Batting Average Bounce-Backs
Fourteen candidates for big-time batting average bounce-back seasons in 2026
Intro
I have 14 confident “batting average bounce backs” picks for 2026. It’s ineffective to release this on October 31st, but I’m doing it anyway. It will be on the list of “offseason articles” in the Resource Glossary, so we’ll hopefully revisit it closer to draft season so it doesn’t get completely forgotten.
There’s variance and randomness in pretty much everything in life and in fantasy baseball. I’m not sure where batting average ranks among the fantasy baseball categories in terms of year-to-year fluctuation, but I would guess it’s pretty high up on the list. A lot of weird stuff can happen to cause deviation in a hitter’s batting average in a one-year sample. Let’s check on our guy, Jeff McNeil, to show some of that.
From .326 to .238 in two years. Two seasons above .315 and two seasons below .250 in six years. Weird stuff. I picked McNeil because he has the second-highest standard deviation in his batting averages over the last ten years. The high man is Yoan Moncada:
But nobody really cares about Moncada for fantasy leagues. Let’s check a more fantasy-friendly name that is high up there on the deviation list, Cody Bellinger:
We have no idea whether Bellinger will rip off .300 or .270 in a given season.
The most consistent hitter we have is Bo Bichette:
Christian Walker has also been delivering mostly what you expect year-in and year-out:
The average standard deviation for a hitter is 0.02. That means a hitter’s reasonable expectation for the next year should be within 0.02 points of their average mark. If you have a .260 hitter, then you should not be surprised at all when they go down to .240 or up to .280. That’s a one standard deviation range.
This is the reality. And fantasy sports are all about using the realities to our advantage. One way to do that is to capitalize on the guys who are very likely to hit for a much higher batting average next year than they did last year. Drafters will see the low batting average from last year, and that will affect their expectations for the next season. Projection models do a good job at regressing properly, so if you’re drafting based on strong projections, you’ll do fine. But there are 14 names I’ve found that stand out.
The Formula
I took four data points to create a filter.
2025 batting average
2024 batting average
2021-2025 batting average (I called that “career”)
2025 xBA
To really narrow down a list to the highest conviction names, I looked for players who met this criteria:
2025 AVG much lower than 2024
2025 AVG much lower than career
2025 xBA much higher than actual AVG
Bobby Witt Jr. is an example of someone who doesn’t meet this criterion. He hit .332 in 2024 and then .295 in 2025. He lost 37 points on his batting average. That could tempt you to think he’ll get some of those 37 back next year. But when you compare his .295 last year with his full sample size, you start thinking that what we saw in 2025 was about right.
His career batting average is .290. He hit .295 last year. The proper projection should be around .290. So he doesn’t make the list.
The guys we’re really looking for are the ones who have established a certain batting average in their career, and came in way below in 2025 while experiencing some bad luck (as measured by the BA to xBA gap).
Let’s get the names.
The Names
This is an interactive table, so you can click the page button to see the rest of the names. Click here to view it in a new browser.
Lourdes Gurriel Jr. makes the list, but he’s out for most/all of 2026 with a torn ACL
We have two old guys here with Salvador Perez and Marcell Ozuna (they’ll both be 35 to start next season). Batting average will trend down for a power hitter as they age and start losing some of that thump. But you see the .249 xBA for Ozuna and the .279 mark for Perez. There was some bad luck there as their 2025 averages came up well short of what we’ve come to expect from them in their career. I wouldn’t project the career average for a guy that far into his thirties, but it’s perfectly good to expect both guys to bounce back to .250 or so.
Oneil Cruz
He was the player who inspired this post. I was writing the Pirates preview and noticed this massive loss in batting average.
He lost 59 points of batting average in 2025. Any time you’re dealing with a strikeout rate north of 30%, you know you’re not getting a good batting average. But Cruz had established himself as a .240 or so hitter with that high strikeout rate prior to 2025. Things just went very wrong for him last year. His .229 xBA gives me confidence that he’ll climb back at least to the .230 range next year, and that will help his fantasy value a ton.
Bryan Reynolds
The read on Reynolds prior to 2025 drafts was that he’s pretty boring, but consistent. It turns out that players are only consistent until they’re not.
Reynolds had the worst season of his career, and it wasn’t particularly close.
The bothersome part of this is that his K% did rise four points. That’s a big change. That stat alone made the batting average decline inevitable. The good news is that he’s still just 30 years old and landed a .271 xBA last year.
It’s no guarantee that Reynolds will bounce back to the .265 hitter with 24 homers that we saw in 2023-2024, but it’s a good bet that he’ll be a lot better in 2026 than 2025.
