, he played even more, and was almost exclusively the lead-off hitter against right handed pitching.
So it’s a good bet that he plays more than 80% of the time next year and leads off a ton. But I don’t think it’s a lock that he plays 150 games even if healthy. He is somehow not a good outfielder. It’s wild to see 97th-percentile speed with 11th-percentile range in the outfield.
Range is measured when you’re making outs, not just how far you’re running. So the guy has some problems. He doesn’t read the ball off the bat well, and that’s a lot more important than your speed.
All of that just to say that we can’t lock him in to be a starter all year, which means we can’t bank those 60+ steals. If he does play even 120 games, he’s a must-own fantasy player because of the rate at which he piles up steals.
Simpson piled up a good roto fantasy season last year with a +6.6 SRV. The .300 batting average massively helped him, so we should talk about that too.
The guy makes a ton of contact. The main reason he’s not hitting homers is the approach. He knows who he is and how he’s going to make his money. Short, slow swings that generate high contact rates.
He had a 92.5% Zone Contact% with a 60% GB% and a 9% FB%.
We would benefit from some more line drives, for sure, but a 60% GB% is not a problem at all for an Olympic sprinter. He gives himself a chance for infield hits that way. The last thing you’d want to see from him would be a high fly ball rate.
Chandler Simpson Batting Average by BB Type
Ground Balls: .228 (league = .275)
Line Drives: .621 (league = .614)
Fly Balls: .182 (league = .279)
With league-low swing speed, his fly balls will be caught at a very, very high rate. And with league-high sprint speed, his ground balls should turn into hits at a higher-than-average rate. Interestingly enough, that’s not what we saw last year. I wouldn’t expect another .230 batting average on ground balls from the kid. It’s true that EV matters in that regard too, he’s getting fewer grounders through the infield, but I think that number will come up significantly next year. His xBA was at .280. I think the batting average is safe with him. He probably can’t hit .320 or anything like that with the lack of any sort of exit velo, but I have little doubt that he’ll be a positive in the fantasy game in the category.
The question is simply about whether you want to use one of your top 12 or so picks on a guy who will not hit you a single home run (unless he lucks into an inside-the-parker again).
I think it would be a fine thing to do if I was sure he was their everyday centerfielder. But I’m not sure about that at all. I think there’s a chance he ends up back in the minors if he’s playing bad defense and not racking up a ton of base hits to make up for it.
My general approach in drafts is to have every single pick be a guy I think can hit 15 homers and steal ten bags. That’s not always possible, of course, but that’s the general approach. Simpson clearly doesn’t fit that. But there is the case where you end up with an extra slugger or two early in the draft because they fall too far and you can’t pass up the value. That puts you behind in steals, and Simpson immediately catches you up.
Projection
337 PA, 44 R, 2 HR, 32 RBI, 34 SB, .275/.312/.346
Ranking
You almost shouldn’t even be ranking Simpson among other outfielders, but what option do we have? We have to put him somewhere. The proper way to handle the Simpson decision is to be constantly looking at where your team is at in steals while you draft it. If you’re in round 11 and dead last in steals projection, Simpson becomes quite appealing. But if you’re doing fine in the category, there’s not much benefit to adding his zero homers and questionable playing time to the pile.
Yandy Diaz
Age: 34
Pos: 1B
Yandy might be the biggest victim of this park shift. He set a career-high in homers last year with 25, and no doubt that was helped by the home park.
The splits:
→ Home: .307/.374/.533, 18 HR
→ Road: .293/.348/.428, 7 HR
That’s 72% of his homers coming in George Steinbrenner Field. You can see in his career numbers the home run downside he has. He played 145 games in 2024 and hit just 14 homers. 137 games in 2022 with just nine homers. It’s good to see the one other 20+ homer season. That lets us know that 2025 was not a total mirage, but yeah, the home run expectations should be around 12-15 in 2026 rather.
The home run spray chart layered on top of Tropicana:
So it looks like most of them would still have gone out, but that doesn’t account for wall height. The thing I notice is that there are a handful of first-row jacks in that 25. Diaz averaged 381 feet on his homers, which was the fourth-lowest distance for anybody who hit at least 20 bombs.
Yandy’s “problem” has always been ground balls. I put the word in quotes because I don’t know if he or the Rays would view it as a problem. He’s been a nice real-life player for them, and maybe part of that has to do with the hard-hit grounders and line drives he’s hitting. You don’t have to hit 20+ homers to be a valuable bat.
Even with the home run explosion in 2025, we did not see a lwoer GB%. His FB% came up a couple of points from that 2024 season, but at a 54% GB% and a 20% FB%, he still wasn’t elevating the ball at a rate you’d like to see if hoping for home run production.
The exit velo has never been an issue for the big man, and his 109.2 EV90 was a career-best last year. Teaming that with an always low K%, and you have a guy that will rack up a ton of base hits. His fantasy value has usually come from run scoring (as the lead-off man) and batting average.
Diaz has always been, and will continue to be, a guy who is much better for points leagues. I don’t think he has a 30 HR+SB season in him, and it’s possible he ends up with single-digit homers if he starts to lose some of the bat speed and other skills. The guy is 34, after all.
I think most drafters will be pretty keen on the fact that the 25 homers isn’t to be expected again. But that doesn’t mean his big 2025 season won’t result in a cost that’s too much in 2026. We’ll have to wait and see.
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