Did we draft the first two rounds correctly? A 2026 Fantasy Baseball post-mortem

Every year, we look for an edge in fantasy baseball, and oftentimes that means doing something we hate: looking back and acknowledging our mistakes. In order for our processes and analysis to be sharper, we need to see where we went wrong before, which led me to the question: did we draft the first two rounds correctly this year?

In order to answer that question, I looked back at the March ADP from NFBC drafts and then cross-checked that with the FanGraphs Player Rater to see the dollar valuation earned by all players this season. I looked at the median value of the first few rounds to see if the players we drafted in the first two rounds were generally stronger producers than the players drafted in the few rounds after them. The process gave me a lot of insight into the type of decisions we made as a group, and the types of players we tend to over- and undervalue.

Yet, before we answer the question of whether or not our draft decisions were the right ones, we need to look at some facts about the first two rounds of the 2026 fantasy baseball drafts.

2026 Fantasy Baseball Early Round Recap

Below are two tables showing the first two rounds of fantasy baseball drafts in 2026, using NFBC ADP, and the dollar value earned for each player.

FIRST ROUND

SECOND ROUND

From a strict dollars perspective, 2026 had the worst first round in five years. I looked at NFBC ADP over the last five years (using FantasyPros as the source) and then cross-checked that with FanGraphs Player Rater dollar values at the end of the season, and I found that first-rounders in 2026 averaged $13.40, about $9 below normal, and round 2 was also the worst at $12.90.

Over those five years, according to FanGraphs Player Rater 5×5 dollars (with Ohtani excluded as a two-way player), a first-round pick earned $22.30 and a second-round pick earned $18.00. The majority of first-round picks have at least earned $20, which presents a relatively high floor for the top picks. However, as noted above, in 2026, first-round picks earned $13.4, second-round picks earned $12.9, and only two of 15 players (excluding Ohtani) drafted in the first round earned at least $20 this season.

Which brings us back to the question:

Did we draft the first two rounds correctly?

The answer, surprisingly, is “mostly, yes.”

Despite Round 1 (picks 1-15) and Round 2 (picks 16-30) averaging below the five-year norm for their spots, both of those rounds cleared the $11.21 average return for the next 30 picks, so drafting the players we did in the top two rounds was, generally, still the right process. In fact, the reason Round 2 outreturned Round 1 wasn’t a talent-evaluation error, but was rather an issue with injuries; 12 of Round 1’s 15 picks were impacted by injury during the 2026 season, and both Garrett Crochet and Aaron Judge basically didn’t play this season.

Four Round 1 picks played the year without an injury meaningfully affecting their output: Gunnar Henderson, Kyle Tucker, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Corbin Carroll. Two of those four (Tatis, Carroll) still delivered strong positive value anyway. Henderson and Tucker are the outliers — the only two picks in the entire round that were effectively healthy and still genuine misses.

The severity varies widely within the eleven injury cases — Crochet’s and Skubal’s were season-altering, while Witt’s, De La Cruz’s, and Rodríguez’s were brief IL stints that cost only a week or two and didn’t stop any of them from playing close to a full season. The point isn’t that Round 1 was decimated; it’s that health, not evaluation, is what separated most of this year’s Round 1 shortfall from Round 2’s stronger return.

Where Did We Miss?

Known injury risk, priced as if it didn’t exist

Garrett Crochet and Aaron Judge were the two biggest misses in round one, and they happened because of injuries. Yet, they both have had long-term injuries in recent seasons. Crochet had just completed one year after Tommy John surgery and had made his first full workload jump as a starter. The shoulder injury that ended his season could be seen as a continuation of the risk that surgery history predicts. Judge also has a recurring pattern of toe/oblique/wrist/hip IL stints. We were still willing to pay the 2nd overall pick price because we know how talented he is, but given that he is a huge person, we should maybe have accounted for his body not being able to hold up over a full season. The other nine Round 1 injuries (Ohtani, Witt, Soto, Acuña, Ramírez, Skubal, De La Cruz, Rodríguez, and possibly Skenes) look more like the kind of in-season injury variance that no pre-draft model would have fully priced in.

Two Clear Talent Misses

If you remove every Round 1 pick whose shortfall could be linked back to injury, the two names left are Gunnar Henderson (pick 12, $8.58) and Kyle Tucker (pick 13, $10.20). Both played full, healthy seasons and still returned modest value. On Henderson, the market bought his pedigree as a former Rookie of the Year and face of the Orioles franchise, but we ignored the softening trend that appeared in his 2025 numbers. The miss on Tucker was also looking at pedigree (his seasons before his last two injured ones) and also the team context (a move to the Dodgers). The market ignored that he hadn’t had a fully productive year in a while. However, I’m not sure anybody expected that Tucker would see his barrel-rate collapse and that he would make uncharacteristically aggressive, out-of-character swing decisions. If you push into Round 2, the market also bought pedigree and the illusion of past production by taking Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (pick 17, $3.32) over upside players who had flashed elite ceilings in 2025 like Pete Crow-Armstrong (pick 32, $49.20) and James Wood (pick 40, $26.74).

