Fantasy Baseball: Six Spring Training storylines to believe, or ignore

16 days until Opening Day ...

Are y'all watching the World Baseball Classic? If not, you're missing out because the action has been absolutely electric, and you might be missing out on some opportunities to learn a thing or two.

For instance, Ozzie Albies might be back to being himself. He slugged a walk-off home run in the Netherlands' win over Nicaragua Saturday, and he did it from the left side of the plate – a 106.1 mph, 411-foot shot from his less dominant side. He had just two batted balls hit harder as a left-handed hitter last season, and three of his five batted balls of at least 105 mph from the left side came in August or later – after he said he fully recovered from the wrist surgery that ended his prior campaign.

One swing isn't everything, of course. In fact, one swing might well mean nothing. But it's still nice to see Albies looking healthy coming off another fracture in his hand, this time a hamate bone last September. Based on what we know about that injury and the timeline required for full recovery, he should be well past any lingering effects. But with his ADP stubbornly hovering north of 150 so far this draft season, any sign that Albies is entering the season at full health should be a reason to buy in at his newly depressed price.

(For those who don't remember, Albies hasn't had an ADP outside of the top 100 since 2018!)

I would be buying Albies at this price no matter what he did during spring action or the World Baseball Classic, of course. I'm not moving him up in my rankings here, even, and I think it would be a mistake to actively move him up based on what we've seen so far. If you were out on Albies before, I disagree with your assessment of him as a player, but I think it would be evidence of poor process to move him up now. Stick with your guns!

So, what kind of spring/World Baseball Classic results should move you? Well, I went over the types of storylines I'm looking at a few weeks ago, and today, we're diving into some of the biggest storylines driving Fantasy Baseball discussions with less than three weeks to go until Opening Day.

Let's try to separate spring fact from fiction with these six popular storylines from the past week or so:

Spring Training Believe It or Not

Junior Caminero is a "Steinbrenner Field merchant"

(Okay, so this one isn't technically related to Spring Training (and it isn't actually a direct quote), but it's a narrative I've seen going around enough in Fantasy Baseball circles that I want to address it.)

The criticism goes something like this: Caminero had a .953 OPS at home last season compared to a .743 OPS on the road. Given that the Rays were playing their home games in Steinbrenner Field, with its generous short porches down the lines, Caminero is due for a bunch of regression this season and is a bad pick in the second round.

Don't believe it.

This specific line of criticism will often include some kind of dismissive reference to Caminero's numbers in a "minor-league park," which is a clue that we aren't getting the deepest level of analysis here. Yes, Steinbrenner Field is a minor-league park, but … you guys realize minor-league parks can be pitcher's parks too, right? It's not like high school or something, where you have shorter fences almost across the board; Steinbrenner Field's dimensions are identical to Yankee Stadium's! Which is, rather famously, a major-league park!

(There is some evidence that wind patterns in minor-league parks are different from MLB parks due to the generally smaller stands surrounding the field, but let's be real: That's not what people are referring to here, for the most part.)

That's not to say Steinbrenner Field wasn't a good place to hit, nor is it to say that I don't have any concerns about possible regression for Caminero. In fact, I think a repeat of 45 homers is pretty unlikely – Aaron Judge has only ever had consecutive 45-homer seasons once, and I don't think it's unfair to say Caminero isn't quite the same caliber of power hitter as literally Aaron Judge.

But my concerns about Caminero, such that they exist, have basically nothing to do with his home/road splits in 2025. He still had a .260 ISO and 20% strikeout rate on the road, both of which are within spitting distance of his home numbers; the biggest difference here is that he had a .324 BABIP at home compared to a .197 mark on the road. Steinbrenner might have had a marginal impact on BABIP, but I think the distinction we saw between his home and road production last year was mostly just noise. BABIP is an inherently noisy stat, and it's going to get worse the more you try to slice a player's production up in random half-season chunks. But there's no reason to believe Caminero's relative struggles away from home are any more real than what he did in Tampa.

In the interest of full disclosure: I have made the point a few times this offseason about my concerns about the impact playing in Tropicana Field might have on Caminero, but this is separate from the argument I'm referring to above. That one is specifically about how some players (like Willy Adames, most notably) have struggled to literally see the ball at Tropicana. My concern there is mostly that I just don't know how or if that will affect Caminero, but that would be true of any player who has yet to play a significant amount at Tropicana Field. It has nothing to do with Caminero's 2025 splits.

**Mick Abel is the breakout pitcher of Spring Training**

With his start Saturday against the Orioles, Abel has now thrown 10 innings this spring without allowing a run. He has 13 strikeouts without even one walk and has gone from seeming afterthought to likely having an inside track to the Twins rotation.

Believe it.

