Fantasy baseball weekend takeaways: Zack Wheeler surges as Eury Perez, Jose Soriano raise concerns

Zack Wheeler continues to amaze. When he was finding success with diminished stuff, it was one thing. Sure, Wheeler could make a living sitting around 94-95 mph with his fastball, he just probably couldn't be an ace like he used to be – he was getting outs and keeping runs off the board, but with eight strikeouts in 13.2 innings in his previous two starts, you could at least write off the upside case there. 

After Sunday, we have to seriously consider the possibility that Wheeler might actually get back to his pre-injury form. Which would be astonishing – he's a 35-year-old coming off Thoracic Outlet surgery, an injury that, if not a career-ender, is often a career-definer. But there he was on Sunday against the Pirates, looking almost all of the way back to where he was last season. 

Wheeler's fastball velocity was up 1.6 mph on average in this one – he was down 1.4 mph coming into the start, so you do the math there. His 96.3 mph average was the highest in a start since last July, and it's little surprise he was able to rack up nine swinging strikes with it. His sinker wasn't quite as dominant as a bat-misser, but he had four batted balls with an average exit velocity of 75.4 mph, and we'll take that, too. Ultimately, he was up 1.1 to 2.0 mph across all six of his pitches, en route to seven shutout innings while striking out eight and allowing four hits and one walk.

And, I'll be honest: I don't know what to do about that. Pitchers in their mid-30s are typically pretty bad bets to bounce back all the way from serious injuries, and Wheeler's was very, very serious. He had a piece of his rib removed and is down more than 10 pounds from last year's playing weight. Assuming he would never get back to his previous level was the smart assumption. But it might also turn out to be the wrong assumption. I still think we're dealing with elevated injury risk moving forward with Wheeler, but after seeing him succeed without his best velocity and then seeing him getting most of that best velocity back, I just don't feel very good about betting against him. 

This might be enough to push me to move Wheeler back into my top-15 at SP. I never thought we'd get back there. 

Eury Perez continues to disappoint

I don't know if there's any way to quantify this, but it sure feels like Perez has more pitches where he just straight up misses his target by 2-3 feet than any other good pitcher in baseball. Sometimes it'll happen twice in one at bat. What's so hard about giving up on him despite how consistently bad he has been this season is that it's just that one issue he has to fix. Just the one. The stuff is phenomenal, and with even decent command, he could be an ace. Even just normal bad command, where he isn't missing the zone by a foot or else leaving his four-seamer and sweeper in the middle of the zone to get crushed. 

Of course, when the "one problem" a pitcher has is "where he throws his pitches," then it's kinda silly to dismiss it as "one problem." It's not quite the whole ballgame, but it's hard to overcome even elite stuff with poor locations, and Perez clearly isn't overcoming. He had yet another poor outing Sunday, where he gave up five runs on five hits and four walks. You could live with the occasional homer issue if Perez was racking up the kinds of strikeouts he should be while avoiding walks, but right now, he's pitching like the worst versions of Gavin Williams or Mackenzie Gore, and when things go bad for both of them, they tend to go very bad.

I won't tell you to drop Perez. Maybe that's my failing as a Fantasy player, but I believe too much in the skill set; I'm too confident that eventually, the light will switch on and he'll be a dominant pitcher. But he's nowhere close to that right now, and he's showing no signs of getting there anytime soon. How you want to handle that is entirely up to you.

Jose Soriano regressed hard

And here's the flip side, where part of why I was wary of fully embracing the breakout for Soriano is that so much of it was predicated on him taking such a huge step forward with his control, and that's something you can't always rely on. It's oversimplifying to say that's the only change, of course, because he's also taken a huge step forward as a bat-misser, but even that can often be downstream of improved control – did his sinker jump from a 16% whiff rate to a 29% because it suddenly became a much better pitch, or was he just finding the right spots for it? Probably a bit of Column A, a bit of Column B, and a dash or two of Column C – the introduction of a legit four-seamer that plays well off the rest of the arsenal.

