Fantasy Baseball 2026 Draft Rankings

Let's begin with a few fun facts about the MLB landscape last year:

• Scandalously, only three pitchers cleared 200 innings and no one reached 210;
• Eight different relief pitchers saved 30 or more games, yet none of them had ADPs inside the top-100 picks. Most (though not all) of the early-round closers were bad ideas;
• Pretty much everyone was stealing bases, including the slow guys. Juan Soto, a man with 13th percentile sprint speed, managed to swipe 38 bags; 
• A catcher finished as a top-5 fantasy player, which had not happened in an age;
• Just seven qualified batters managed to hit .300 or better, because batting average is basically a relic, a forgotten stat;
• Shohei Ohtani remained a cartoon.

We can probably expect the season ahead to look quite a bit like 2025, particularly where base-stealing and pitching workloads are concerned. The exact manner in which you apply these facts and trends to your fantasy life is, of course, up to you. 

As you're about to see, Dalton and I are not perfectly aligned...