10 early ADP Fantasy fades for 2026

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There's good values, and there's bad values. We went over the good values in way-too-early drafts earlier this week, so for the last Fantasy Baseball Today Newsletter of 2026, let's take a look at some of the picks I wouldn't be making at their current price.

That's not to say I don't like these 10 players, or that I won't be drafting them at all in 2026. Of course, there are a few players here whose price will likely prove too rich for my taste all offseason long, but for the most part, these 10 players just need to be a little cheaper to be worth buying into.

This highlights something I've said a lot over the past few years but is always worth repeating: It's just a lot harder these days to find obviously overpriced players in Fantasy drafts. It still happens occasionally, but because every analyst and player is so sharp, there just aren't as many obviously mispriced players as there were even 10 years ago. You have to look a lot harder, and you have to pick a lot more nits to make the case against the wisdom of the crowds in Fantasy drafts nowadays.

That's what we're doing today, but before we get to that, I just want to say thank you to everyone who subscribes and reads this newsletter and supports the Fantasy Baseball Today team in our podcasts, YouTube channel, or our writing. This is a dream job for us, and we can't do it without the support of our readers and listeners, so I just wanted to say thank you before signing off until January. We'll be back in a few weeks, rested and ready to get you through draft season with the best advice possible to build your teams. That's what we're here for, after all.

Now, let's get to those 10 overpriced players in early ADP:

10 early ADP fades

Yoshinobu Yamamoto, SP, Dodgers (23.6)

Yoshinobu Yamamoto is a great pitcher. And he's a great Fantasy player. But he's not a great pick with a second-round pick. The reason why mostly comes down to volume and workload – there just isn't much of a ceiling beyond the 173.2 innings he threw in 2025. The Dodgers have allowed him to throw on less than five days of rest in his career exactly once – when he got the win to close out the 2025 World Series. Otherwise, they have allowed Yamamoto to stay on an every-six-days plan, and that is almost certain to continue in 2026, especially with Shohei Ohtani and Roki Sasaki expected to be in the rotation with at least some kind of workload limitations.

Now, of course, being limited to 170-175 innings doesn't mean Yamamoto can't be an impactful Fantasy pitcher, especially coming off a season where only 21 pitchers even got to 180 innings. It doesn't put you at that much of a deficit, especially when we're talking about a pitcher with high-end skills like Yamamoto. But it does mean that his ceiling is just a bit lower than some of the guys coming off the board behind him; someone like Chris Sale or Logan Gilbert might not be as safe a bet as Yamamoto for 170 very good innings, but Yamamoto doesn't have the 180-plus-inning ceiling those guys have. And if you're picking a starter in the second round, I think they probably need to have legit difference-making upside. I just don't know if Yamamoto has that.

James Wood, OF, Nationals (29.9)

I like Wood. In a draft I'm currently doing, I actually took him as my second outfielder to pair with Jackson Chourio (Elly De La Cruz was my first pick), and I'm happy with that combination's upside. But the key here is the price: I got Wood with the 39th pick, nearly 10 picks later than he typically goes. And that's just a much easier price to swallow for a guy with Wood's obvious limitations.

We saw those limitations in stark detail in the second half of 2025, as he slumped to a .223/.301/.388 line while striking out an alarming 39% of the time. And he largely earned those struggles, with his xwOBA dipping to .319 over his final 250 plate appearances compared to a .361 mark for the season as a whole. The full-season numbers were still very solid – .256-87-31-94-15 – and full-season numbers tend to be more predictive than partial-season numbers, so I'm not saying I expect Wood to hit in 2026 like he did in the second half. But that near-40% strikeout rate is just such a massive red flag when we're talking about a second-round pick in a 15-team league and an early-third in a 12-teamer, especially if he isn't going to be the high-volume base-stealer we hoped he would be.

