2026 Fantasy Baseball Projections: Mr. Cheatsheet’s Special Blend

Predicting the future is not an easy task but it’s essentially what we’re trying to do when we play fantasy baseball. On draft day, you’re wanting some sort of crystal ball that allows you to see into the future so that you can draft the best team possible and win your league. Baseball projections are that crystal ball for you.

To create those projections, there are many talented people out there who have worked hard to find ways to each uniquely analyze player trends in an effort to project the upcoming season performance for each player. Every projection system comes up with different results due to their different methodologies. That’s why it can often be best to actually combine the various systems out there into a combination of all systems in an effort to smooth out potential errors while getting a better projection that is in a nice middle ground among all of those projections. There are many ways to go about such a task and that’s where I come in with my Special Blend of projections, which I’ve been doing for well over a decade now.

Blending Projections for Increased Accuracy

As the name would suggest, this is a “special blend” of projections, and it is not just an averaging of the available projections (though that itself has its own validity as a method). The Special Blend projections are an effort to improve upon a simple average of projections, and it does so by taking the various projection sources and weighting them based on their predictive value (which are determined from my years of analysis).

That’s the idea on the surface but it’s a little more complicated than that. The weighting is actually done for every individual stat. That’s because one system may be much better at projecting HRs but not so good at projecting SBs historically, and so my Special Blend accounts for that by choosing individual weights for every stat from the available sources that I use. The result is a system which gives you the best blend of projections possible with increased projection accuracy.

Changes for the 2026 Blend

Over time, projections come and go and some even modify their process from year to year. This means that the Special Blend needs to be analyzed and tweaked on occasion as their predictive values can change. In order to figure out if my system is working or needs changing, I do a projection analysis here where I analyze how accurate the previous year’s projections actually were. This analysis helps me determine if tweaking needs to be done and in what ways.

After analyzing 2025’s projections (and other recent years), I found there was an issue with how well the Special Blend was doing at projecting pitcher stats. This required me to go back into the lab before releasing the 2026 projections as there was clearly work that needed to be done since a simple average of projections was outperforming the past version of the Special Blend for pitchers. The end result was new weights for 2026 and a couple of new sources as well in this year’s Special Blend.

Within these changes, I’ve introduced the Marcel and OOPSY projections into the weighting. Marcel is the longest-running projection system around and is lauded for its simplicity and it does have some predictive weight of its own despite that simplicity. OOPSY, on the other hand, is a brand-new projection system so it’s a bit of a risk to rely too much on it yet. It did a fabulous job with pitcher projections in 2025, so I am adding a dash of it into the 2026 Special Blend, and I will monitor if OOPSY’s predictive nature carries over to future years as well.

The Sources of the Special Blend

The Special Blend stands on the shoulders of the giants who did the work of creating the projections used in the blend, which I’ll list below. But, beyond that, it also includes a few other sources of data outside of the projections to make the blend extra special.

• Steamer – Good overall reliability across multiple statistics
• ZiPS – Particularly strong at projecting power metrics
• Clay Davenport – Has unique player development projections
• Fangraphs Depth Charts – Great for playing time projections
• THE BAT – Excellent for rate statistics
• Marcel – Good baseline weighting
• OOPSY – A newcomer seemingly great at pitching rate stats
• 2025 xStats that I calculated for advanced analysis of last year
• 2025 actual stats to ground it in recent performance

2026 Special Blend Projections

This is my second year with this new site design and posting projections within it, but you will see a link to the projection tables below as well as a Projections tab at the top of the page. That tab allows you to switch back and forth between the article and the projections. On the Projections tab, you’ll see the projections in a table that you can sort and filter to your heart’s content. You can also download the projections as a .csv file for your own uses as well.

Accounting for the changes that I’ve done for this upcoming season, I’m feeling really good about the strength of the Special Blend for 2026 and their ability to help you dominate your fantasy baseball leagues this year. My Excel cheatsheets will be updated in the coming days to include the updated projections (as well as other tweaks and fixes). You can subscribe to be notified of cheatsheet updates from that page. In the meantime, enjoy the 2026 Special Blend!