Fantasy Baseball Draft prep: The best specialists for every category to target late in drafts

Don't leave your drafts without these category sleepers

Chris Towers

Mar 18, 2026

6:31 pm ET

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21 min read

I won't spend too much time on a long intro today, because the content here is already pretty long. Today, we're looking for late-round categories specialists for your Roto leagues.

By the time you hit around pick 200, the core of your team is well-established, and you should have a pretty good idea of what your needs are. If you went heavy on power early on, you might find yourself in need of some batting average and steals to balance your team out; if you took a lot of high-upside strikeout arms, you might need to shift your focus to some more boring stabilizer types to make sure your ERA and WHIP don't get too ugly, or to shore up wins.

That's what we're looking for today with all 10 of the traditional Roto categories. Let's get to it:

Late-round hitting category specialists

We're using a relatively loose definition of "late-round" for our hitters – anyone with an ADP outside of the top 185 in the month of March in NFBC leagues qualifies here. These aren't all bench picks, in other words, though most of them go late enough that you should know what your team needs by then.

I'll also note: It's a lot easier to find true category specialists among hitters because the categories are less correlated here. At least batting average and steals are – every home run you hit necessarily leads to at least one RBI and a run, so guys who are good home run hitters tend to be good at RBI and R production. But batting average and steals are less correlated, so finding guys who are true specialists there is a little easier.

Batting average specialists

- Luis Arraez, 1B, Giants – ADP: 262.3: The cover boy of this exercise for a reason. Arraez's limitations are real, but he's arguably the best source of batting average in the entire league. You might get below-average production or worse everywhere else, but if you took Kyle Schwarber and Jazz Chisholm with your first two picks, you won't mind.

- Alec Bohm, 3B, Phillies – ADP: 231.4: The past two years, Bohm's price was around 150-160 in drafts. He's not a great hitter, but he wasn't so much worse in 2025 that you should be totally out on him the way so many are. He'll show up again in this article, too – which arguably makes him a poor fit for this article, but we'll take it.

- Jung Hoo Lee, OF, Giants – ADP: 311.5 There was some hope that Lee might be positioned to make a leap in his second MLB season, but we haven't seen it yet. I think the ceiling is probably no better than 10-15 homers and 15 steals, but we're more interested in turning that 10.8% career strikeout rate into something like a .280 batting average. We haven't seen it yet, but I still don't think it's asking too much.

- Brendan Donovan, 2B, Mariners – ADP: 257.4: The move to Seattle is probably helping keep Donovan's price low, because T-Mobile is one of those venues that can be extremely hard to adapt to. We don't know how it will impact Donovan, but given his very strong bat-to-ball skills, I'm hopeful we can still rely on him for his usual .280-ish average – and he's probably in the best lineup of his career, so maybe we could hope for more helpful counting stats, too.

- Jake McCarthy, OF, Rockies – ADP: 476.5: McCarthy could fit in as either a late-round source of average or steals, but I'll slot him here because the need for batting average is usually greater. McCarthy hit just .204 last season, of course, so there are no guarantees here. However, he strikes out at a below-average clip, has speed, and hit .285 two seasons ago. With the help of Coors Field's BABIP-inflating properties, I think we could see a .275-.280 average and 30-plus steals from McCarthy with the Rockies.

Runs specialists

- Gleyber Torres, 2B, Tigers – ADP: 235.4: Torres is boring. He hasn't hit more than 16 homers or stolen more than four bases in either of the past two seasons, and he hasn't hit better than .257 in either, too. But he's gonna play every day, usually near the top of the lineup, and he's going to get on base. That should lead to at least another 80-run season.

- Ezequiel Tovar, SS, Rockies – ADP: 201.5: Tovar is a curious choice for this exercise given his sub-.300 career OBP. But even a much-diminished version of the Rockies offense will score a decent amount of runs at home, and Tovar will hit near the top of the lineup. He might be a better specialist for homers than runs, but I think he'll be at least useful in both.

- Marcus Semien, 2B, Mets – ADP: 243.9: Ultimately, it comes down to this: Do you think Semien is going to bounce back this season? If you do, then you think he's clearly undervalued given his spot in the middle of a good Mets lineup. He figures to be less of an obvious runs standout since he won't be hitting leadoff like he did with the Rangers, but he should