I don't really have any insight into whether Abel is going to make the Twins rotation, but … c'mon, he has to, right? We're talking about a former first-round pick and top prospect who was the primary return in a somewhat sizable trade last summer, and now he's been dominant this spring. What's the point of being a team like the Twins, with a bunch of unproven young talents, if you aren't going to give someone like Abel a chance when he's pitching like this?

Of course, we care less about performance and more about underlying skills changes, and I don't see much new about Abel right now. He's still throwing the same six-pitch arsenal he did last season, and there doesn't appear to be a significant change in either velocity or movement profile, which means he may just be executing at an especially high rate against overmatched competition.

You should maintain a healthy degree of skepticism about Abel, who had a 6.23 ERA in 39 innings in the majors last season. I'm not ready to say Abel is definitely even a league-average pitcher. But I'm ready to say he should be drafted in most leagues at this point, just in case.

**Matt McLain is the breakout hitter of Spring Training**

Through his first seven games, McLain has four homers this spring. To go with them, he has three walks and just two strikeouts in 23 plate appearances. And unlike with Abel, we have tangible changes to point to – McLain spent the offseason working on hitting low-and-away breaking balls, and he's using a quarter-inch longer bat to try and give himself better coverage on those pitches.

Don't believe it.

I mean, I'm not discounting the possibility of McLain having a breakout in 2026. He came into 2025 with huge hype in the Fantasy community despite missing more than a year with shoulder, oblique, and rib injuries, which was already asking a lot out of him without even accounting for the pretty sizable swing-and-miss issues he had during his otherwise successful rookie season. A healthy offseason where McLain isn't just focusing on rehab but actually building his skill set could make a world of difference.

But the reason I'm more skeptical of the McLain helium comes down to price: McLain's ADP before Spring Training was already around 200; Abel's was around 425. McLain was still cheap-ish, but any movement up as a result of spring performance costs a lot more than Abel's without something nearly as tangible to hang on to as "Abel is playing his way into the rotation."

McLain didn't have playing time concerns; he is overcoming, which means any increase in his price is more or less entirely due to his performance during the spring. And I'm not saying there's zero signal there. But according to Baseball-Reference.com, McLain's average opponent so far this spring has been below a Triple-A level of competition, and yeah, I'd hope a former top prospect entering his third MLB season would be ready to crush farm hand types. With McLain's ADP well inside the top 200 (178.8 in 54 March drafts), the stakes are higher. And I need a lot more than a quarter-inch longer bat and some offseason drills to push him any higher.

Konnor Griffin definitely won't be on the Opening Day roster

The arguments are getting heated. Some claim there's no way he makes the team, citing multiple quotes from Pittsburgh's manager and front office types where they have pointedly refused to anoint Griffin as anything more than an "impressive" young player who has "got a chance to have a really, really good, long career." Every time they mention the fact that Griffin has very limited exposure to the high minors, his chances of cracking the Opening Day roster diminish.

Don't believe it.

I mean, look, it's entirely possible Griffin won't crack the Opening Day roster. In fact, at this point, I think it might be more likely than not that he goes down to Triple-A. He's done some impressive stuff, but he has also had just four hits total in eight games among the three homers we've seen. Perhaps most concerning is the four strikeouts without a walk, given how concerned you have to be about any teenager's ability to handle major-league pitching.

But "more likely than not to start in Triple-A" is not the same thing as "definitely won't be on the Opening Day roster." The truth is, none of us knows. Nobody outside of the Pirates organization knows, and even then, I'd bet it's a pretty select group; they might be genuinely undecided about Griffin's immediate future, even.

But the fact that they are reportedly willing to talk extensions with Griffin – which would, presumably, come with an effective guarantee that he'll open the season in the majors – means they haven't already decided he'll be overmatched. They may still try to play service time games with him if he doesn't sign the extension, or they may come to the decision, independent of all that, that he just truly isn't ready for the majors.

With his price pushing into the top-150 in a lot of recent drafts, the stakes are increasingly high for those planning to acquire the bag with Griffin. It might not be worth the risk. But it's also still true that nothing about Griffin's future is guaranteed yet, no matter what anyone says.

Andrew Painter is about to break out!

I added Painter to my Sleepers 2.0 list, so I must believe this one, right? Especially with Painter having thrown 5 shutout innings through two spring starts while averaging 96.3 mph on his four-seamer and showcasing a deep five-pitch arsenal. With a rotation spot locked in, he's a great pick in all leagues, right?

Don't believe it.

Gosh, I wish I could believe in it. Painter was one of the most exciting prospects of the past decade and was on his way to a teenage debut in the majors before elbow troubles in 2022 derailed him. He's still just 22, and he still has a live arm and a good feel for multiple different pitch shapes.