But it's certainly no surprise that Soriano's worst start of the season was also the one where he struggled with his command the most, as he gave up six runs on six walks and just one hit in 5.1 innings of work Saturday. That now gives Soriano a 6.35 ERA in three May starts, with one excellent one-run outing sandwiched between a pair where he gave up more runs than innings pitched. 

Does that mean Soriano is going to turn back into the maddeningly inconsistent pitcher he was prior to March of 2026? Maybe. I'm not saying I'm going to rank him outside of the top 50 again, or anything. But he wouldn't be the first pitcher to turn in a good month before regressing back to who he always was. 

Gerrit Cole is almost back … and he might be back

Cole made what is probably his second-to-last tune-up start before he returns from Tommy John surgery this weekend, and it just so happened to be his first one in front of the Statcast cameras since his rehab began. And what we saw was very interesting. Cole averaged 97 mph with his four-seam fastball while pitching for Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, higher than his average for any season since 2022. That doesn't mean Cole is going to come back and immediately pitch like the vintage version of himself – we've seen plenty of pitchers come back from Tommy John with their stuff intact but struggle because their command wasn't there. But this should make us feel even more confident about Cole returning with his stuff intact, and that answers one big question about what to expect from him. He may not be a difference maker right away, but he has the upside to be one. I'm excited to see him get back out there against big-leaguers now. 

Roki Sasaki may be turning into something 

Slowly but surely, he's figuring it out, and he might have just taken a big step forward Sunday. Sasaki tossed seven innings for the first time in his MLB career, limiting the Angels to just one run on four hits and, notably, zero walks. He struck out eight, a career high, and now has 22 strikeouts to just four walks in 23 innings over the past four starts – by far the best he has ever looked in his MLB career.

And it's not necessarily an arbitrary endpoint here. Four starts ago, is when Sasaki introduced his new, harder splitter, relegating his older, less consistent version to serve as more of a putaway pitch and making the whole arsenal look a lot better. Sasaki's four-seamer will probably never be a good pitch on its own, but he has multiple pitches he can throw off it now. There's the high-80s/low-90s splitter and also the slider, which he has commanded better lately, throwing nine of them in first-pitch situations Sunday, seven for strikes Sunday. The splitter and forkball (what used to be called his splitter; not confusing at all!) are two separate pitches Sasaki can throw, the latter more of a pure chase pitch. 

The physical characteristics of the four-seamer and slider still aren't impressive, but the wider arsenal has helped him command better and be less predictable, and now he might have three legitimate swing-and-miss options. I suspect there will still be plenty of inconsistencies along the way, but the Dodgers look pretty smart for sticking with Sasaki when he frankly didn't look like a major-league pitcher in March and April. I don't think we're anywhere close to Sasaki living up to the hype he brought over with him from Japan. But for the first time in his two seasons in the majors, I can actually see myself wanting to use him. I even added him in a few leagues over the past few weeks. Let's see what he can do moving forward. 

Bryce Harper might be elite again

When Harper had a sub-.700 OPS through the first 10 games of the season, it looked like all that offseason chatter about him not being a superstar anymore looked spot-on. And hey, at 33, it's no great shame to no longer be an elite player. But he had three hits in his 10th game of the season, two walks in his 11th, and really hasn't looked back; after going for four hits Friday and then a homer both Saturday and Sunday, he's up to a .282/.376/.559 line for the season.

What's interesting is this has come with his lowest average exit velocity since 2016, down to 88.9 mph. Of course, averages can be misleading in small-sample contexts, and for a player like Harper, I don't so much care if he's hitting the ball hard on the ground as much as what he's doing when he elevates it. And while he's in just the 43rd percentile in average exit velocity overall, he's in the 63rd percentile on line drives and fly balls. That still isn't elite, but when combined with a slightly higher pull-air rate and better plate discipline than we've seen in years, it all looks excellent once again. Heck, his .417 expected wOBA is not only his best since 2021; it's 16 points north of his actual mark. This rebound may not be a fluke. 

