Why the 2026 Fantasy Baseball Projections Are Lying to You (And the FantasyPros Crew Knows It)
Math is fundamentally unimaginative.
Listening to episode 1164 of the FantasyPros Baseball Podcast, I kept coming back to this exact thought. Joey P, The Welsh, and Joe Arrico spent a solid hour wrestling with the very thing that makes fantasy sports so maddening. Projections—specifically the 2026 ATC models they were analyzing—are fantastic at telling you what happened yesterday. They are profoundly bad at telling you what happens tomorrow if a player decides to finally adjust his launch angle.
This episode hit that sweet spot I'm always hunting for. It wasn't just a dry reading of spreadsheets. Instead, it was a fascinating argument about the friction between cold data and human nuance.
Here is what the algorithms are currently getting dead wrong, according to the guys.
The “Growth” Blindspot
The most heated back-and-forth centered around Jeremy Peña and Gunnar Henderson.
Arrico took the traditionalist view on Peña. The guy is hitting his age-28 season. At this point, you essentially are what the back of your baseball card says you are, right? A decent 18-homer, 18-steal middle infielder.
Welsh completely rejected that premise.
And honestly, Welsh is right. Algorithms penalize players for getting hurt, dragging down their three-year averages. Peña was actually putting up career-best underlying metrics last season—higher barrel percentages, better hard-hit rates, pulling the ball more often in the air—before the famously inept Astros medical staff bungled his injury recovery. Projections see a guy who missed time. A human scout sees a player in the middle of a massive, interrupted breakout.
If you draft purely off the ATC sheet, you are drafting the floor. You entirely miss the ceiling.
The Golden Nugget "The one thing that projections don't do a great job of is progression. Projections are always looking and building off of what we have had and what they have told us. It's not accounting for if Gunnar Henderson were to start pulling the ball a whole bunch more." — The Welsh
The Injury Washout Discount
If there is an inefficiency to exploit in your fantasy drafts this March, it sits squarely with guys coming off freak medical years.
Take Jackson Merrill. His 2025 season was a tragicomedy of ailments. A hamstring pull in April. Sick in May. A concussion in June. Ankle injury late in the year. The math looks at his final stat line (16 homers, 1 steal in 115 games) and shrugs.
But Arrico pointed out something crucial here. If you toss the nightmare 2025 season in the trash and look solely at his rookie campaign—plus the fact that his sprint speed remains in the 80th percentile—you are getting a massive 50-pick discount on a premium asset simply because he had a bad run of luck. The kid still hits in between Tatis and Machado. Sometimes, you just have to trust the environment over the recent sample size.
Three smart takeaways from the episode:
- Ignore games played projections: Seriously, don't even look at them. No algorithm can predict a twisted ankle in July. Draft based on per-game skill and let the chips fall.
- Watch the pulled-air percentage: Welsh hammered this repeatedly. It is the secret sauce for unlocking power in guys who don't profile as traditional sluggers (like Zach Neto).
- Don't blindly trust the strikeout models on international players: Munetaka Murakami is the ultimate wildcard this year. The projections think he'll hit .200 with a 34% strikeout rate for the White Sox. But insider chatter (including direct quotes from pitchers who faced him in Japan) suggests his power will absolutely translate against big-league velocity.
Projections are a safety net. They keep you from drafting entirely on vibes and gut feelings. But if you want to actually win your league, you have to know exactly when to ignore the math.
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