2026 Team Previews: Arizona Diamondbacks
A detailed fantasy baseball oriented team preview of the 2026 Arizona Diamondbacks
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Podcast
2026 Team Previews Podcast: Diamondbacks
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Intro
It looks like the Diamondbacks are in a bit of a rebuilding phase. They look like a 75-80 win team as the roster is currently constructed, but there’s talk about them trading off Ketel Marte, which would push them down the ranks a ton. And the pitching staff is not looking great, to say the least.
There are many worse offenses, and at least a handful of worse starting rotations, but the Snakes do not look like a playoff team to me. Let’s go through it as we analyze all fantasy-relevant names for 2026.
Hitters
Corbin Carroll
Age: 25
Pos: OF
Carroll recorded his first 30-30 season last year. He added six homers to his previous career high while recording a 14.2% Brl%. I didn’t think that was possible for Carroll, but that’s what happened.
Carroll has had two easy round-one seasons out of three. The “down year” in 2024 still saw him his 22 bombs and swipe 35 bags, but the .231 batting average was alarming.
But he came into 2026 as a new kind of hitter. He was swinging the bat harder than ever before, hitting it way harder than ever before, and elevating it way more than ever before. Look at these changes:
Carroll doubled his barrel rate last year and added all that goodness everywhere else. This is a very impressive hitter.
He did have to raise the K% a little bit in exchange for the power. It was a very worthwhile trade, but it does make the batting average a touch lower.
He was at 19% in K% from 2023 to 2024 with those mixed results in batting average. At 24%, he probably can’t do another .287 batting average like back in 2023. But that’s fine for a 30-30 guy.
Carroll is a first-rounder. His early ADP is 7.6, so he’s in the middle of that first round. There’s a concern that the Diamondbacks could be terrible. They might trade away Ketel Marte and head for a rebuild. That would hurt Carroll, who has benefited from the Diamondbacks being a well-above-average run-scoring team the last few seasons (they somehow led the league in runs in 2024 and finished sixth last year). Carroll is fourth in baseball with 228 runs scored over the last two years. It’s possible he lands around 90 if the Diamondbacks suck.
If we’re just talking early-round hitters, I think it tiers off like this:
Tier One
Shohei Ohtani
Aaron Judge
Bobby Witt
Tier Two
Jose Ramirez
Juan Soto
Corbin Carroll
Elly De La Cruz
Ronald Acuna Jr.
Julio Rodriguez
I’m inclined to put Carroll above Soto in standard roto. I don’t think those steals are coming back for Soto, and his walk rate doesn’t help for these standard 5x5 leagues. With Carroll having the age advantage over J-Ram and both teams looking pretty mediocre, I think I’d make Carroll my #4 player.
Projection
629 PA, 96 R, 28 HR, 82 RBI, 24 SB, .257/.343/.492
Ranking
For now, he’s easily #1 since I haven’t gotten to the Yankees, Dodgers, Royals, Guardians, Mets, etc. yet.
Ketel Marte
Age: 32
Pos: 2B
We could see Ketel ending up another team at some point this year, but the Snakes have him on a deal through 2031 that came from an extension they gave him. So it’s certainly no guarantee that he’ll be going anywhere. I think the best bet right now is that he remains a Diamondback. And he’s been awesome for them.
He’s on a short list of hitters who have cleared a .270 batting average in each of the last three years with 400+ PAs.
There were some questions about his power output in 2021-2022 when he hit just 26 bombs in 227 games. But since then, he’s homered 25, 36, and 28 times with a very nice 19.9 PA/HR.
The one thing he doesn’t do is steal bases. And he’s also getting up there in age. But so far, there are no signs of decline. These last two years have, in a lot of ways, been his best work.
A .294 xBA is so good, and it comes with loads of power with the 13.5% Brl% and .400 xwOBA.
He gets a lot of balls in the air and hits them very hard with an elite 107.3 EV90.
I’ve been trying to check the splits for all hitters, but I haven’t been good at doing that. Marte is a switch-hitter, which always makes the splits a little bit more interesting.
He has long been a lot better against lefties, but he evened it out last year with a sick .397 xwOBA even as a left-handed hitter.
You’ll want to build in some steals around him with your early picks, but Marte is the runaway best player at a very weak 2B position. And that should boost him a few slots up draft boards.
If we look at my projected SRV at 2B:
So it’s Marte in tier one, Turang and Hoerner in tier two, and then a massive fall-off down to the next group of players. Turang and Hoerner are heavily reliant on steals for their value. So the gap is truly even wider.
This is a situation where I’d be happy to get Marte in the third round. He separates from the rest of his position like nobody else does this year.
Projection
619 PA, 94 R, 30 HR, 85 RBI, 6 SB, .281/.364/.522
Ranking
Geraldo Perdomo
Age: 26
Pos: SS
The biggest shock of the 2025 season, to me at least, was that Geraldo freakin’ Perdomo got MVP votes.
He went from a 102 wRC+ to 138, for the seventh-biggest increase from 2024 to 2025.
He played awesome defense, as always, and was an incredibly valuable real-life player and fantasy player. Forget the defense for the rest of this post, we don’t care about that. With the bat, he was the #4 roto shortstop last season.
A 20-27 season with a .290 batting average and a ton of action in the counting stats. Compare that with this two prior seasons:
→ 2023: 144 GP, .246/.353/.359, 6 HR, 16 SB
→ 2024: 98 GP, .273/.344/.374, 3 HR, 9 SB
→ 2025: 161 GP, .290/.389/.462, 20 HR, 27 SB
Let’s get into the advanced marks from 2025. He was a plate discipline stud with more walks than strikeouts. That’s very rare to see. He was very patient (40% Swing%) but made a bunch of contact (92% Zone-Contact%) when swinging.
I can buy him as a good batting average and OBP guy. But the guy has 44th-percentile sprint speed and 7th-percentile bat speed.
That 101.2 EV90 was the second-lowest in the league for any hitter who reached 20 bombs.
It’s tough to get to 20+ homers with this little EV. You see guys like Betts, Steer, Altuve, Paredes, and Bellinger around them. All of those guys have either elite pull fly ball rates, very friendly home parks, or both. Perdomo had a 16% Air Pull%, which is above average but nowhere near the elite. So the 20-20 thing really doesn’t make much sense. I’d bet heavily on the under 20 bombs for him next year.
With those elite bat skills, he does give himself a chance to “luck” into a ton of volume. He’s getting a bunch of balls in play and ending up on first base quite a lot. So even without the big bat speed or sprint speed, he can get to double-digits in both categories on volume alone.
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