Fantasy bounce-backs for 2026: Who to trust

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This time last season, George Springer was more or less left for dead in Fantasy. Oh, he'd get drafted in most leagues, but nobody was excited about a 35-year-old coming off consecutive seasons where he hit just .240/.316/.389. It looked like the end was here for Springer.

If you were willing to zig when everyone else zagged toward the exits, of course, you were rewarded with one of the best hitters in all of Fantasy in 2025. He hit .309/.399/.560 with 32 homers, 190 combined runs and RBI, and 18 steals, in what very well may have been the best season of Springer's career. He was basically free, and your faith in a late-round flier was rewarded.

Who is going to pull that trick off in 2026? If you can identify them, that could give you a huge leg up on the competition, but … predicting this kind of bounce-back is hard! Impossible? Maybe not, but if you can find a Fantasy analyst who was pounding the table that Springer was going to be a top-10 hitter this time last year, I want to meet that person and ask them so many questions.

In today's newsletter, we're going to try (and probably fail, let's be honest) to find who might bounce back from a subpar season in 2026. We've also got a few players whose bounce-back campaigns I'm skeptical about, plus a few more I'm still trying to figure out.

That latter category includes Braves closer Raisel Iglesias, who got a bit of company in the back end of the Braves bullpen with the signing of Robert Suarez to a three-year contract Thursday. Multiple reports have already come out indicating that Iglesias is still the team's closer, but his margin for error has to be viewed as pretty slim after this signing.

Suarez wasn't the only big signing since we checked in earlier this week. I wrote about Pete Alonso's signing with the Orioles and the fallout for both the O's and Mets earlier in the week, and Scott White and I continue to keep you up to date with everything else going down in our offseason tracker, which includes updates on the Tigers bullpen, Kyle Schwarber's return to the Phillies, and the Dodgers' addition of Edwin Diaz, among much else. Keep that one bookmarked and head to CBSSports.com/Fantasy/Baseball for Scott's position-by-position prospect rankings, updated for 2026.

Now let's look at some key bounce-back candidates for 2026:

Buy or sell bounce-backs

Bounce-backs to buy

Yordan Alvarez, DH, Astros

I'm not saying there's no risk with Alvarez. But after years of knee issues, he has mostly avoided serious issues with that particular body part the past two seasons, with his 2025 season instead derailed by a misdiagnosed hand fracture and a freak ankle sprain late in the season. He's the kind of gigantic human who might just always be more prone to injury than your average baseball player, but I don't think it necessarily makes a ton of sense to look at the time he missed in 2025 and assume that will be an issue again in 2026.

I also don't really think there's much reason to be concerned about his .797 OPS in 2025. What happened there was he had one bad month at the start of the season, and he just ran out of time to make up for it – from the time he returned from his hand injury until the ankle injury, Alvarez had a 1.031 OPS and almost certainly would have gotten his numbers to where we expect them to be with more playing time. His underlying numbers remain elite (.391 xwOBA), and he is one of only a handful of players with the skills to both hit .300 and approach 50 homers. He is, effectively, a perfect hitter, and with a bit better health luck, he'll be in for another typically huge season in 2026.

Devin Williams, RP, Mets

Williams was terrible last season. He was also, in many ways, pretty much the same guy he's always been. The Mets sure seem to think so, giving him $51 million over three years to be their Edwin Diaz replacement – though it is worth noting that they did try to re-sign Diaz, though not so badly that they didn't end up getting out-bid by the Dodgers. Giving a $51 million vote of confidence after a season where your cross-town rivals pulled him from the closer job on two separate occasions seems like a pretty good sign of the Mets' confidence in Williams.

He was bad in 2025, of course, but it wasn't like there was a huge change in most of the skill indicators we typically look at. After stranding 82% of opposing baserunners in the first six seasons of his career, Williams' strand rate dropped to 55.2% in 2025; according to FanGraphs, that was the 10th-worst strand rate of any reliever with at least 60 innings since 2000. Out of 6,897 seasons. Williams' strikeout rate did drop to 35% and his whiff rate down to 40%, his worst marks since 2019, though both marks were still very, very good relative to the population of all relievers.

