Given how his MLB career started, I would love nothing more than for Monday to represent the turning point for Tatsuya Imai. I mean, a combined no-hitter? Even falling short of the individual accomplishment, that's still a heck of a performance – let alone from a guy who didn't even look like he belonged in the majors at the start of the season.
But I can't exactly get excited about this performance for Fantasy. Six no-hit innings is great, but when it comes with four walks and only two strikeouts, it's hard to believe in it being sustainable. Imai is basically just a two-pitch pitcher right now, throwing his four-seamer and slider 96% of the time, and he missed just six bats on 97 pitches Monday, a pretty awful rate.
I don't think this means Imai is destined to be terrible forever, but it doesn't do much to move me after how much he has struggled. I'm pulling for him to build on this and become a viable starter at the MLB level, but this start notwithstanding, I'm just not sure he's there yet.
We're back from the long weekend at Fantasy Baseball Today HQ, and so today's newsletter is going to go a bit long. I've got our usual look at the top waiver-wire targets from Monday's action (and before), and then we're looking at some of the biggest storylines from this weekend's action before we get to the biggest news you need to know about.
Here's what else you need to know from Monday's action around MLB:
Tuesday's top waiver-wire targets
Here's who we're looking to add coming out of Monday's action:
Reid Detmers, SP, Angels (59%) – Detmers remains one of the most frustrating players in the game. His surface-level numbers of the years suggest there just isn't much to be interested in here, and even his successful stint in the bullpen last season ended with a 3.96 ERA. Of course, we also know that ERA isn't the best predictor of future performance – it holds very little predictive value, in fact – but after five-plus seasons and over 500 innings, you kind of have to assume a pitcher is who he is, right? That's what makes Detmers so frustrating, because he's so obviously capable of so much more. The latest evidence came in eight dominant innings against the Rangers Sunday, which saw him strike out 14 while allowing just one run on one hit. If he could do that consistently, Detmers would be a star, and his underlying metrics suggest he's capable of it – you'd take his 2.90 xERA in a heartbeat! But he has consistently underperformed his peripherals throughout his career, to the point where it's hard to just write it off as a fluke. Still, we're always looking for upside on the waiver wire, and Detmers certainly has plenty of that.
Ben Brown, RP, Cubs (70%) – Brown clearly has plenty of upside, too. I wasn't convinced the move to the rotation would work, but he's more than held his own, allowing just four runs in 19 innings across four starts, while striking out 25 and walking just six. I still have some concerns about how he's going to handle lefties in the long run, but it hasn't been an issue for him so far, and his limited arsenal is mostly holding up to longer outings. At this point, Brown has shown enough to be worth adding in basically all formats despite my mild misgivings.
Tommy Troy, 2B, Diamondbacks (9%) – Troy isn't quite on the same level as a prospect like Ryan Waldschmidt, but he's an intriguing young talent with a potentially Fantasy-friendly skill set. He makes enough contact to project useful batting averages from, and in 82 games at Triple-A, he has six homers and nine steals. You'd like to see more power from him, especially with a strikeout rate pushing close to 25% this season before his promotion, but if he can get to 15-ish homers and 20-plus steals with a helpful batting average, that would play at second base, even if he's playing in the outfield for the D-Backs.
Jonah Tong, SP, Mets (31%) – Tong knows that what he tried last season didn't work, so he's been trying to figure things out in the minors. The results have been pretty bad, but when he pitched for the Mets over the weekend, there were some interesting things going on, as Lance Brozdowski noted in his excellent Substack. Tong has lowered his arm angle, seemingly in hopes of improving his non-fastballs, and we saw a bit of that here. His curveball had significantly more sweep with similar velocity as last season, and he flashed a new cutter as well. Given his control struggles at Triple-A and questions about his role in the majors, Tong isn't someone you need to run out and add everywhere possible, but I remain very intrigued by the overall skill set here.
Curtis Mead, 1B, Nationals (7%) – The Nationals need to just give Mead full-time run, and I suspect they will after Monday. He started against a right-handed pitcher for the second time in three games and went 2 for 5 with a pair of homers. Mead is now hitting .246/.386/.579 against righties, and he's actually putting up better underlying numbers against them, especially as a power hitter. Mead has never hit much at the MLB level but has a good minor-league track record and some pedigree, so I'll look his way in deeper leagues where I need a corner infielder.
