2026 Team Previews: Los Angeles Dodgers
A detailed fantasy baseball oriented team preview of the 2026 LA Dodgers
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Intro
The nice thing about fantasy baseball is that the Dodgers can’t ruin it! A lot of people are quite turned off by what the Dodgers have been up to, and that makes sense. But I’m not going to sit here and complain. I leave the complaining to other people. Unless I have something to complain about that other people aren’t complaining about. I keep my complaining super unique.
If the Dodgers win 150 games and their third-straight World Series this year, we fantasy players will be fine. Nothing will change for us. We still have to get the stats daily. Who wins the games hardly matters.
And it doesn’t even reduce the strategy aspect of the game. If there were an absolutely loaded NFL team that was clearly going to go like 16-1 and score 40 points per game, that would make the draft kinda lame. There’d be a rush to those players.
But that’s not really the case with the Dodgers. I actually find myself running away from their players (the ones not named Ohtani, anyway) this year. They have this unique combination of being old, fragile, and having to try at like 65% capacity to coast into the playoffs. You’re not going to see a ton of volume from their pitchers. Their regular season focus will primarily be on getting their best players to October healthy. That plus the fact that Ohtani will be pitching again puts them in a true six-man rotation situation. I don’t imagine anybody on this team exceeds 160 innings this year.
And they only have two clear smash fantasy picks on offense (Ohtani and Tucker). It’s a pretty interesting team from the fantasy game. So let’s break that down. Life is good in fantasy land.
Hitters
Shohei Ohtani
Age: 31
Pos: DH/SP
Just another 55 bombs to add to the Hall of Fame resume for Ohtani. And this time, he did it while also focusing on pitching. We’ll cover his pitching separately.
We figured that he wouldn’t come anywhere near the 50 steals from 2024, and he fell the whole way down to 20. Look at the attempt rates here:
That 2024 spike was about two things
Not pitching
Chasing the historical season
I think you can get 20 again, but the guy is going to be pitching once per week, and he’s into his thirties now, so these steals are more likely to decline than anything else.
Who can question his impact with the bat, though? That’s 109 bombs in two years, and in this Dodgers offense, it’s just a ton of runs and RBIs. He drove in 93 runs as a lead-off man, the most in the league (by 22).
I hope someday we get the whole story about that gambling stuff from the beginning of the 2024 season. It does make you wonder about the guy a little bit. But I suppose ignorance is bliss, and it’s fun to see what the dude can do. And this will be a big year for Ohtani fever again as he returns to being a full-time starting pitcher right out of the gate while leading off as many times as possible.
At some point, we’ll start talking about age. Eventually, things are going to slow down or Ohtani, but given his absurd physical abilities, I don’t think that’s going to happen as a 31-year-old.
Projection
Ranking
I suppose it doesn’t matter what league type you’re in, Ohtani is probably still the #1. I could see an argument for taking Judge over him if you’re talking about Ohtani as strictly a hitter. But that’s about as harsh as I can be.
Kyle Tucker
Age: 29
Pos: OF
The big news of the offseason thus far has been the $240 million deal that Tucker got to play with the Dodgers for just four years. An absurd AAV, and just an absurd roster the Dodgers have now put together.
Tucker is coming off a couple of pretty rough seasons to boot. He’s played just 214 games in the last two years with 45 bombs and 36 steals. It’s still a very good production, but not quite the guy you’d usually expect to set contractual records as a 29-year-old.
He was clearly playing hurt last year, and that explains a good bit of the three-year-low he put him in all three elements of the slash line. With a clean slate of health along with this team and park change, he’s a first-round consideration again in fantasy leagues.
But we should note that Tucker has never had the chart-topping skill metrics.
He hasn’t cleared a 13% Brl% in his career, and the EVs have never been great. He’s just very, very good with the bat and he seems to maximize everything he has.
But when he’s not playing fully healthy, you can see the toll that takes. There’s a chance that Tucker underwhelms for the Dodgers. I think you’re pretty likely to look at what he does in these four years and be like, “Was that really worth $240 million?”
The projections are all between 25 and 30 homers with 18-24 steals and a .270ish batting average. You’re usually getting some kind of absurd upside in something with these top 15 hitter picks, and I guess you don’t have that with Tucker. What you do have is across-the-board reliability, and with massive RBI potential this year in particular.
I think you’ll be wrestling with taking Tucker or guys like Gunnar Henderson and Fernando Tatisi. I think Tucker is the safety play in those comparisons, but it’s important to state that it doesn’t look like he has the same ceiling as most of these hitters around him.
Projection
653 PA, 91 R, 30 HR, 88 RBI, 21 SB, .267/.371/.492
Ranking
Mookie Betts
Age: 33
Pos: SS
This is an interesting one, and a tough guy to rank for 2026. Because he was not very good last year!
We’re at 39 homers in his last 266 games with just 24 steals. The saving grace prior to 2025 was the batting average and the buttload of R+RBI. He scored 95 runs and drove in 82 last year, but hit just .258.
But there was this weird illness thing at the beginning of the year where he lost a bunch of wait. Maybe we’ve given that too much credit for his lack of production early on. But it makes some sense. It’s probably hard to play pro baseball after you just lose like 15% of your body weight or whatever it was claimed to be.
It’s probably fair to call 2025 the floor. And it wasn’t all that bad of a year. The Dodgers offense boosts these guys so much in R+RBI.
The other reason for belief is that he turned it on late.
Let’s compare the first four months with those final two months:
→ First 4M: .240/.309/.369, 11.3% K%, 5.2% Brl%, .317 xwOBA, 101.6 EV90
→ Final 2M: .294/.351/.478, 8.3% K%, 5.9% Brl%, .380 xwOBA, 102.0 EV90
The true answer is probably in the middle! But he’s 33 now. And it’s not easy to keep hitting 20+ bombs when you’re 33 and have never had a ton of raw power. His bat speed is low, but he’s always been able to get a ton of balls pulled in the air. His K% is always very low, so he gets to a ton of stats just through volume.
I don’t think Betts is going to have a bad year, and he will probably bounce back from what we saw last year. But I do think the ceiling is very capped. I don’t think there’s much chance of 25+ bombs from him, and on the steals front, you’re hoping for like a dozen.
But he’s a lot cheaper this year than years prior. He’s outside of the top 50 in ADP, so you can get your hands on Betts in rounds 4-5, and that sounds like a good strategy to me if you’re drafting for safety.
Projection
Ranking
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