I'm open to the idea that Williams has lost a step (or whatever the pitching equivalent of "a step" might be), but when you're starting from a baseline of "best reliever in baseball," some regression can still make you a very good one. His 3.11 xERA and 2.67 SIERA suggest he's still a very good closer, and while the Mets have some work to do about losing Diaz and Pete Alonso to free agency already, this should still be a competitive team. Maybe 40 saves is asking too much, but an ERA around 3.00, 90 or so strikeouts, and 30-plus saves feels like a reasonable expectation.

Sandy Alcantara, SP, Marlins

It already happened. You might not have noticed because Alcantara was such a disaster in the first half of the season that he finished with a 5.36 ERA, but Alcantara already seemed to have shaken off the rust and was locked in during the stretch run. You started to see it around the middle of the summer when Alcantara started routinely throwing six innings even when he wasn't necessarily pitching well, but everything really came together for him in the second half of the season, when he put up a 3.33 ERA in 13 starts after the All-Star break.

What changed for him? Well, it went almost exactly how you should expect when a pitcher is coming back from Tommy John surgery – Alcantara's stuff was mostly back from day one, but it took a while for the command to catch. Once it did, he looked like himself, as his walk rate dropped to 6% over those final 13 starts, while his K-BB% rate rose to 15.3%. That's not quite where it was during his Cy Young season in 2022, but it's a lot better than his overall 11.4% mark for the season. We shouldn't expect another ERA near 2.00, but something in the low-to-mid-3.00s with Alcantara's typically enormous volume numbers seems perfectly reasonable to me. Remember, he made it to 174.2 innings in his first year back from Tommy John surgery – is there a better bet for 200-plus innings in the whole league? If there are one or two, there probably aren't many more than that.

Michael Harris, OF, Braves

Here's another one where the bounce-back already mostly happened in the second half of last season. Harris finished on a bit of a down note, but still managed to hit .299/.315/.530 in the second half of the season, and while it's typically better to use full-season stats than trying to figure out which specific partial-season sliver might be more predictive, in this case, the second-half numbers line up with what Harris probably should have been doing all along. Because, while he's been a frustratingly inconsistent player (and that's putting it nicely), Harris' skill set hasn't really changed much. He still has an overly aggressive approach at the plate, and he still manages to hit the ball hard consistently despite making some pretty bad swing decisions. He's a high-level athlete with some rough edges he still hasn't managed to sand down, but the overall package could still deliver a .290 batting average to go along with the 20-20 floor he showed in an otherwise down 2025. He's probably just an inherently high-variance hitter, but if we saw the floor in 2025, I think there's still a super-high ceiling he can tap into in 2026, and given his discounted price (93.7 ADP compared to 40.8 a year ago), I'm willing to bet on the good side coming out.

Bryan Reynolds, OF, Pirates

I wasn't planning on being in on Reynolds in 2026, but it turns out everyone else is way more out on him than I am – he's sitting at 199.6 in drafts to date. He was a top-100 pick for years before this year, and while 2025 was bad, the underlying data isn't nearly as worrisome. Betting on a bounce back from a 30-year-old generally isn't a great idea, but Reynolds actually had a career-best 91.2 mph average exit velocity and .425 xwOBA in 2025, which is a promising start. The increase in strikeouts is an issue, for sure, but Reynolds did at least do a good job of picking his spots better, swinging at fewer pitches out of the strike zone while maintaining his swing rate on pitches in the zone without sacrificing much zone contact. Can Reynolds get back to being a .270 hitter with 25 homers in 2026? I think he can, and it should come in an improved Pirates lineup (though this one is a bit of an assumption at this point). Which is all to say: Yeah, I'm buying the dip on this one.

