With the paint dry on the fantasy football season, it's time for fantasy managers to shift gears and focus on MLB draft prep. Like fantasy football, fantasy baseball is for everyone, not just the diehards. There are two standard formats for fantasy baseball: head-to-head and rotisserie.
Head-to-head pits two teams against each other weekly, competing to see who can get more of a specific category, such as home runs. The winner gets a point; there are usually ten categories (HR, RBI, R, SB, AVG for hitters; W, SV, ERA, WHIP, K for pitchers), making each contest weekly worth ten points. The standings are cumulative, so if you win five categories and lose five categories, you go 5-5 that week.
Rotisserie is the OG format where teams compete against each other all season in a royal rumble-esque fashion. In "roto", it doesn't matter if you had a good week; it only matters if you have a good season. At the end of the year, standings reflect the cumulative totals of each team, so having the most home runs gets you the most points in that category, and having the least home runs gets you the fewest points, with the most points possible for each category equal to the number of teams in the league.
The key to finding a good league is finding people who share your vibe; if you're a baseball diehard, you want to play with other diehards, but if you are interested in playing for the first time, it's probably better to join a league with other novices with simple rules.
There's not much happening in the fantasy baseball world that alters player rankings from the end of the World Series to the start of spring training, except for one factor: players change teams.
A player leaving a good situation and heading to a bad one or vice versa can significantly impact their performance. Here are five players who switched teams this offseason and how that will affect their fantasy baseball stock.
Isaac Paredes
Paredes is a versatile infielder who can play at either corner position with a good batting eye, low K%, and high BB%. He also has pop, as he hit 30 home runs two seasons ago and 16 in 101 games with the Rays last year before they traded him to the Cubs at the deadline for Christopher Morel and two prospects.
Unfortunately for Paredes, Wrigley Field is probably the worst place for his skill set, which is evident by comparing his OPS with the Rays (.792) to his OPS with the Cubs (.632). This is because the right-handed hitting Paredes is an extreme pull batter, and Wrigley Field is one of the worst parks in the majors for righties. Fortunately for him, he was the centerpiece of the deal that sent Kyle Tucker to the Cubs, and now he finds himself in a much better situation with the Houston Astros.
One of the best features for him is that the Astros have the Crawford Boxes in left field, which are 315 feet down the left field line and tailor-made for his swing. He hit 19 home runs last year, but if he had played every game in Houston, he would have hit 26, according to his spray chart.
With the switch to Houston, Paredes finds himself in a better lineup and the ideal park, besides maybe Fenway. Thirty home runs are a real possibility for the third baseman in 2025... just don't expect a high batting average.
Garrett Crochet
Garrett Crochet pitched a career-high 146 innings last season. It was a massive jump from his previous high of 54.1 innings, so it's only natural that his performance waned as fatigue set in during the second half of the season (3.02 ERA and 0.95 WHIP in 107.1 first-half innings vs. 5.12 ERA with 1.40 WHIP in 48.2 second-half innings). But the Red Sox took a chance on him and traded four prospects to the White Sox so he could be their ace.
If Crochet had stayed in Chicago, he would have been lucky to win five games for the White Sox, but now that he's with Boston, he has a chance to be the most valuable pitcher in the American League.
The most significant question mark is how his arm will respond to increased innings. For their part, the White Sox limited his workload down the stretch and didn't let him pitch past four innings in any start after July 1. Crochet's K-BB% (29.6%) would have been the best in baseball had he qualified, which bodes well for his future regardless of his second-half stats.
There's not much to worry about outside of legitimate concerns about the massive jump in innings leading to an injury. Still, managers won't have to worry about the Red Sox treating him with kid gloves, as a 10-20% increase in innings year-over-year would put him at a respectable 160+ for 2025, which is only a few short of a full workload. If Crochet can stay healthy, he'll be one of the best pitchers in baseball next year.
Juan Soto
The most significant move of the offseason was Juan Soto's decision to choose the Mets' money over the Yankees' historical dominance. Soto is one of baseball's best hitters; he won't lose his skills because he's playing in Queens, but fantasy managers should taper their expectations for him.
First, he leaves the friendly confines of Yankee Stadium for the vast expanses of Citi Field. Yankee Stadium has the shortest right field wall in the majors, and Citi Field was the 28th-best park for left-handed hitters last year. It's unlikely that Soto will be able to hit as many home runs as he did with the Yankees for the Mets.
Secondly, when he was on the Yankees, he had the best hitter in baseball, Aaron Judge, hitting behind him. Now, he has Mark Vientos.
Vientos had a nice postseason and seems like a promising young player, but his OPS was over .300 points lower than Judge's last year. That means fewer runs scored for Soto. And while Fransisco Lindor should set Soto up with many RBI opportunities, the bottom of the Mets lineup is stuffed with guys who don't get on base or hit for power, so he won't see a huge uptick in his run production.
If you play in an OBP-centric league, Soto will remain a top-half-of-the-first-round consideration. But, for people in classical AVG leagues, he might be relegated to the end of the first or early second round since he won't be stealing bases, and his counting stats will suffer playing with an inferior lineup him.
It's fair to wonder if we'll look back on his decision 15 years from now and wonder how his place in the record books — both in real life and in fantasy baseball — was affected by his choice to jump ship to New York's "other" team.
Kyle Tucker
Fans and front offices have underrated Kyle Tucker his whole career. For some reason, it took the Astros a long time to insert him in the heart of their lineup, batting him fifth or lower every year before 2023.
The Astros had dominant players around him, so it could have just been an embarrassment of riches that led to his not-ideal lineup position. However, he's been one of the best players in fantasy the whole time, thanks to his ability to contribute in all five categories. However, last season, Tucker, when healthy, reached another stratosphere.
Now Tucker is leaving the Astros for the Cubs, and because he's left-handed, he wasn't a Crawford Box merchant. Still, according to park factors, he is going from a stadium that was middle of the pack for lefties (12th overall) to the worst in the majors.
Like Soto, the ballpark downgrade also comes with a lineup downgrade. Instead of having Jose Altuve, Yordan Alvarez, and Alex Bregman hitting around him, he'll have Dansby Swanson, Ian Happ, Seiya Suzuki, and Michael Busch. That's not terrible, but not in the same league as what he had with the Astros.
Thanks to the decrease in counting stats and likely regression to career norms, Tucker goes from someone managers would consider drafting in the first few picks to someone managers should draft in the second half of the first round. It's not a huge drop, but every slot matters when dealing with a first-round selection.
Nestor Cortes
Nestor Cortes was part of the return in the deal that sent Devin Williams from Milwaukee to New York. That was great for him because his future role in New York was questionable. Cortes was one of the best pitchers in baseball from 2021-2022, but he got hurt in 2023 and hasn't been as effective since.
The Yankees may have squeezed him out of the rotation after they signed Max Fried. At that point, they then boasted seven starting pitchers: Cortes, Clarke Schmidt, Carlos Rodon, Gerrit Cole, Fried, Luis Gil, and Marcus Stroman.
With Fried, Cole, Rodon, and Gil locked into four spots, it left only one open, and Schmidt might have outshined Cortes if they were to compete for the job. Plus, after the backbreaking home run he allowed in Game One of the World Series, Yankees fans didn't have a lot of goodwill toward "Nasty Nestor".
Now, he gets a fresh start in Milwaukee, where he will be essential to their starting rotation. Likewise, he moves from an afterthought in fantasy drafts to a potential sleeper pick and impact player for managers that wait on filling out their pitching staff.