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

Chris Towers highlights velocity gains, command issues and trends from this weekend's action

Chris Towers

May 18, 2026

2:31 pm ET

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12 min read

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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 t