There’s no way of getting around it: It’s been a frustrating season for Nolan McLean. Everyone’s favorite breakout pitcher pick has a 4.03 ERA after giving up six runs in six innings Wednesday, and he’s been even worse lately: A 5.32 ERA over his past eight starts.
And it’s got me thinking: Did we just overrate this guy?
I think there’s a case to be made. McLean was viewed as a very good prospect, but his success at the end of the season with the Mets definitely pushed him up a tier or two – in BaseballProspectus’ mid-season top-50 rankings last year, he was the No. 34 prospect, but he jumped all the way up to No. 4 by the preseason. It wasn’t all on the strength of his dominant eight-start run at the end of 2025, but that surely played a sizeable role. He had a 2.06 ERA and 30.3% strikeout rate in his first taste of the majors, albeit with a 3.57 xERA and 10.9% swinging strike rate that suggested McLean was more “good” than an immediate ace.
And this is a weird profile for an ostensible ace. McLean gets a lot of strikeouts – 28.5% in 2026! – but he doesn’t actually miss a ton of bats, with Wednesday’s game marking just his sixth start out of 16 with a swinging strike rate over 10%. For all the .gifs McLean’s stuff generates on Baseball Twitter, he actually relies a lot more on called strikes than just about any pitcher in baseball. That’s not an inherently bad thing, but when you look at the list of pitchers with the highest called strike rates over the past decade, Logan Webb and Aaron Nola are probably the only true aces in the top 10.
But hey, a 28% strikeout rate is still great. McLean doesn’t have great control, but a 9% walk rate isn’t awful, either. The problem this season, as was certainly the case Wednesday, has been what happens when guys put the ball in play. He has gone from an elite groundball pitcher (61%) to just a pretty good one (47%), and homers have started to become something of an issue for him. Not a huge one, at least not generally, but he’s now given up multiple homers in three of his past seven games, which, combined with his control starting to back up a bit, has led to a handful of these blow-up starts.
All that being said, I’m not sure it makes sense to panic about McLean. He’s still on pace for 210-plus strikeouts, has a solid 1.12 WHIP, and has peripherals that suggest he should be better than his 4.03 ERA. I can’t guarantee this is as bad as it’ll get for McLean, but if you set the over/under on his ERA at 3.50, I still might lean toward the under just ever so slightly.
He’s not the ace you hoped he could be, and he’ll need to figure out a way to turn all those .gif-able moments into missed bats a bit more consistently to make that leap. But he’s still a super-talented pitcher, and at least a very good one, despite some recent struggles. It’s just about whether he can make the leap beyond that. If not? Well, there’s nothing wrong with being Logan Webb or Aaron Nola, either.
Pre-game Lineup Card
Here’s what you might have missed from CBSSports.com’s MLB coverage in recent days:
Prospects Report! Kade Anderson‘s massive first season as a professional has him knocking on the door to the majors even at Double-A. Scott White says he’s worth stashing even with the Mariners‘ crowded rotation.
Buy-low Pitchers! Scott highlights six pitchers who still have plenty of room to live up to their potential. It’s time to make some trade offers.
Week 14 Trade Values! My rankings have been updated for both H2H points and Roto leagues for Week 14. Go check out the latest changes and get some guidelines for a deal as we near the halfway point of the season.
MLB Trends. We’ve talked a lot about Jac Caglianone‘s breakthrough here at the FBT Newsletter recently, and Mike Axisa has another perspective on the blossoming Royals slugger.
Rumor roundup. Byron Buxton and Logan Webb won’t be on the move this summer, allegedly. Here’s who could be.
Hitting the Wire
The top waiver-wire targets from Wednesday’s action:
Gage Jump, SP, Athletics (78%) – It’s never a sure thing with young pitchers, but this was what we hoped to see from Jump once he got settled in. He struck out seven in his previous start and then followed it up with nine Wednesday night against the Giants while walking one over five shutout innings. The four-seamer generated six swings of his 11 total swings and misses, and a good fastball from a lefty is always a nice building block. Jump’s home park will hold him back a little with ERA, but I think he’s a very good source of strikeouts and should be worth rostering in all formats moving forward.
Dansby Swanson, SS, Cubs (67%) – Swanson has been mostly awful this season, and up until a week or so ago, there were vanishingly few reasons to be optimistic. But as I wrote about Bo Bichette last week, when we’re talking about established players, track record is generally going to be more predictive than recent production, even if that recent production is backed by apparent changes in the underlying skill set. It’s still just one good week for Swanson, more or less, but what a week it’s been – he has homered in three of the past six games, including twice Wednesday, while going 5 for 9 with 11 RBI across two games. He has 18 RBI in that span and has even chipped in three stolen bases, and all of a sudden, Swanson is on pace for something like 22 homers and 18 steals. Or more or less what we usually expect from him. The batting average is bad (but improving!), but if he hits .250 the rest of the way, he’s going to be at least a viable middle infielder, and that’s what he’s done throughout his career, so I’d bet on it.