Aroldis Chapman, RP, Red Sox (58.0)

Just … don't pay for the career year, especially for a 37-year-old. Chapman cut his walk rate from 14.4% in 2024 to 6.6% in 2025, going from a major liability in his game to a legitimate strength, and it fueled arguably the best season of what might end up a Hall of Fame-caliber career. Maybe he can sustain it, but Chapman hasn't had a walk rate below 10% since 2017 (outside of the shortened 2020 season), so it's fair to bet against it. Especially when we're talking about a reliever who throws just 60 or so innings every season. That's a small sample size, roughly the equivalent of two months from a starting pitcher.

Now, it's worth noting that closer prices tend to get pushed up very aggressively in these early drafts, especially for the relatively few closers without much role risk. Chapman is going to be the Red Sox's closer in 2026; of that, we can be very sure, so pushing him up makes sense in that context. But I still think pushing him up as high as sixth among closers – ahead of Josh Hader! – just doesn't strike me as an especially wise move.

Freddy Peralta, SP, Brewers (62.0)

Say it with me: Don't pay for the career year!

Peralta was more or less the same guy as always in 2025. His 3.47 xERA was within spitting distance of the 3.35 and 3.84 marks he posted in each of the previous two seasons, while his 2.70 actual ERA was nearly a full run better than he managed in either season. There's a similar story to be told with his other ERA estimators, which were all maybe slightly better than his previous couple of seasons, but not nearly by the same margin as his actual ERA. He's a good pitcher, albeit a pretty frustrating one at times, and he'll generally get you close to 200 strikeouts, a mark he has hit three straight seasons.

But he's also never thrown 180 innings in a season and is coming off both an ERA and win total (17) that will be hard to repeat even if he isn't eventually traded by the Brewers at some point this offseason. This time last season, Peralta was a target for me with an ADP of 112.1. Now? He's a pretty easy fade at his current price, since nothing much has actually changed in his skill set.

Josh Naylor, 1B, Mariners (69.2)

What do we do with the steals? He stole 30 while ranking in the third percentile in sprint speed last season, and there's basically no precedent for that, including in Naylor's career, which featured a high of 10 steals prior to 2025. The fact that he is returning to Seattle helps his case – he stole 19 of his 30 bases in just 54 games after being traded there last summer – but expecting anything like a repeat of 30 steals is probably asking too much.

And when you look at the rest of Naylor's skill set … It's fine. He hit .295 in 2025, which is terrific, but he's also been notoriously inconsistent with his batting average over the years, going from .256 to .308 to .243 in three seasons prior to 2025. He's also topped 20 homers just once, and while he held his own in his partial season in Seattle, it's still a very tough ballpark to call home. Naylor was the No. 21 hitter in 2025, per the FanGraphs.com Player Rater, worth $23.8. $4.9 of that came from stolen bases; if he reverts back to being a single-digit stolen base source like he was for most of his career pre-2025, you're probably looking at more like a $15 player. And with the batting average fluctuations we've seen in the past, that's not as safe a $15 player as you'd like.

Oneil Cruz, OF, Pirates (85.8)

Now this one I just don't get. Is there some kind of collective delusion going on with Cruz? I understand the argument for his upside, given his world-class athleticism and top-of-the-scale raw power, but … he's 27 years old! He has over 1,500 plate appearances to his name in the majors. If he was going to level up significantly, wouldn't it likely have already happened? Does it really make sense to talk about potential with a player with this much experience in the majors?

Cruz did take a big step forward in the stolen base category in 2025, which helped keep his value from totally cratering, but even then, he was actively harmful in three of the five Roto categories, hitting just .200 with 62 runs and 61 RBI. And there is real playing time risk here for Cruz, who just looks totally overmatched against left-handed pitching, hitting just .177/.255/.311 when he didn't have the platoon advantage in 2025. Given that he is, at best, just a fine defender, there's some real risk of the Pirates simply turning a significant chunk of his playing time over to someone else in a season where they are seemingly trying to actually win games.

