I got at least one thing right in the slate preview yesterday. Sonny Gray is not to be trusted. And that goes both ways. He got crushed by the Phillies in his previous start, and his K% this year was way down. But yesterday, he struck out ten Tigers in six scoreless innings.
Sonny Gray Fantasy Point Scoring, 2025
The SwStr% is poor for him this year at 12.3%. The fastballs are bad, as they have been for a while.
He makes his living on breaking balls and mixing it up. I think this up-and-down season is going to continue. He’ll have more great outings, but he’ll have plenty of bad ones as well.
Kris Bubic’s breakout season continued.
7 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 5 K, 3 BB, 16.5% SwStr%
Let’s take a close look at his pitch mix, because I don’t know if I’ve done that recently.
The overall 15.4% SwStr% is fantastic, and he gets those whiffs on four different pitch types. Having a four-seamer that can get whiffs is such an advantage. How many starting pitchers have a SwStr% above 14% on their four-seamer? I’ll tell you. Looking at just four-seamers thrown at least 300 times this year
Bryan Woo 18.4%
Zack Wheeler 17.5%
Joe Ryan 16.0%
Garrett Crochet 15.7%
Simeon Woods Richardson 15.6%
Kris Bubic 15.6%
Hunter Brown 15.2%
Hunter Greene 14.9%
Nick Pivetta 14.5%
Jacob deGrom 14.2%
Shane Smith 14.2%
It’s not a very long list. But you need more than just a fastball to get the job done in a Major League rotation. Bubic has three more pitches that are all working very well. He has at least a 48% Strike% on all four of his pitches. This is also rare to see.
That’s really impressive stuff. The 52% strike rate on the changeup! Only three pitchers above 50% on their changeup:
Skubal 57%
Bubic 52%
Anderson 51%
Ragans 49%
Wacha 49%
Devin Williams 49%
Bibee 49%
Deadly combination of pitches for Bubic, and that doesn’t even mention the two breaking balls that he also has. So it would seem like Bubic is going to continue to be very good.
Kodai Senga labored early but ended up getting a decent line in the box score:
We knew that he’d have a higher walk rate and spotty command overall. But I didn’t expect the lower SwStr% that he has.
Senga has thrown seven different pitches this year, but he’s about 80% usage between the four-seamer, forkball, and cutter. The forkball (basically a splitter) is his best pitch. It has a 23.7% SwStr% and 44% Strike% on the year with a 66% GB% and a .193 xwOBA.
So you can’t do much with the forkball. But the four-seamer has struggled. A 45% Strike% on a fastball is very bad, and he doesn’t get many whiffs with it (8.7% SwStr%) even though the velo is pretty decent.
All of that bad news, and yet he has a 1.61 ERA. With all of the lack of strike-throwing, last night was the first time he gave up more than two earned runs.
Senga’s luck metrics:
→ SIERA: 4.22 → xFIP: 4.12 → LOB%: 83.9% (8th-highest in the league)
I can’t really say that he’ll go out and shellacked a few times soon, because that forkball does really limit the damage he gives up. He’s not a guy who will give up six earned runs on a couple of dingers very often. But he’s going to be inefficient, and the WHIP is going to end up being pretty bad, I think.
Ryan Pepiot has also been pretty rough this year. He got through a quality start last night, but it didn’t look pretty.
I liked Pepiot in the preseason because of the four-seamer he has and the decent pitch mix of pitches behind it. But the four-seamer hasn’t been great (10.7% SwStr%, 50% Strike%, 34% BAll%, .412 xwOBA), and no other pitch has really stood out either.
We knew he’d have some bad outings as a fly ball pitcher in this new ballpark. But now, since we see he’s having trouble getting strikeouts, I don’t think he’s someone you want to be starting in a standard league.
Ben Brown gave up six runs on seven hits, but everything else looked fantastic.
An 8:0 K:BB and an elite combo of a 19.3% SwStr% and 29% Ball%. Seems like a bad luck outing. He gave up two homers and allowed six of seven base runners to score.
