Fantasy baseball toughest second basemen to rank for 2027: Jazz Chisholm leads the biggest draft-day dilemmas

Jazz Chisholm, Ketel Marte and Ozzie Albies headline the second basemen, presenting difficult decisions for 2027 Fantasy drafts

Sep 17, 2026 at 8:35 am ET • 7 min read

Second base was a pleasant surprise in 2026. And an underrated fact about the position is that might just be true most seasons, if for no other reason than second base tends to be a position where teams are more willing to experiment, defensively. 

The bar for defensive excellence across the board is higher at shortstop than at second base, obviously. While the range demands of third base are lower, the need for a strong, accurate throwing arm limits how many players are moved to third base unexpectedly. You simply don't see a lot of guys move to those two positions without much warning or experience. Still, it'll happen regularly enough at second base that, for example, Fernando Tatis ended up playing nearly a third of his season there after not playing the infield at all since 2021. 

And Tatis will enter 2027 as the top-ranked second baseman as a result of that. Nobody saw that coming, and other names like Otto Lopez and Luis Arraez added second base eligibility and ended up making a big difference this season as a result. So, even though Lopez is among the players losing second base eligibility entering 2027 – a list that also includes Ceddane Rafaela, Luis Garcia, and Casey Schmitt, among others – you can be pretty confident that the position will end up in better shape in 2027 than it might look this offseason. 

That doesn't necessarily mean you can just punt the position in drafts next season, safe in the assumption that you'll end up with decent production from someone who doesn't currently have 2B eligibility. But it seems pretty reasonable to assume that someone will come along to strengthen this position, usually multiple someones. It happens every year. 

For now, here are the toughest players to rank for 2027 who do carry second base eligibility, and just for the record: Tatis is not on this list. I think he's exceedingly easy to rank as the top option. While we can quibble about whether he's worth a first-round or if the inherent risk shown by his first-half struggles relegates him to the second-round range, I don't think anyone's going to realistically argue he shouldn't at least be a top-20 pick in 2027. There are definitely bigger question marks here. 

The toughest players to rank at second base

Jazz Chisholm Jr., Free Agent-to-be

Uh, so much for that 50-50 season. Chisholm had actually played close to a 40-40 pace since joining the Yankees before this season. His offensive game has absolutely collapsed ahead of his big free agency, and he had just 19 homers before going on the IL recently with a thumb injury. And the underlying numbers back up that this wasn't just a fluke – he legitimately took a big step backward this season despite posting the highest average exit velocity of his career.

The issue was tied to his deteriorating swing decisions, as he started swinging at fewer pitches inside the strike zone while simultaneously chasing more pitches out of the zone. For a guy with contact issues to begin with, that's a dangerous combination, because he has to really do damage when he makes contact to make the whole profile work, and that's obviously tougher to do when you're swinging at the wrong pitches. 

Was Chisholm pressing in a contract year? It's a reasonable (though unprovable) theory, for sure. But the margins here are narrow enough that it's also possible we just saw a normal downside season for Chisholm. The stolen base upside remains nice, but the uncertainty around where he'll be playing heading into a potential lockout, plus the inherent volatility of his skill set, makes Chisholm an especially tough player to rank. He'll be lower than he was in 2026, that's for sure, but this is probably still a top-five second baseman in Fantasy, and potentially top three. 

Ketel Marte, Diamondbacks

Because he was a relatively late bloomer and has missed so much time with injury, you may not realize that Marte turns 33 in just a few weeks. And we're definitely starting to see some signs of slippage in his skill set. Not outright collapse, mind you, and there's still a lot he does really well – he still generally makes the right swing decisions and makes a lot of contact, and he generally still hits the ball quite hard. But he's chasing a lot more than ever before (up from 25% swing rate on pitches out of the zone to 32%, a genuinely poor mark), and he's hitting the ball a bit less hard, both at the high end and on average. 

It's still a strong skill set overall – his .348 xwOBA is quite a bit better than his .328 actual mark, and is the second-best mark among all second basemen. But it's definitely down from his previous couple of seasons, and at his age, it's probably not smart to bet on a bounce back. Marte is probably still a good hitter, but I'm not sure he's a great one anymore, and given his tendency to get hurt (plus, you know, whatever else is going on with him in Arizona), the vibes just aren't great here. Are the vibes enough to downgrade Marte? I suspect they will be, but he still looks like a top-five second baseman to me. 

Ozzie Albies, Braves

The thing about aging curves is, they don't affect everyone equally. Albies is just 29, but we're on a multi-year trend of his production slipping, and the underlying data along with it. The most concerning thing for Albies is that he just isn't crushing lefties the way he used to, which was usually what propped up his overall line, as you can see here:

• 2021 vs. RHP: .749
• 2026 vs. RHP: .688
• 2021 vs. LHP: .940
• 2026 vs. LHP: .739

The skill set has collapsed all around, but it's especially notable that he no longer seems to have that ability to demolish lefties, and it's made him a pretty iffy Fantasy option overall. Albies has gotten the benefit of the doubt for a while, but with a third straight underwhelming season, it seems like he's just a run-of-the-mill fantasy option these days. And heading into his age-30 season, I don't think things are going to get better for him. If he's a top-12 2B in 2027, it's mostly by default at this point. 

Nico Hoerner, Cubs

Nico, you're supposed to be a high-floor player! Despite the Cubs offense as a whole taking a step forward, Hoerner is struggling through his worst season since becoming an everyday player in 2022. A lot of it can be explained by his BABIP dropping from .313 (and a career mark of .307 entering the season) to just .278 in 2026, which feels especially flukey in light of his career-best .300 expected batting average. But if it was just the lower batting average, you could just place a pretty easy bet on a bounce-back and walk away from the table. But Hoerner got moved down to the middle/lower part of the lineup in June and has batted higher than fifth just twice since June 6. That has had predictably disastrous effects on his run scoring, as he sits at just 60. Without a commensurate rise in his RBI production, it's dragged the whole profile down. 

And then there's the speed, or lack thereof: Hoerner's sprint speed has dipped to a career-low 76th percentile, and he has just 22 steals now, seven fewer than 2025 in the same number of plate appearances. Some of this stuff could just be tied to his lineup spot: Runs are harder to come by the lower you bat and many teams are more willing to let players run at the top of the lineup than in the middle. With Seiya Suzuki and Ian Happ heading into free agency this offseason, Hoerner very well may find himself back at the top of the lineup in 2027, and these concerns could disappear. But when we're talking about a player whose primary appeal is supposed to be a predictable, high-floor, seeing that floor drop out is scary. Especially as he heads into his age-30 season. Is there that much separating Hoerner and someone like Sam Antonacci at this point? I'm not sure there is, making Hoerner look more like a fringe top-12 2B than anything else. 

Kody Clemens, Twins 

The raw power has always been there for Clemens, but there wasn't much else there; he was strictly a platoon bat before 2026 and looked like a huge batting average drain despite that. Well, the Twins have given him a longer leash as a more-or-less everyday player this season and he has responded by holding his own against lefties and emerging as kind of a poor man's Brandon Lowe. And despite more exposure to same-handed pitching, Clemens is actually putting up the best underlying numbers of his career, right in line with his actual production. This doesn't look like a fluke.

Still, do the Twins really want him playing every day against lefties? A .699 OPS is playable, but if you want to compete, that seems like an obvious spot to upgrade. This is also a one-year breakout from a 30-year-old, and that's usually not the kind of thing you want to bet on repeating.