Late Season Breakout Hitters
I dive into Standings Gained Points (SGP) to locate late-season fantasy baseball breakouts on the hitting side
Artificial intelligence bots probably won’t take over the world or end humanity as we know it. 90% of the people talking about AI doomsday really have no idea what they’re talking about. The AI might go ahead and make humanity incredibly stupid and ruin people’s childhoods and plummet us all deeper into a world where nothing you see is real. That probably will happen.
But damn if they aren’t amazing at doing some math. And I’m feeding the beast. I’m now a paid member of ChatGPT. So I’m living no limits. Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more a part of the MLB DW's genuine intelligence. That means the tools and the calculations all vastly improve.
I’ve had a little roto player rater for a few years now. But I never thought it was perfect. I’m replacing that now with Standings Gained Points.
There’s some code and math. I like to throw that stuff into these posts to make myself look smarter. But in this case, it’s a total sham because I didn’t write the code. But not all shams are bad.
The other huge development that happened in 2025 was my learning how to create Python Streamlit Apps. I found out that these existed in March, and I’ve been learning and improving ever since. So the future of MLB DW is bright. I have user-friendly, interactive Python apps now. Tons of them! I’ve been piling everything into that. And that’s where I’ll host the offseason content (rankings, tools, projections, customizable league settings stuff, etc.).
But let’s explore some of these late-season roto studs to see what lessons we can learn for 2026. You can get the data on the app if you’re a paid sub. All tools require a paid subscription. Hit the Resource Glossary for the links to everything.
Second Half Hitter Breakouts
Here’s a look at some of the most surprising guys near the top of the SECOND HALF SGP list.
George Springer
53 R, 16 HR, 31 RBI, 7 SB, .360 AVG
Geraldo Perdomo
45 R, 10 HR, 35 RBI, 14 SB, .320 AVG
Shea Langeliers
45 R, 19 HR, 41 RBI, 3 SB, .330 AVG
Josh Naylor
35 R, 9 HR, 34 SB, 19 SB, .300 AVG
Michael Harris
33 R, 14 HR, 42 RBI, 8 Sb, .300 AVG
Brice Turang
40 R, 12 HR, 42 RBI, 7 SB, .310 AVG
Trevor Story
41 R, 10 HR, 38 RBI, 15 SB, .270 AVG
There were few things more shocking than seeing Josh Naylor swipe 19 bases in a little more than two months.
The draft prices next year will be interesting in all cases. Springer is 36. It’s really tough to believe that he’ll do anything to close to repeating this stuff next year. He was a bad hitter in 2024 (.674 OPS), and wasn’t much more than average in 2022-2023.
I don’t think this 2025 breakout season will fool too many people. But I’ll be on the fade side.
Geraldo Perdomo, man. He hit .290 for the season. He just about won a batting title. Which isn’t as impressive as it used to be. In another way, though, I guess it’s just the same amount of impressive every year. You can only operate in the context you operate in. But the 90th-percentile batting average fell below .290 for the first time this year.
He also racked up 720 plate appearances. Remember when Jordan Lawlar was supposed to take his job or something?
Perdomo dropped the K% down to 11.5% while raising his walk rate to nearly 13% and posting the highest 90th-percentile EV of his career at 101.7.
He’s a great defender, so being a huge positive with the bat makes him one of the game’s most underrated players. I’m not sure I can buy into a guy who jumps from an eight-homer pace to a 20-homer season, but he’s just 25 and Arizona showed a ton of confidence in him even before this big season giving him the extension they did.
Trevor Story will also be a really interesting case next year. He stayed healthy this year and finished with a 25-homer, 31-steal season. He swiped 14 bags in the final two months and blasted eight homers while hitting .278 in August and .302 in September. That took his batting average up to .263 for the year, so he didn’t even really hurt fantasy teams in that category. He was a fantasy stud again!
Story was one of just ten hitters to go for a 10-10 second half.
