“Polar Bear who is going to be okay”

If you are an O’s fan or a fantasy baseball enjoyer who happens to employ Pete Alonso on your fantasy team, the start Alonso has given you is not what you hoped for.

The Orioles will be paying the ‘Polar Bear’ 31 million for the next 5 years, making him the second-highest-paid player at his position per AAV.

The Blue Jays were rewarded for extending Vlad Guerrero Jr. to 15 years and $500 million, with a trip to the World Series.

Baltimore, hopeful for the same type of reward, is off to a lukewarm start. 10-11 record through 21 games, and ranks 18th in runs scored and is tied for 2nd with K% at 25.1.

Pete Alonso, coming into the Orioles, was expected to drive in runs, and so far, he has one fewer run batted in than his teammate Leody Taveras. Leody Taveras only has 48 plate appearances compared to Pete Alonso’s 92.

I’m still pretty optimistic about Pete Alonso’s season going forward, though I have accepted that he may not reach the higher end of his preseason projections as I had hoped for.

What is going wrong for Pete Alonso?

At a glance, I can point to Pete Alonso’s early struggles due to his bat-to-ball skills.

Pete Alonso is currently showing career-high numbers in his swinging whiff rate (31%) and strikeout rate (28.3%).

Pitchers have been able to put Pete away by hammering him with breaking balls. Baseball Savant shows that 34.4% of the pitches he is seeing are breaking balls.

Pete Alonso (so far) has been whiffing on 49% of the breaking balls he has seen this year.

The first baseman is also providing career lows in his barrel rate. Alonso’s bat speed has dropped nearly 2 MPH from his 2025 season, which is cause for actual concern.

His current 7.7% barrel rate puts him behind Cleveland’s Angel Martinez and Angels’ Josh Lowe.

Pete Alonso ranks 144th in barrel rate among all qualified hitters in Major League Baseball.

The ‘Okay’ Things of Pete Alonso

While his .205/.326/.346 slash line is super disappointing to look at. Pete Alonso has been a walking machine.

Alonso’s 14.1 BB% puts him 32nd among qualified hitters. It is a higher walk rate than Matt Olson, Corbin Carroll, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

Pete is doing a great job at not chasing pitches out of the zone either. His chase percentage of 25.3 is better than 71% of Major League hitters.

So why is this only okay, you may ask?

It is only okay because I believe this passivity has caused some of his offensive power to taper off.

Baseball Reference shows that Pete Alonso is seeing, on average, more pitches per plate appearance than he has at any point in his career, at 4.1 pitches/PA. His Career average is 3.86/PA.

His percentage of pitches swung at is also at a career low. Swinging at 41.5% of all pitches he sees. The inverse is that he is taking a strike, looking at a way higher rate in his career. 32.8% of strikes looking - the most strikes taken since his 2024 season, where he posted a career worst .788 OPS.

The Good for Pete is about to come.

The good news is that Pete Alonso is in a position to benefit from the law of large numbers. He is going to be in that Baltimore lineup every day, and the batted ball stuff should turn around eventually.

Although it is a super low barrel rate for him, his average exit velocity and hard-hit rate are both in the top 5% of all qualified hitters.

When he isn’t striking out, he is also not generating many hits. The problem comes from the type of balls he is hitting.

Pete Alonso is hitting an alarming low number of pulled fly balls. 11.5% of pulled flyballs is a career low for him by 7.5%. He is also a career high in flyballs to the deepest part of the field in straightaway center, 30.8% of the time.

Now I don’t know how much ‘Walltimore’ will hurt Pete Alonso, but he’s shown over the course of his career that he will hit home runs no matter where he is playing or where the ball is hit. If he can just find a way not to hit it into the deepest part of the field for most of his flyballs, the slugging numbers we expect should come around.

His groundball rate of 44% is also a career high for him.

I want Pete Alonso to allow himself to be more aggressive at the plate.

The walks are nice, and he may be seeing fewer fastballs than in years past, but by not being aggressive at the plate, he is not taking advantage of the pitches he sees in the strike zone, forcing him to either walk or to be in a position that doesn’t give him a strong hitter’s count.

If the bat speed doesn’t come back to career norms for him, he still will swing hard enough to be able to generate a 30-homer season by the end of the year. I remain optimistic about the ‘Polar Bear’ and I think he is going to be okay.

First pitch for Major League Baseball arrives in just three days. Which means we are in the final days of projection previews for the upcoming fantasy season.

So, with just days remaining, it felt as good a time as any to create my own projections.

I took a look at RotoGraphs’ Positional Power Rankings and began mapping out which players will end up in the top 10 throughout 2026 and into the 2027 season.

Follow along as more positional rankings will be added each day. First, let’s start with behind the dish.