Kirby Yates, RP, Angels (45%) – All along, I've been assuming the Angels wanted Yates to end up as the closer, and it looks like that's where we're going to end up. Whether he'll be good enough to hang on to the job remains to be seen, but with his average fastball velocity down nearly 3 mph since the last season when he was good, skepticism is reasonable. But he got the save Saturday and has worked the ninth inning in three straight appearances, so it's reasonable to think he's at least going to get the opportunity, and anyone who gets the opportunity to close can matter in categories leagues.
Weekend storylines
Cole Ragans seems to have had a setback
Ragans didn't recover as well as hoped after his minor-league rehab start Saturday and will be shut down from throwing for a few days. It's not clear whether this represents anything more than just a bump in the road, but any time you're dealing with a pitcher with an elbow injury that recurs when they start throwing in games, I think you have to be worried. Ragans has been out since May 7 with left elbow impingement, but thus far has seemingly avoided the kind of structural damage that would lead to a long absence. But even a supposedly minor setback is pretty alarming, and I think you have to be concerned about Ragans' chances of making a real impact the rest of the way.
Nolan McLean has hit a rough patch
Amid an otherwise disastrous start to the season, the Mets at least had McLean's development to point to. Yeah, a lot of things have gone wrong, but McLean? That guy's a legitimate ace, someone we can plan on building the rotation around for the next half-decade or so.
And he probably is still that. But we're seeing for the first time over his past couple of starts some signs of weakness, as he has been tagged for 13 runs in nine innings over the past two starts. His velocity has held well enough, and his control has been fine, so the main issue for McLean in these two starts has been the long ball – and even that comes with a caveat. Of the four homers he has allowed in these two starts, one was an inside-the-parker that glanced off an outfielder's glove. Not that three homers in two starts would be much better, but it's some useful context.
More than that, I still just don't see much reason to think this is anything other than a couple of poor outings in a row. Yeah, they've driven his ERA for the season above 4.00 now, but it's not like there's much to be concerned about beyond the ERA – his 1.09 WHIP is terrific, McLean is still an elite strikeout pitcher, and he has good enough control, hence the peripherals that suggest he's a low-3.00s ERA pitcher at the worst pretty much across the board. A few poorly timed homers shouldn't change how you view any pitcher, and McLean still looks like he very much belongs in the top-15 discussion. If there's any kind of buy-low window here, I'll take it.
Gerrit Cole is back … but is he … you know … back?
There's the "getting back on the mound" bit that matters, of course, but then there's the "how did he look when he got there" part that matters just as much. And in Cole's case, I think we saw plenty to be optimistic about, even if he only struck out two over his six innings of work.
Cole sat at 96.2 mph with his four-seamer, up a little bit from 2024, and he had the same movement profile. That was a slightly diminished version of Cole from his truly elite days, but it was still good enough for us to view him as an ace. His sinker was also used more aggressively than basically ever before, and it looks like Cole brings a pair of really good fastballs to the table, with an all-around arsenal that still looks like it should work – he even seems to have put in some work on the changeup, which came in 3 mph slower than in 2024 and with more drop, an interesting wrinkle that separates it even more from his fastballs.
The results weren't ideal from a bat-missing perspective, but the stuff still looks plenty good. As we've seen with many pitchers coming back from extended time off, it can take some time to get the command and overall execution there on a start-by-start basis, which remains to be seen for Cole. I'd guess we're going to see some ups and downs from him, but at the very least, we can say we're looking at a high-upside pitcher here yet again. How often he reaches that upside will determine if Cole can be a top-20 pitcher or more like a top-40 one the rest of the way.
Gavin Williams did it again
In fairness, in this context, "it" could mean either a good start or a terrible one. In this instance, however, we're talking about another good start from Williams, his second in a row and arguably his best of the season – he limited the Phillies to just four hits over eight shutout innings during an 11-strikeout effort Friday. That came after he allowed 10 runs in a two-start span, which was following a nine-strikeout effort to close out April; in the start before that one, he gave up six earned runs in six innings.