Crazy stuff. He will be 33 next year, which makes him a tough click on draft day. For years now, he has been a guy who couldn’t stay on the field and would kill your batting average while he was healthy. But we see clearly that he still has plenty of ability in the roto fantasy baseball game.
Let’s look at some of the biggest differentials between the second half and the first half.
I filtered it to guys who had at least 150 ABs before and after the break.
The Shea Langeliers season was a wild ride. He hit just 11 homers before July, and then 20 more the rest of the season.
I don’t think anybody is going to miss Langeliers in drafts next year. With 60 bombs in his last two seasons, he’s going to be a top pick at the catcher position. The guys you might be able to snag some nice value on:
Michael Harris II: He’s now done this second half breakout thing a few times in his career. That doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. It could very well just be randomness, and you might get a nice price on him next year since the season-ending numbers don’t look that great (.678 OPS to go with the 20-20 season). If he can put it together for a full year, he’ll return first-round value.
Spencer Horwitz: I think the wrist stuff that happened in the spring hampered him even when he got back into the lineup. He posted a .284 xwOBA in May and hit just three homers in his first near 250 PAs. But he homered eight times with a .922 OPS, a 12.6% K%, a 12.6% BB%, and a large .346 xwOBA in 182 PAs in August-September. He’ll be a nice value at 1B, especially for points/OBP leagues.
Ozzie Albies: Maybe we should take the four months of sucking a lot more seriously than the last two months when he was okay again. But Albies will be extremely cheap in drafts next year. He swatted seven homers and stole five bags in the season’s final two months to get him to a respectable 16-homer, 14-steal season. And there’s some team-related counting stat upside if the Braves can finally get these stud players they have going at the same time again.
Matt Shaw: The classic case of a rookie who is overmatched in his first look at big league pitching but makes adjustments and improves. Shaw hit five homers in August. 11 of his 13 homers were in his final 220 PAs. His EV90 was 101.0 in the first half and 102.8 after the trade deadline. That’s the kind of in-season gain you don’t see very often. Add on the fact that he swiped 17 bags in 126 games played, and you have a guy who will likely project for a close to 20-20 season next year at the age of 24.
Brenton Doyle: It must have been a tough year to be a Rockies player. I’m not saying he’ll be a standard league outfielder next year, but he’ll be basically free and does have 38 homers and 48 steals in his last two seasons. He hit .344/.283/.645 in August with seven homers just to show you that there’s still some life in the bat.
Mark Vientos: Few hitters were bigger disappointments in the first half than Vientos. He came into the season with a good amount of hype and then slugged just .372 in his first 290 PAs. But he finished off the year by banging 10 homers in his final 172 PAs while slugging .484. And his K% improved for the year, down to 24.8% for the season after it was a big problem for him in 2024 (29.7%).
Let’s flip it around the other way. Second half LOSERS!
I’m not going to get into too much detail. Writing takes a long time, and it’s friggin’ October 7th after all!
I would say that I’ll lean more towards buying on these guys. Most drafters are going to remember how awful James Wood and PCA were down the stretch. That might push them down draft boards further than it should.
I have thought about writing down the Ten Commandments of MLB Data Warehouse. I haven’t done it. But if I ever do, one of them will be thou shalt not considereth the smaller sample size when a bigger one is present-eth. And that is exactly what you’re doing when you start drafting guys based on what they did in the final two or three months. James Wood still slugged .475 in 2025 with 31 homers. That’s a huge season. And you can get some value on it at times.
It’s also a pretty big advantage to find the players whose performance suffered due to injury. Aaron Judge isn’t a great example of that because he still had an awesome season, but we will set out this offseason to make a list of players who played hurt and struggled because of it.
For now, it’s a wrap. My main goal of these sorts of posts is to give you guys tools and methods to use on your own, rather than just giving player names that I find myself. So become a paid sub today and get into all of this data and these new interactive tools.