Who Should Have Gone in the Top 30

The 15 players taken between picks 31-60 who outreturned the Round 1 median ($11.32):

Some of these names won’t surprise you, and it’s why they just missed the top two rounds. Yordan Alvarez, Rafae; Devers, and Bryce Harper are all players we’ve drafted in the first two rounds before and probably should have again. Jacob deGrom and Chris Sale also both had another healthy season after we got comfortable with the idea that they were significant injury risks.

As I mentioned above, there were some other previous breakouts, or partial breakouts, that we maybe didn’t give enough credence to with Wood, Crow-Armstrong, Ben Rice, and Brice Turang. That also made three catchers who performed like top-30 picks while also having a systematic positional discount. So those early round catchers CAN wind up being really solid picks.

Did We Draft Starting Pitchers Right?

With Skubal, Skenes, and Crochet all finishing outside the value tier they were drafted for, it’s fair to question if any starting pitching should even go in the top 30? I’ve been a proponent of waiting on starting pitching, so I don’t tend to draft a starter in the first two rounds, but the answer is more nuanced than “avoid the position.” Skubal and Crochet didn’t fail to return value because of stuff or approach; they were limited by arm health. However, as we mentioned before, both of those pitchers had previous arm injuries, so maybe that needs to be weighed more heavily if we’re going to take a pitcher in rounds where we really can’t afford not getting value. Skenes has pitched like a diminished version of himself, and it would not surprise me if the injury theories are partially true. All of this is then less an indictment of drafting pitching early and more a reminder that pitching inherently carries the highest injury-attrition rate in the sport.

If we exclude Shohei Ohtani’s inflated dual-role dollar value since his $36.81 combines his SP and DH valuations, the pitchers drafted in the top 30 returned $14.52 on average, which is essentially even with the $14.94 earned by hitters in the top 30. However, those starting pitchers had a higher median ($19.89 vs. $12.49), which means that, when an early starting pitcher hit, it hit bigger than a typical hitter at the same cost. Yet, when it missed, it missed deeper than any hitter bust in the group. Given that we can’t really predict starting pitcher injuries as much as we’d like to believe, taking a pitcher in the first two rounds remains the ultimate risk-reward play.

If we continue on this trend (and I did dig in further because I was curious), the safest window for drafting starting pitchers this year was picks 16-45, which is where Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Cristopher Sánchez, Chris Sale, Logan Gilbert, Bryan Woo, and Hunter Brown went a combined 6-for-6 in positive-value earned. Yes, Brown earned over $2, so it wasn’t a great pick for value at the cost, but he was at least a positive value player, unlike Cole Ragans, Freddy Peralta, Logan Webb, and George Kirby, who were all drafted after him.

It probably comes as no surprise that the best pocket in the entire draft, for hitters or pitchers, was picks 106-120 where both Jacob Misiorowski ($41.82) and Cam Schlittler ($37.75) were going. Within that pocket, Tyler Glasnow ($4.89 and Kevin Gausman (-$2.90) were relative misses, but the two young aces propped up the section. However, we know that’s not something we can rely on every year. Still, waiting on a starting pitcher and then grabbing your ace in the pick 16-45 range seems to make some sense before jumping back in to grab those upside arms that have risk baked into their depressed price.

The Final Takeaway

The key findings appear to be that, when approaching our first two picks, we should :

1. Favor hitters over pitchers
2. Prefer young players still improving over veterans priced on their past production
3. Favor full-time players with 600+ plate appearances
4. Be wary of anyone priced on a peak season they haven’t repeated

Additionally, most of the busts in Round 1 came back to health, so it’s fair to wonder if we need to be more cutthroat in punishing health questions at the top of our board. Most of the injured players (Ohtani, Acuña, Ramírez, Skubal, Crochet) had some injuries in the past that we perhaps should have counted against them more. Yet, at the end of the day, it feels like we drafted the first two rounds fairly well in 2026. A little less blind following of previous resumes, and a little more focus on breakout signals and past injury, and we might do even better in 2027.

Who Should be Drafted in the First Two Rounds in 2027?

We’ve gotta have some fun with the exercise we just did, so an early look at the first two rounds in 2027 might look like this (not ranked in any specific order):