Fantasy baseball weekend takeaways: Spencer Strider struggles, Emerson Hancock surges and more injuries

Shifting expectations continue to reshape the Fantasy baseball landscape

Chris Towers

May 4, 2026

10:40 am ET

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16 min read

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Don't worry. I'm not gonna do what everyone thinks I'm gonna do and flip out.

I've been loud about my Spencer Strider skepticism going back well over a year, and his first start of the season Sunday was, to be frank, a disaster. He couldn't even get out of the fourth inning, giving up four hits and five walks en route to three runs. Against the Rockies? And his fastball velocity was down yet again, as was the movement on his four-seamer. Again, disaster!

But I'm not panicking. Not yet anyway. Mostly because, well … Coors Field. I don't care how bad the Rockies offense is; anything can happen in Coors Field. Both because the ball just travels farther there when it's hit, but also, notably, because the ball doesn't move the same way when pitchers throw it there as anywhere else.

The ball doesn't move as much in the thin air, which helps explain why Strider's four-seamer had just 15 inches of induced Vertical Break, down even from last year. It also likely helps explain why his slider was so much less effective, and probably why he threw his curveball more often than his slider for literally the first time in his career.

Coors Field is such a different environment than any in baseball that it effectively renders analysis of visiting pitchers irrelevant. Chris Sale had a great start this weekend in Coors Field, but I similarly don't think there's anything we can learn from it. Coors Field just doesn't translate, and I'm not going to hold a bad start there against anyone.

I'm still not optimistic about Strider, but I'm no more worried about him today than I was before first pitch Sunday. We'll learn more about him in his next start, set for this week against the Dodgers in L.A. Jeez, so much for a soft landing. If Strider struggles in that one, I won't hold it against him much either, but I will at least be able to get a better sense of where he's at based on the movement and velocity of his pitches in a more normal pitching environment.

But we're giving him an incomplete for now. Here are the rest of the key storylines to know about from the rest of this weekend's action:

Six big takeaways from this weekend

Emerson Hancock isn't slowing down after all

It sure looked like Hancock might be fizzling out. After he opened the season with nine strikeouts in his debut, he hadn't topped five in four out of his next five, which coincided with him starting to look a bit more vulnerable overall. I was pretty much ready to declare him a middling pitcher, someone who didn't necessarily need to be rostered across the board … and then he came out with by far the best start of his career, striking out 14 and walking none in seven one-run innings against the Royals Saturday. It wasn't just a career high for Hancock; it was the most strikeouts by any pitcher in baseball this season.

So … now what?

We've got a former top prospect who spent most of the first few years of his career looking like a Quad-A pitcher at best. And now we've got this big breakout that is still very much in small-sample size territory, but with a couple of starts of actual, blinding brilliance. And it's not like Hancock is just the same guy he's always been – he's dropped his arm angle to a near-sidearm profile, which has helped pretty much the entire profile play up, and he's added a more or less new sweeper to the arsenal, too. I don't know if I buy that this is enough to make Hancock a must-start pitcher moving forward, so if you get an offer for a top-40 type starter in return for Hancock, I'd definitely be open to trading him away.

But he's already made me look bad a couple of times this season.

Yeah, maybe I was just wrong about Zack Wheeler

I'm getting flashbacks to Brandon Woodruff last season. Wheeler's velocity predictably dipped from his first start to his second start, down to 93.6 mph Friday, 2.5 mph down from 2026. And it just didn't matter! He limited the Marlins to just one run on three hits and a couple of walks over six innings of work, and he struck out eight while racking up 14 whiffs on 94 pitches. This is ace stuff, despite the diminished velocity and stuff quality – according to one model on FanGraphs, he's gone from a 111 Stuff+ to a 103 since last season, the equivalent of going from a top-five mark to something more like a 60th percentile mark among starters.

It's a similar dropoff to the one Woodruff saw in his return from shoulder surgery last season, but it never really slowed him down. His strikeout rate in 2025 was as good as it has ever been, and his 3.20 ERA was backed up by even better peripherals. Woodruff eventually seems to have fallen apart, but that didn't really happen until the following season. It might be asking a lot for Wheeler to remai