Players to Buy Low On
We locate buy-low hitter targets coming off down years
My graphics suck, I know it. But I’ve decided not to spend that much time on it. To me, aesthetics is a luxury item. I plan on getting better at Canva and all this other easy stuff at some point, but it’s not at the top of my to-do list right now as we ramp up toward true draft season.
I’m good with logic and numbers. That stuff has always come naturally to me. But, as we know, every up has a down, every positive has a negative. And there’s a trade-off for the mental skills I’ve been given. And that is that I don’t know what looks pretty and what looks ugly. I mean, I guess I know what looks ugly, because I can tell that my stuff looks ugly. But I don’t know how to fix it.
And I don’t want to continue just to ask the AI to make my graphics, because it’s very obvious when you do that, and it’s becoming more and more popular. And I really don’t want to know the popular thing.
So you get what you get, and I suspect it doesn’t make any real difference anyway! You’re here for the NAMES! You probably just do what I do when other people put out articles like this. I CLICK it and then I scroll super fast through it just to see the names that were listed and then I go back to whatever time-wasting thing I was doing before that. And that’s fine with me. So let’s get into this post.
Part two! We did career years to fade here. In this one, we’re doing the opposite. We’re taking the positive approach in looking to buy low on players coming off a 2025 season where they did some of the worst work of their careers.
We’re following the same principle. An established player is more likely to repeat their career average rather than the last individual season. So we should be inclined to draft the guys that performed significantly below their career norms last year, although we’ll definitely be more suspicious of guys that are getting up there in age.
The examples I’ll give out for free:
Mookie Betts
How much of 2025 was about the illness he had early on? They said he lost more than 20 pounds from March to April after a strange illness. If that’s true, and I’m not sure why they’d lie about it, obviously, you’re not going to be the same level of athlete. And then you add on the fact that he finished the season very well, and you have all the makings of a big bounce-back year in 2026. Here’s his slash line per month table:
Things aren’t always this simple, but if they are in this case, Betts is one of the biggest values inside the top 100.
Nolan Arenado
It’s way harder to get excited about Arenado, who has been a bad fantasy player for several years now. But the rule applies. He lost 27 points on his wOBA last year after losing 13 the previous year, and that’s bad news, but an ADP drop outside of the top 400 for a guy in a new organization who will certainly play a bunch? That’s a perfectly good, albeit boring, target for deeper leagues.
Many more names to get to, but you’ll have to be a paid sub to get it!