Catcher - Hunter Goodman out, Alejandro Kirk in.

Why Hunter Goodman will not be a Top 10 Fantasy Catcher

The Hunter Goodman breakout was one of three good things (literally, maybe three) to happen for the Rockies last year. Hunter Goodman’s impressive power in super-hitter-friendly Coors should be a fantasy baseball dream.

Goodman was able to provide a 12.8% Barrel-Rate and an elite bat speed at 74.4 mph, which places him in the 83rd percentile among qualified hitters. He showed these impressive numbers while also showing abysmal plate skills. Goodman’s strikeout rate was a career low in 2025 at 26.3%, which still places him with a higher K-rate than 83% of qualified hitters. His swing decisions and bat control are also causes for concern - whiffing 32% of the time and chasing nearly 37% of the pitches he sees out of the zone. With this plate discipline and extremely low walk rate, Goodman is unable to pick up the pitches he is seeing on a day-to-day basis.

However, with the supporting cast of Willie Castro, Mickey Moniak, Jordan Beck, Brenton Doyle, and Ezequiel Tovar, and of course, Coors Field itself being its own type of beast, I expect plenty of runs in Colorado, which only helps Goodman.

The opportunities are going to be there for him to replicate his 2025 all-star campaign, but I believe I need to see improvement on the chase and strikeout rates before I can admit I am wrong.

Why Alejandro Kirk will be a Top 10 Fantasy Catcher

If I am going to fade Hunter Goodman for making less-than-stellar swing decisions and bat-to-ball skills. It is only fair that I replace him with the guy who is the complete opposite type of hitter.

Alejandro Kirk was the 11th toughest hitter to strikeout in 2025. While Hunter Goodman was the 24th easiest to strike out in the same season. Projections won’t place Alejandro Kirk as a top 10 fantasy catcher, but the good news for him is that he is a top five in real-life catcher!

In the fantasy stats that matter, Kirk tied for 4th in RBIs and 1st in batting average amongst qualified catchers. Kirk may not project himself as a power bat, but he has increased his bat speed year over year.

From 2024-2025, Kirk managed to jump his bat speed from 70.1 mph to 72.5 mph. In doing so, Kirk was able to enjoy a career high in homers with 15 in 130 games.

If you also want to include the postseason, here’s what it might look like if he played closer to a full 162: Kirk hit 20 homers in 148 games last season. The ability to get to 25 homers is there if he gets the plate appearances necessary.

Kirk also manages to hit the ball hard half the time he puts it in play. He ranked 24th among all qualified hitters in hard-hit rate.

The Toronto Blue Jays have a great supporting cast around Kirk. Especially if Kirk is going to maintain hitting in the heart of that lineup. The Toronto Blue Jays led the majors last year in OBP, and they may not do it again in 2026, but it would be hard to imagine them falling out of the top 10. Kirk’s bat-speed improvements can keep improving since he is only headed into his age-27 season, and with that increased bat speed, he can pave the way for possibly generating a career high in RBIs.

First Base

Josh Naylor: Out

I’m actually very curious about Josh Naylor. Curious as to which version of Josh Naylor we’ll get in 2026.

Are we going to get extremely high BABIP luck like in years 2023 and 2025? Are we going to see the Josh Naylor who clubbed a career high 31 homers and also had a career high in strikeouts as he did in Cleveland in 2024?

Are we going to see Josh Naylor be a regular 20/30 guy despite having the bottom 7% sprint speed?

Josh Naylor doesn’t hit the ball harder than other players at his position. With a below-average bat speed (71 MPH)and a below-average barrel rate (6.7%). Naylor’s Batting Average on Balls Put In Play (BABIP) was .315 in 2025.

Due to his bat speed and hard hit rates, his xBA (expected batting average) came out to be .254. 41 points lower than what his batting average rounded out to be at the end of the year.

Naylor does, however, possess some otherworldly bat-to-ball skills, even though he manages to chase at 37% of the pitches he sees out of the strike zone. Yet in doing so, he rarely strikes out, and he rarely swings and misses the baseball.

What bodes well for Naylor is that he does tend to pull the ball in the air. Also worth noting that Josh Naylor smashed his previous career high in stolen bases (10) with 30 this past season.

I think it’s unlikely he can get back to that 30 number, but the Mariners were 3rd in stolen bases as a team last season and seem to have an aggressive baserunning ethos in the organization.

Willson Contreras IN

The Boston Red Sox made one of the most underrated acquisitions this offseason, acquiring Willson Contreras from the St. Louis Cardinals back in December.

The Red Sox will have the rights to Contreras for his age 34 and 35 seasons before he becomes a free agent.

Contreras will get a huge boost in his newfound home of Fenway. Fenway ranks 7th for park factors for right-handed hitters, while Busch Stadium ranks 14th. His first home in Wrigley ranks 27th out of 30.