But he just isn't the same guy he used to be anymore. When he tore through three levels of the minors with a 39% strikeout rate as a 19-year-old in 2022, with a high-90s four-seamer with elite physical characteristics, when he came back from Tommy John surgery last season, he did so with a lower arm slot and a tick less velocity on the four-seamer, which also had a worse movement profile. Where he used to touch triple digits regularly with extension and movement profiles that made the pitch play even better than the velocity, it's not one of those dreaded "dead zone" fastballs. 96 is still 96, so it's not a bad pitch, but it's not the kind of pitch that can carry an arsenal in its present form, and unfortunately, that hasn't changed this spring.

As for the rest of that deep arsenal, nothing else is really standing out either. When Painter threw three shutout innings Saturday against the Blue Jays, he did so while generating just one whiff on three sliders and one on a couple of changeups – the 10 sweepers and curveballs he combined to throw didn't register a single whiff. And, by PitcherList's Stuff+ model, only the changeup rated out as an above-average pitch based solely on physical characteristics, not results.

Which is all to say: Painter still looks a lot like the guy who the Phillies decided they couldn't trust to pitch late in a pennant race, even after they lost Zack Wheeler to injury. Wheeler's delayed start to the season means Painter should be among the starting five when the games start to count, and at the very least, he has shown enough command and control early on to think it won't be a disaster when he does face MLB lineups.

But right now, Painter doesn't really look like the guy who used to be the easy choice for the top pitching prospect in baseball. He's still worth a late-round flier in most leagues, but it's mostly a blind-faith situation based on what he's showing right now.

Roki Sasaki isn't an MLB-caliber pitcher right now

When Sasaki elected to join the Dodgers, it was yet another seismic shift in the balance of power in baseball. Unlike Shohei Ohtani or Yoshinobu Yamamoto, or even Teoscar Hernandez, Sasaki was a world-class talent who would cost the Dodgers nothing, further cementing their edge on the rest of MLB by providing a cost-controlled ace to supplement their increasingly expensive and aging roster.

But with a 4.46 ERA (and significantly worse peripherals) in the majors as a rookie and five walks and seven earned runs in his first 3.1 innings of work, Sasaki looks, in the words of Fangraphs.com's Michael Baumann,more like "Broke-i Sasaki."

Believe it.

Bad pun aside, I can't really disagree with anything Baumann wrote there. Not right now, at least.

At his best, Sasaki combined an electric, high-90s fastball with a one-of-a-kind splitter. There was a slider in there, but Sasaki never really had a feel for spin, and it served more as a show-me pitch to get him over. It never made him the best pitcher in Japan, but he did have prodigious strikeout skills, and, given his age (just 23 years old when he joined the Dodgers), he was rightly viewed as one of the best pitching prospects in the world.

But there was already some slippage before he came over to MLB. In his last season pitching in Japan, his ERA (adjusted for league context so that average is 100) had risen from 54 to 75 – basically from Tarik Skubal's 2025 to Carlos Rodon's 2025. His strikeout rate dropped from 39% to 29%, too, and his average fastball velocity dropped about 2 mph. He pitched through some nagging injuries, and as we learned when he signed with the Dodgers, at one point, doctors recommended he have Tommy John surgery to repair his UCL.

He opted not to and said he signed with the Dodgers out of a belief they could find some tweaks to get his fastball back to peak form. The problem is, while his velocity is up so far this spring from where it was when he was starting last season, that's been in less than two-inning bursts, and with the same poor movement characteristics as before. Sasaki's is not a fastball that gets a lot of that deceptive rise or run we're looking for from four-seamers; given his release point and velocity, Sasaki's fastball looks like most fastballs, and that's not what you want. Especially when you don't have a good feel for throwing secondary pitches – he has switched to a harder cutter-like breaking ball this spring, but it doesn't look like a game-changing upgrade from his previous slider.

Sasaki does still have that splitter, but that's probably never going to be a foundational pitch for him. He throws it with such low spin rates that commanding it seems nearly impossible to do consistently – sometimes it spins so little that it moves like a traditional splitter (toward the arm side), but occasionally it will float left and move more like the funkiest slider you've ever seen. That makes for a heck of a putaway pitch, but it's not so great when you're down 2-0 in the count and just need to get a pitch over.

More than anything else, though, this is a story about Sasaki's fastball. Despite the velocity, he had just an 11.1% whiff rate with the pitch in 2025. That's lower than the whiff rate on Seth Lugo's 91.3 mph sinker, for the record. He might be able to survive and even thrive if he were sitting 98 and consistently hitting 101, but if anything, Sasaki's fastball looks worse than it did a year ago. After a full offseason in the lab, that's not what we hoped for.

At this point, I'm not even sure Sasaki is worth a late-round dart throw. There are enough pitchers showing a lot more than Sasaki is right now.