Edward Cabrera is looking pretty mediocre

It hasn't been a disaster. But it hasn't been good. Cabrera has allowed more than three runs in a start just once this season, but he also hasn't allowed fewer than three runs since April 5. There was at least a stretch starting in mid-April where he started throwing his four-seamer less and was granting fewer walks, but he walked that back in his Friday start, where he walked three in 4.2 innings. On the whole, his strikeout rate is down from 25.8% to 21.3%, while the results on balls in play and control continue to look mediocre at best. The long-term track record suggests there should be room to grow on the strikeout front, at least, but it's increasingly looking like 2025's run of utility was a bit of a fluke. Cabrera shouldn't be dropped in all leagues or anything, but I'm not particularly excited about starting him at this point. 

Daylen Lile is looking great

Lile looked like he was going to go down as a flash-in-the-pan, but the underlying numbers never got as bad as the surface level stuff. Even when he was struggling to open the season, he was still hitting a lot of line drives and making plenty of contact, in a way that suggests the struggles were at least somewhat attributable to poor luck; his .339 xwOBA in April was quite a bit better than his .317 actual mark. And in May, we've seen him make up for it and then some, hitting .304/.349/.607 with four homers (and two steals!) in 15 games. I'd still like to see Lile be a more successful baserunner given his athleticism, but I think this dude is just a flat out good hitter; there's some Steven Kwan going on here, where I do expect him to just be a very good source of batting average (even if he'll likely strike out a bit more than Kwan), and it won't just be an empty batting average. I think he's potentially a 20-20 guy. Heck, he's at 16 and 11 in 137 games since he debuted, while hitting .289. That's pretty good! 

Davis Martin continues to look intriguing

I'll admit, I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around Martin's newfound success. He spent parts of the previous three seasons with the White Sox and never really showed much reason to be interested in him; he's made a few tweaks to his arsenal since, but nothing that would seem to suggest the kind of breakout we've seen from him in the early going, as he lowered his ERA to 1.61 (0.98 WHIP) Saturday with another excellent outing. And it's not just the low ERA – he has the peripherals to at least back up a breakout, if not quite this level of success, with an xERA of 3.65 and a SIERA of 2.99. We'd take either of those marks from a guy who was undrafted in most leagues.

I'd take the over on either moving forward, but I point them out to say he isn't just BABIP-ing his way to success. His control is dramatically improved, not because he's necessarily throwing pitches in the strike zone significantly more often (he isn't), but because he is generating swings on pitches out of the zone a lot more often. The slider takes most of the credit here, with an absolutely massive 53% whiff rate, though Martin's otherwise middling four-seamer has also jumped up from a 21.5% whiff rate to a borderline elite 29.5% mark. It may not prove sustainable, but it doesn't look like a fluke that Martin is succeeding right now, either. And I'm inclined to just ride it until the wheels come off. 

Grayson Rodriguez is back

I originally had an exclamation point there, but I realize that would be overselling how exciting this actually was. It is, for now, a mere statement of fact: Grayson Rodriguez was, for the first time since July of 2024, back on a major-league mound Sunday. I won't say much more beyond that because, well, he had about the lousiest landing spot possible, making his return against the Dodgers. That's rough, and the results were rough, as they jumped on him for seven runs in just 3.2 innings. Seven hits, four walks, four strikeouts … yeah, it was a bad start.

But it was a start! A start where Rodriguez was healthy and then, just as importantly, remained healthy by the time the manager came to get the ball from him. There will be time to evaluate the performance moving forward, but for now, I'll celebrate Rodriguez getting back on a mound after lat, shoulder, and elbow injuries derailed what was once a promising career. And, for what it's worth, Rodriguez hit 99 mph with one fastball and averaged 96.3 mph, actually up slightly from 2024, and he sustained it throughout his 79 pitches. The results were bad, but we saw a new, slower slider that resulted in five whiffs on 11 swings, and we'll take the small victory there. 

I don't think Rodriguez needs to be picked up anywhere he isn't already rostered. If you had him stashed, I don't think we saw anything this week that should make you feel like you have to keep him around. But now that he's back, I'm looking forward to seeing if he can recapture some of the form that once made us so excited.