To a certain extent, I think this is just who Williams is. He's always struggled with consistency, so shouldn't we just take at face value that he'll always be inconsistent? The path the journey takes is less important than the destination, and at this point, we're going on a year-plus and nearly 240 innings of Williams pitching at a 3.11 ERA. And, with his walk rate improving from 11.8% to 7.9% this season, maybe it's time to just stop focusing on the bad starts and inconsistency and just take Williams' numbers at face value.
I'm pretty close to getting there, but I can't quite shake the feeling that this guy still isn't worth trusting. For as good as the ERA has been since the start of last season, his peripherals don't back it up; his 4.09 FIP in that span tells the story, but his 4.27 xERA might tell it even better. Because the argument in favor of just trusting Williams is that he has some skill that allows him to out-pitch his peripherals, and the xERA (which takes into account the quality of contact allowed by pitchers) suggests that isn't really the case here.
That being said, I do think Williams has taken a step forward this season that the xERA isn't quite capturing. Or, rather, I don't think his .431 xwOBA on contact (one of the worst marks in baseball this season) is likely to prove sustainable. He is giving up harder contact, but that is the kind of thing that often regresses; strikeout and walk rates are a lot stickier than quality of contact metrics when the sample sizes are measured in months rather than years. Which is all a long way of saying: Yeah, I think I'm over (most of) my skepticism toward Williams.
Jordan Walker continues to rake
When a player gets off to an unexpectedly great start, you know what I always want to see? I want to see them slump. It happens to everyone, and when a player takes the league by storm with a new skill set or new approach, I want to see what it looks like once that new skill set or approach stops working. I want to see how the league adjusts, and then I want to see how the player adjusts to those adjustments.
When Walker homered in his first 16 games of the season, I was intrigued, but skeptical. When he went 13 straight games without a homer while striking out nearly twice a game, it might have seemed like the skepticism was the right call. However, he has actually managed to be even better since the calendar turned to May, hitting .316/.386/.585 after he homered in both sides of a doubleheader on Saturday. He has cut his strikeout rate to just 17% in May without sacrificing much of the elite quality of contact he has been producing all along, leading to a .391 expected wOBA so far in May, the best for a single month in his career since June of 2023.
There will always be a lot of swing and miss in Walker's game, and I don't think he's suddenly a 17% strikeout rate guy just because he's been doing it for a few weeks, especially when the underlying plate discipline metrics still show too much chase and worse-than-average contact skills. But he's managed to be more aggressive on pitches in the zone without sacrificing either swing decisions or contact skills, which means he's swinging at more of the pitches he can do damage with. And Walker can do a lot of damage. I don't necessarily buy Walker as a top-12 outfielder forever, but I'm a whole lot less skeptical today than I was a month ago,
Shota Imanaga struggled again
And just like that, Imanaga's ERA is over 4.00 for the season. Now, the nice thing about Imanaga is that even when his ERA is a little inflated, he tends to remain a big-time contributor in other ways, as seen by his 1.07 WHIP. However, he has genuinely undone much of the good work he did over the first two months or so of the season by allowing 15 runs over the past two starts. The issue? As usual, it comes down to homers, as he allowed five across those two starts, compared to just five in his previous nine. Imanaga is still sporting the best strikeout rate of his career, so I'd take the under on a 4.00 ERA the rest of the way, but there's always ERA risk here with a guy who gives up as many fly balls as he does.
Bubba Chandler showed signs of life
The walks have been prohibitively high for Chandler, but the biggest source of frustration for him this season has actually been the lack of strikeouts – you can talk yourself into a guy with elite stuff figuring out control issues if he's missing a ton of bats, but if he's not? Well, Chandler finally started missing bats and, more importantly, putting guys away in his most recent start, as he struck out 11 over five innings of work Friday against the Blue Jays. This is a Blue Jays lineup that tends to make a lot of contact, so it was very good to see him generate 22 swinging strikes, including at least two on five different pitches. He has been surprisingly hittable this season, though I've generally chalked that up to poor location rather than to him not having the stuff to miss bats, and it's good to see a reminder of how good he still can be. I understand why many of you have dropped Chandler, but I still think he's someone whose upside makes him worth rostering in a lot more than 72% of CBS Fantasy leagues.
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