Career Years to Fade
What goes up must come down. In this post, we look at players who too expensive this year coming off a career year in 2025
One of the general principles that sharp fantasy baseball players have is to always expect regression to the mean. You usually don’t have two career years in a row.
It’s a bit counterintuitive if you’re somewhat new to the concept. You’d typically be more excited about a player after they’re coming off a career year. The inclination would be to think they’re rapidly ascending, and they have a good chance to get even better the next year.
But that’s not what you find. Generally, players will revert toward their career average the year after substantially beating it.
I’ve got a bunch of names who outperformed their prior selves last year that we should expect declines from in 2026. But first, let’s go back in time a year and see how this would have worked out for us last year.
I measured wOBA from 2021-2023 to establish a baseline for each player. Then, I found the players who went the most above that mark in 2024, and then checked what those players did in 2025 as a follow-up to their breakout season.
Only two of the 15 examples (Langeliers & Turang) did better in 2025 than they did in that breakout 2024 season. The average change was 0.0185 points. That’s about the same difference as there is between 2025 Juan Soto and 2025 Freddie Freeman, just to put an example on it. It’s not a huge drop, but 18 points is surely significant.
We’ll get into the names to expect similar declines from in 2026, but we’ll include ADP data in here as well. If you’re in a sharp league, the prices will more or less have adjusted properly for this stuff. Projections factor it in, so I’m not uncovering any new ground here for those of you who are keen on projections. But if we’re talking about your normal fantasy leagues out there, getting 12 guys together will usually turn in at least a couple who aren’t grinding and sweating through draft prep and projections and stuff. And I’d be happy to let those guys pay the higher prices for the guys we’ll talk about below this year. You’re very unlikely to get a repeat of last year, and somebody is going to be willing to pay a price as if that is very likely.
I’ll give you all the headline example for free, but then we’re heading behind the paywall.
Geraldo Perdomo, Arizona Diamondbacks
wOBA trend
ADP trend
A +370 in ADP. You usually only ever see that with rookies entering their first year as an MLB starter after they made a big splash in the middle of the previous season. Perdomo’s 2025 season with the bat was just so different than what we’d come to know from him and so unexpected that to me, it’s really hard to buy back in for 2026.
That’s not to say it was a total fluke. He had an elite 92% Zone Contact% with a .280 xBA and a .360 xwOBA. So the actuals weren’t all that different from expectations. But guess what bro - expected stats regress to the mean as well. That can be a hard pill to swallow. I’m not going to call anybody who drafts Perdomo in the top 100 the biggest fish in the pond, but I won’t be doing it myself. I’m a man of principle.
There are 29 more names given below the paywall. So sign up today to get the rest of this post and a ton of other stuff (and I do mean a ton).