Drake Baldwin, C, Braves (92.7)

Baldwin is a terrific player. As a rookie catcher, he went out there and hit .274/.341/.469, and very little of it seemed like a fluke. He won't turn 25 until shortly after Opening Day and has the prospect pedigree and minor-league track record to back up what he did en route to winning Rookie of the Year. Even in a more stacked catcher landscape than I can remember for Fantasy, Baldwin's skill set stands out.

I'm just not sure his playing time does. Not after the Braves signed Mike Yastrzemski to a deal big enough to at least assume he's going to see plenty of playing time in 2026. That signing likely moves Jurickson Profar to a full-time DH role, and that makes it tough to project Baldwin for the kind of playing time some of the true difference makers at the catcher position can get. I would bet on Baldwin being the primary catcher for the Braves in 2026, making him a good bet to top the 446 plate appearances he got as a rookie. But unless Sean Murphy is traded, it seems unlikely the Braves are just going to outright bench him when he's making serious cash.

The one caveat here is that Murphy is coming back from hip surgery, and while he could be ready for Opening Day, that hasn't been quite confirmed. If Murphy's season is delayed and he isn't capable of being an impact bat coming off the injury, Baldwin's path to 550-plus PA becomes a lot more clear. I'm still not sure I'd be comfortable with a top-100 pick on him, but I can at least make the case for it.

Michael Busch, 1B, Cubs (110.5)

Here's the question with Busch: How much do you buy his age-27 breakout? He went from an interesting corner infield option to one of the better power hitters in the league in 2025, and the underlying data backs it up – he went from an 89.9 mph average exit velocity to a 92.2 mph mark in 2025, while his expected wOBA on contact jumped from .399 to .461. And he cut his strikeout rate from 28.6% to 23.5%. He basically got better at everything … though he didn't really improve his most notable shortcoming much, as Busch hit just .207/.274/.368 while still being shielded from many of the toughest lefties.

He was so good against righties (.910 OPS, 30 homers in 497 plate appearances) that it didn't really matter very much, but it's still an awfully high price to pay for a guy who was pretty much just a platoon bat last season, starting 11 of 42 games against left-handed starters. If he's able to replicate last season's success against righties, it won't matter much, but it doesn't give him a huge margin for error at this cost.

Andy Pages, OF, Dodgers (127.9)

Anytime you can spend an 11th-round pick on a guy who was benched for the most important games of the season, I think you've pretty clearly got to do it.

In all honesty, I just don't think Pages is a particularly good hitter. He's not terrible, but I think even his .774 OPS in 2025 was probably an overperformance – he put up a .315 expected wOBA to an actual mark of .332. There's a bit of pop here, but the quality of contact here on the whole is pretty average, with Pages' ability to pull the ball in the air consistently helping him outrun that a bit. But when you combine average-ish quality of contact skills with poor plate discipline, that's a recipe for inconsistency at best. We saw a big second-half slump, and I think there's a real chance that's the guy we get in 2026.

Emmet Sheehan, SP, Dodgers (137.6)

I love Emmett Sheehan. I just wish I was more confident that the Dodgers love Sheehan. There should be a role for him in the team's rotation, with one spot left in their likely six-man alignment. That should be Sheehan's spot after he put together a 2.82 ERA in 73.1 innings in 2026, but that's no guarantee at this point. The Dodgers kept Sheehan in the rotation for much of the second half of 2025, but when they looked to skip a spot in the rotation, it was usually his, and by the time the playoffs rolled around, Sheehan was plucked from the rotation to serve in a relief role … which did not go well, by the way.

Maybe his struggles pitching out of the bullpen will convince the Dodgers he needs a set routine and a spot in the rotation for good. I hope so, because Sheehan has massive strikeout upside and could be a must-start Fantasy option with a consistent role. But being the sixth man in a six-man rotation narrows your margin for error considerably, and with Gavin Stone and River Ryan expected back in 2026 and the Dodgers' usual cohort of viable options hanging around in the high-minors, Sheehan won't have much room for things to go wrong. A poor run in Spring Training could cost him his expected rotation spot, and guys with that kind of workload concern typically don't go this early in drafts.