Injuries, News, and Notes

Updates on the hamate bone injury guys, all of whom do actually look like they might be ready for Opening Day, surprisingly:

Jackson Holliday hit 40 balls off a tee Saturday, using both hands to swing, and said that he expects to take batting practice within the next week.
Corbin Carroll has been taking live at-bats and said he plans to play on Opening Day.
Francisco Lindor started a hitting progression last Wednesday, the team has been consistent all along that Lindor will be ready for Opening Day.

Here's some other news to know from around MLB:

Nick Pivetta is dealing with mild arm fatigue. Manager Craig Stammen said that it's nothing major, but for a guy I already have questions about, this isn't what we want to see. It's probably nothing – "dead arm" is a pretty typical complaint in Spring Training – but we'll watch it.
George Kirby has swapped out his splitter for a changeup and is toying with a cutter. Kirby lost the feel for his splitter when he lowered his arm slot last season, and while we don't have arm angle data for Spring Training -- c'mon, MLB, help a guy out ... -- the fact that Kirby hasn't gone back to that splitter suggests that his arm slot is still low. That led to more lateral movement on his breaking balls, especially, which helped Kirby get more whiffs and strikeouts at the expense of a slightly higher (though still elite) walk rate. But it also corresponded with worse results on balls in play, and it's hard to know how much of that is because of the lower arm slot, compared to just random variance or noise. Kirby is a viable No. 2 starter, but he's also seemingly a different pitcher than the one he was pre-2024, which makes it harder to say how good he'll be with confidence. My expectations are high, but I bet they're lower than a lot of other Fantasy analysts.
Don't love to see this: Ivan Herrera was scratched Sunday due to knee inflammation. He had offseason elbow surgery that delayed his spring, but he also missed some time with a knee issue last year, and this might limit his reps behind the plate early in the season. He's Util/DH-only for Fantasy, so getting eligibility somewhere would sure help his value.
Zack Littell has agreed to a one-year deal with the Nationals. He's a solid WHIP specialist, but the ERA will likely be around 4.00 and he'll offer very little help in strikeouts, so throw him on the low-end streamer pile if the early-season matchups line up well – unfortunately, because of his late signing, it's not clear if he'll be ready for Opening Day, making it impossible to try to project his early-season schedule.
Brandon Woodruff made his spring debut Saturday, tossing two shutout innings with three strikeouts and one walk. His fastball velocity was down 1.1 mph, but this early in spring, he should be able to at least get back to where he was in 2025, when he was extremely effective when healthy. The bigger question is whether he'll be able to last throughout the season.
Cam Schlittler appears to be past the back injury that was bothering him this spring. He pitched 2.1 scoreless innings Friday, and his velocity was fine – it was even up on his cutter, which is an interesting wrinkle. I have some concerns about his ability to hold up amid the massive velocity jumps he has experienced in recent seasons, but I don't really doubt the talent.
Gerrit Cole threw 30 pitches over two innings during a simulated game on Friday. His fastball topped out at 97.5 MPH, which sounds promising. He maxed out at 98.4 mph in his last regular-season start in 2024, so he isn't far off.
Shane Bieber had a heavy flat-ground throwing day Friday, but there remains no timeline to throw off a mound. I remain very concerned about his ability to stay on the mound for long enough to really make an impact for Fantasy.
Merrill Kelly threw a successful bullpen Sunday and will throw another one this week before potentially pitching in a Cactus League game. He's dealing with that mid-back tightness, but could still be ready to open the season in the rotation.
Quinn Priester continues to deal with a right wrist issue, which has plagued him since August of last year. He could be off to see a specialist in the coming days if he continues to deal with soreness.
That could open a rotation spot for Kyle Harrison, who has a new kick-change and has looked very good this spring. I'd like to see him throwing fewer fastballs than he still is (around 60%), but at least he's still sitting 95-ish with it now. The changeup is interesting enough, given Harrison's pedigree, to put him on that late-round flier list for drafts the rest of the way.
Bryce Miller threw a 25-pitch bullpen Sunday at about 80% intensity. He's working his way through a left side injury and remains in question for Opening Day.
Riley O'Brien made his spring debut this weekend, allowing a walk and a hit over a scoreless inning of work. He's been coming back from a calf injury, but should have enough runway to get ready for the season, where he figures to at least have a share of the Cardinals' closer role.
Chandler Simpson has been held out of games since Wednesday, due to renewed tightness in his left hamstring. That's just a little bit concerning for a guy whose entire game is based on speed.
Yandy Diaz has not played since Tuesday due to soreness in his left hand. Manager Kevin Cash said Diaz is fine, just giving him some time to get right.
Edwin Uceta is unlikely to be ready for Opening Day due to shoulder inflammation. Griffin Jax figures to lead a committee in the ninth inning, though the Rays have yet to confirm anyone's roles.
Josh Lowe took dry swings Friday and "said it went well". He was diagnosed with an oblique injury on February 28, the same injury he's dealt with each of the previous two years.