You still can’t trust this guy start-to-start, but he does have upside. The SwStr% is now at 13.4% for the year and the ball rate is impressive as well at 34%.
He is one of just 15 SPs this year with a SwStr% above 13% and a Ball% below 34%.
Hayden Birdsong will make his first start of the year tonight. He was another guy that the Main Event people went crazy on. People were 15-25% of their budgets for him like they did with Tony Gonsolin. I’m continually amazed by that. The only type of pitcher you would want to spend that much on would be a guy with at least like a 25% chance of being a true ace for your fantasy squad. $200 FAAB dollars in a league like that is incredibly valuable. And people are just throwing it away on these starting pitchers that are almost surely not going to be anything special.
Here’s what we’ve seen from Birdsong in his MLB career since last year.
The Good
27% K%
13% SwStr%
The Bad
12.7% BB%
40.5% Ball%
45% Strike% on four-seamer
This year, the K% is down to 25%, and that’s in a bullpen role where he’d be able to air it out a bit more. The SwStr% is still nice at 14.5%, but the fastball command has been spotty, and he’s allowed a ton of fly balls.
Things will change a bit as he re-enters the rotation, and he does skill-based upside. He has good stuff, but I just don’t see it. The command has never been good, the pitch mix is pretty limited, and the fastball just doesn’t look like anything special to me.
I imagine that he will struggle to throw strikes and struggle to get past five innings. But we’ll see, I could be wrong. All I know is that I would have been very happy to let someone else in my league spend 15% of their budget on him.
Let’s take a look at what Chase Meidroth is doing for the White Sox.
That is pretty good stuff, besides the lack of power. He has an elite 92% zone contact rate. And that’s very good, because he does not swing the bat very much. He’s at a 34.7% Swing%. That’s the lowest in the league!
And here’s an important point to make. The goodness or badness of your swing rate is dependent on your contact rate. If you’re going to take extra strikes (which is what will happen when you have a low swing rate), you’d better not whiff very much when you do swing. Here are the lowset swing rates of the last two years, filtering down to 90+ PA so we can see Meidroth. and I’ve boxed the guys with at least an 85% Z-Contact% (league average = 83%).
It looks to me like Meidroth can be a high OBP guy in the Majors. He’ll take a lot of walks swinging that infrequently, and he’ll still get a ton of balls in play because of his contact skills.
The one other thing he’ll need to do to be a useful fantasy player would be to post a higher line drive rate. Right now, he’s at a poor 17% LD%. Most of his batted balls have been ground balls (52%). That’s not what we’d love to see, and it makes me not believe in the .338 BABIP at all. But it’s only 69 balls in play so far, so we can’t really judge the batted ball profile yet.
I’m not saying he’s a priority pick up in any kind of league. He has very little upside with the lack of power (100.9 EV90, 107 max so far), but I do think he could be a valuable points league bat in a deep league if he can get the LD% up a bit.
Nolan Schanuel hit his third homer of the season last night. He’s been on a heater of late. Since May 7th:
Do you remember me getting real hyped up about his increased bat speed and exit velos early in the year? Well that has not worked out. He has just a 4.5% Brl% and only those three homers in 177 PAs with a .406 SLG.
But it wasn’t all wrong. He truly is hitting the ball harder this year.
However, he’s not hitting his fly balls harder:
The bat speed increase has stuck around.
Nolan Schanuel 75th-Percentile Bat Speed
2024: 68.9 2025: 71.8
So it’s not like we were wrong to point out that early-season change. It’s just that it hasn’t translated into significantly more fantasy production, because it doesn’t seem to apply to the swings where he actually lifts the ball.
But he’s improved a lot this year - that’s the bottom line. And this is a very young hitter.
The .356 OBP and .277 AVG play pretty nicely in plenty of league types. I’d say he’s a starter in a 14+ team league, especially if you can points/credit for walks.
And I still have to think he can get back to around 12-15 homers. So it’s not like he’s a zero in that category.