Contreras still managed to post an .800 OPS or better in four of his seven seasons there. Looking at this spray chart (Image down below) from last season, placed over top of Fenway Park, you will see that Contreras is going to find his way into more homers or at least more doubles while peppering balls into the left field Green Monster. Even at age 34 has elite bat speed (76 MPH) and barrel rates (13.9%) - more than double Josh Naylor’s.

Contreras’ stats suggest he had experienced bad luck last season, where his expected slugging percentage was 41 points higher than his actual slugging percentage.

I expect his .791 OPS from 2025 playing in Busch Stadium to be dwarfed by what is to come playing half of his games in the hitter-friendly Fenway Park.

That will do it for the Catcher and First Base - be on the lookout for Second Base and Third soon!

There isn’t really anything sexy about signing an aging center fielder who posted a .690 OPS in 2025 to be your everyday guy in the middle of the outfield for 2026. Yet with Cedric Mullins, I’m convinced the Rays front office made one of the most sneaky, underrated moves this offseason, signing him to just a 1-year deal for $7.5 million.

If you take a look at Cedric Mullins’ page on baseballsavant.com, what you are going to see is a sea of blue, and you’ll question my optimism about the 31-year-old, but I want you to hear me out.

First, I am going to provide you with a list of players who share a very specific batted-ball trait with Cedric Mullins (minimum of 300 batted-ball events, according to baseballsavant.com).

1. Isaac Paredes

2. Cal Raleigh

3. Spencer Torkelson

4. Kyle Schwarber

5. Jose Ramirez

6. Pete Crow-Armstrong

7. Cedric Mullins

8. Eugenio Suarez

If you take Mullins out, the above list hit a combined 277 home runs last season, and Isaac Paredes only played 102 games. The average player on that list would have hit 39.6 homers. So what batted-ball data do these guys all share? These are the eight hitters who pulled the ball in the air the most.

It is a shame that Cedric Mullins won’t get to play at Steinbrenner Field now that the ‘Trop’ is playable once again, because the “south course” version of Yankee Stadium would have been a dream for him.

Mullins pulled the ball 29.6% of the time, which is the highest rate of his career. Pulling the ball in the air is the most damage you can create as a hitter, and the data backs it up. Statcast Batted Ball Leaderboard | baseballsavant.com shows data on pulled fly balls from 2022-2024, indicating that pulled fly balls account for 66% of home runs hit during that time. They also provided a .547 batting average and a 1.227 slugging percentage during those years.

A small part of me wants to believe that the Rays have taken notice of this trend and that’s part of the reason why they signed Mullins to a small(ish) deal in the first place.

The Rays play 81 of their games at Tropicana, which has the 6th-shortest distance to the right field foul line at 320 feet. The Rays will play 26 games against their AL East opponents in their home ballparks. Here’s where their fields rank in distance to the right field foul pole.

• Fenway Park has the shortest distance to the right field line at 299 Feet.

• Yankee Stadium ranks 3rd shortest in 313FT.

• Camden Yards is the 4th shortest at 317ft.

• The Rogers Centre has the farthest distance (for the AL East) in right field at 328 FT, which ranks 18th in baseball.

The Rays get to play in 107 games in ballparks that favor left-handed hitting flyballs. Cedric can get to a sneaky 25-homer season if the stars can align.

Even though last year was a bad year for Mullins, who has been teetering back and forth between above-average and below-average hitter since 2022, I find his approach at the plate respectable.

His 10.0% walk rate was the highest mark of his career. Mullins also remains aggressive on pitches in the middle of the strike zone with an H-Zone Swing% (heart of zone swing)of nearly 77%.

The other thing that should get fantasy players excited about buying low on a player like Cedric Mullins is that the path for everyday playing time is there. The Rays’ outfield situation looks bleak the way it stands now. FanGraphs projects the Rays outfield looking like this: Chandler Simpson in LF, as a platoon bat against righties. Jake Fraley in RF, again, as a platoon bat against righties. Jonny Deluca, backup outfielder, platoon bat against lefties. Ryan Vilade, super utility guy, platoon bat against lefties. Cedric Mullins is the only outfielder projected to play every day. FanGraphs has him batting 4th for Tampa Bay’s opening day lineup, which is where he has hit the most this spring training.

I know I am going against the grain with my Cedric Mullins hopium; baseball’s most popular projections do not even have him with an OPS higher than .700 (Zips, OOPSY, etc.). I’m bullish on the Cedric Mullins bounce back, a change of scenery, a steady diet of playing time, and some more hitter-friendly ballparks for lefties who pull the ball in the air. I think Cedric could be a steal for deeper fantasy leagues.