Eh, I dunno about this one

Raisel Iglesias, RP, Braves

Iglesias is in a tough spot for Fantasy, because I do expect him to be a better pick in Fantasy than he was in 2025, when he lost his job for about two months, a long enough period that most people who drafted him probably ended up dropping him. Which is a shame, because he did end up having pretty close to the season you expected, finishing with a 3.21 ERA and 29 saves.

But I'm not sure I actually want to be the one who drafts him in 2026. He's a 35-year-old who, as you may have heard, lost his job for a couple of months in 2025, and is now backed up by a guy who was one of the best closers in baseball the previous two seasons. If Iglesias does what he's supposed to, an ERA around 3.00 and 30-plus saves seems like a pretty good bet. It might even be the most likely outcome. But even though Iglesias is expected to be the closer in 2026, Suarez's presence significantly narrows his margin for error. A couple of poor showings in early April could very quickly turn this into a totally wasted pick, and that's a level of risk I'm just not comfortable with from a top-12 closer.

One to wait and see on

George Kirby, SP, Mariners

Likely in response to the shoulder injury that delayed the start of his season, Kirby dropped his arm angle from 37 degrees to 29 degrees in 2025 and, as a result, lost the ability to get on top of his splitter. He tried to go back to his old changeup, but neither pitch worked with his new approach, and it left him with a more limited arsenal. The splitter was never a go-to pitch for Kirby; he typically saved it for two-strike counts against lefties – so it's not so much the loss of that fourth, offspeed offering that I want to focus on as much as it was just an indicator that, despite pitching effectively at times, Kirby was never truly himself in 2025. What I want to wait and see is whether he gets that arm angle back to where it was prior to the shoulder injury when we see him pitch this spring. If he can, he seems like a nice bargain with an ADP around 70th overall. If not, I worry we could be headed for another frustrating campaign.

Bounce-backs to sell

Oneil Cruz, OF, Pirates

You might be asking, "bounce-back to what?"

And it's a fair question. He wasn't even a top-70 player in 2024, and he was outside the top 100 in 2025, and yet there his ADP sits at 84.7 in early drafts. There's no doubting his a physically gifted athlete, but I'm increasingly unconvinced he'll ever be able to truly live up to his potential as an actual baseball player. He finally ran a ton in 2025, stealing 38 bases, but that's basically all he did for your Fantasy team – 20 homers in 135 games is pretty close to replacement-level, especially when it comes with just 61 RBI, 62 runs, and a .200 average.

Is he capable of more than that? Sure, the high-end exit velocities scream for 40-homer upside. But the flaws are just impossible to ignore here, given the massive swing-and-miss issues and total inability to handle left-handed pitching. I think there's a legitimate chance he's not an everyday player by this summer, and a top-90 pick on a player with issues this glaring is just way too rich a price to pay.

Bryce Miller, SP, Mariners

It sounds like Miller won't have surgery this offseason to fix the bone spur issue that led to elbow inflammation and really derailed his 2025 season. While it's usually not a bad thing for a pitcher to avoid offseason surgery, failing to correct the underlying issue here definitely gives me pause, given how bad Miller was in 2025. I worried that his postseason success (four runs in 14.1 innings) might convince some drafters to buy back in, but only nine strikeouts to five walks was seemingly enough to convince most that his issues weren't fixed. Miller showed plenty of upside in 2024, but the injury and his struggles as a result of it are enough to make him just a late-round flier.

Seth Lugo, SP, Royals

On average in NFBC drafts to date, 338 players are being drafted ahead of Seth Lugo, including 133 pitchers. Good. That's how it should be. He got away with outperforming his peripherals for a couple of years, but it came back to bite him in 2025, as his 4.15 ERA was backed up by an even worse 5.24 xERA. The 36-year-old was a model for how to pitch without huge velocity, but nothing went right for him in 2025, and I don't see much reason to buy back in. He ran out of tricks.