Luis Garcia Jr.
Garcia almost perfectly replicated his K% and BB% from 2024. He has popped in for a 16% K% and a 5% BB% (some rounding involved here) in each of the last two years. His xBA in 2025 was way up there at .291. And yet, he hit just .252. That’s not a terrible batting average in today’s day and age, but the primary appeal in Garcia’s career fantasy profile has been the batting average. And he did not come through on that last year.
He swings the bat a ton. That brings in some extra volatility, but I don’t think you’ll see Garcia hitting .250 next year.
Yainer Diaz
Diaz and Garcia have very similar profiles. They’re extremely aggressive with middling raw power. The reason to make Yainer Diaz your fantasy catcher is the playing time and the batting average. He’s been a hit collector in his career.
He came into 2025 with a career .291 batting average. His performance in 2025 dropped that number to .279. The right answer for the 2026 projection is somewhere in the middle. It’s hard to hit .290 these days, and it’s harder for a guy who chases a ton of bad pitches. But I view Diaz as an easy .275 hitter, and that’s a big plus at the catcher position.
Mookie Betts & Seiya Suzuki
We’re left with two veteran players who bottomed out in batting average last last season.
There are some age worries here. Suzuki is 31 and Betts is 33. 33 is about the time you start seeing the decline.
The shared thread is that both of these guys had some brutal cold spells in 2025.
It seems like Betts just was not healthy for the first half of the season. His power was zapped. He slugged just .369 prior to August 1st.
Like a lot of his other teammates, Betts got right late in the year and headed into the postseason in good form. From August 1st to the end of the regular season:
→ .294/.351/.478, 9 HR, 24.7 PA/HR
That was a welcome sign, and it will Betts as a top-30 pick next year. His K% was just 8.3% in those final two months. So Betts’ batting average should be perfectly fine next year. There are fair questions about his power ceiling (22 or so homers?), but he should be a batting average and counting stat (near) stud next year.
As for Suzuki, he was going nuts for the first three months and then hit some sort of wall.
Three samples:
→ Mar-June ||| .258/.313/.540, 22 HR
→ Jul-Aug ||| .228/.344/.367, 5 HR
→ September ||| .232/.333/.478, 5 HR
The batting average didn’t really snap back in September, but he started hitting for massive power again. His career strikeout rate is 25%, which is a bit high. That will keep the batting average down a bit, but the raw power and solid bat control have resulted in two seasons of a .280 batting average already, so I don’t think it’s crazy to think he can bounce back up to that range in 2026.
The other qualifying names and quick notes about them:
Logan O’Hoppe: High K% catcher, he’s going to be volatile in batting average. He was not good with the stick in 2025, with a .213 AVG on a 31% K%, while the power dropped off (.378 SLG). I think he can do a lot better than .213, but .250 seems a bit out of the question at this point.
Jackson Merrill: We don’t have a good read on his baseline since he’s played just two seasons (around 1,000 PAs). I don’t know what kind of hitter he is. His two batting average performances have been .292 and .262. Seems wise to me to just put the 2026 projection right in the middle.
Ryan McMahon: It’s always weird when a Rockies hitter gets traded away. McMahon, even in Coors, hasn’t been much of a fantasy hitter in recent years. And it’s not clear that he’ll be an everyday player for the Yankees next year. He hit just .208 with the Yankees after going .240 with Colorado. Maybe we should forgive him for that weird mid-season location change, but McMahon isn’t going to be cracking any top ten 3B lists at this point.
Nolan Arenado: It seems like it’s about over for. Arenado. He’s 35 now, and his batting average lost more than 30 points last year. Some injuries factored in as well, causing a career-worst season. I don’t see much reason to draft him for fantasy next year; his skills seem mostly dried up. He can hit .250 next year, but that won’t be worth much with the lack of power and speed. Although hey, we said the same sort of things about George Springer a year ago.
Teoscar Hernandez: Another older guy (33). Interestingly enough, he put up a 24.6% K% in 2025. That’s very good for him (31% in 2023, 29% in 2024). But he lost some thump, and the average fell to .249. I think he’s at the point in his career where he’ll turn into a pretty one-dimensional hitter (home runs). I wouldn’t count on a good batting average from him, even though he definitely could improve on the .249 mark we saw last year (just by virtue of making this post!).
Willy Adames: The move to San Francisco didn’t end up costing him home run production (30 homers in 2025 after 32 in 2024). But the SLG did drop to .421 and the batting average to .225. Adames’s .251 batting average in 2024 seems like the outlier. He’s a .240 career hitter, so that’s about what I’d expect next year. Better than 2025, but still not good.