Griffin Jax, RP, Rays (40%) – You might see another five-inning outing from Jax and think it’s more of the same. But after being limited to 72 pitches or less in his first 10 starts, the Rays let him go 88 Wednesday, so there’s some loosening of the reins going on here. Jax will need to be more efficient moving forward, but I think he’s very similar to Drew Rasmussen last year, where the lack of quality starts will hold him back, but he should be pretty good otherwise. To wit, he has a 2.40 ERA and 43 strikeouts in 45 innings since moving to the rotation.
Willi Castro, SS, Rockies (55%) – Castro is having a nice little season, and it’s been getting better, as he is hitting .324 with four homers and two steals in June. Typically, he wouldn’t be a particularly high priority on waivers, but the Rockies are finally playing a full Fantasy week at Coors Field next week, so this is the perfect time to pick him up. With eligibility everywhere but catcher, you’ve surely got somewhere in your lineup to stick Castro.
Luis Garcia, 2B, Nationals (61%) – Garcia had an awful April but has been pretty great since then, including eight homers in the month of June. He sits against nearly every lefty, which limits his appeal, but Garcia is hitting .270 with 12 homers in 45 games since the start of May, so he does have some appeal as either a middle or corner outfielder – though likely not next week, with three lefties on the schedule out of six games.
Three Up, Three Down
Three big performances that have players trending up, and three that have the arrow pointing in the opposite direction.
Three Up
Chandler Simpson is getting back to it
In what might go down as one of the oddest statistical quirks of the season, Chandler Simpson went from May 11 through June 19 without a single stolen base. And the thing about Chandler Simpson is, if he’s not running, he’s really not bringing anything to the table, and that was especially true during this stretch, as he hit .184/.236/.233 and was actively harming your team. He played through some injuries during that stretch and was starting to get some regular time off, but he has started eight straight games after Wednesday, and now has five steals in his past five games after swiping two in this game. It’s still a very limited skill set, and as we just saw, the margin for error here is extremely slim; if he isn’t running unusually high batting averages and stealing a lot of bases, Simpson basically does nothing for you (even in this stretch, he has one run scored in his past five games). But this stretch is also a sign that he isn’t quite done as a contributor yet, so if he’s available in any leagues where you need steals, you can go ahead and add him again. Or at least not drop him.
Francisco Alvarez is starting to do it
I’ve been in on Alvarez since he came back from his demotion to Triple-A last season, but I can admit he has mostly been pretty underwhelming so far this season. Between that and a knee surgery, it makes sense why his roster rate has dipped to 42%. But that is too low, and he’s starting to show us why. He’s been making better contact for much of the season, but there hasn’t been a ton of power until the past few days. He homered twice in Wednesday’s double-header against the Cubs to give him three in his past two days and four in 13 games since coming off the IL – with a .319 batting average and .934 OPS. Alvarez has long had the potential to be an impact bat; he just hasn’t done it consistently enough. He’s starting to now, and he should be rostered in at least all two-catcher leagues – and I sure don’t think there are more than 12 catchers with a higher ceiling than Alvarez if he’s truly starting to figure it out. He’s hitting .265/.339/.476 with 15 homers in 90 games since coming back from Triple-A last year, by the way.
I cannot believe how good Otto Lopez has been
I thought I was high on Lopez coming into the season, but I genuinely did not think this kind of stretch was possible. He hit a big homer and went 2 for 3 in Wednesday’s win over the Rangers and is now hitting .340/.374/.483 for the season after three straight multi-hit games in a row. And this isn’t just the result of one hot stretch propping his numbers up – Lopez is now hitting at least .330 in each of the first three months of the season. The underlying data doesn’t buy him being quite this good, but a .292 expected batting average and .441 expected slugging percentage from a guy on a 30-steal pace who could hit 15 homers is nothing to sneeze at, especially with eligibility at both middle infield positions. He’s worth starting, no matter where you put him in the lineup.
Three Down
Tarik Skubal hasn’t quite looked right
Skubal’s recovery from elbow surgery was remarkable, but it wasn’t necessarily miraculous. In three starts since his return from surgery to clean up a loose body in his left elbow, Skubal has a 4.96 ERA, a far cry from what we’re used to from him. Why is this happening? Wednesday’s start highlighted the problem: He’s just getting hit too hard. He gave up three homers in six innings against the Yankees to give him six in 16.1 across the three starts. It’s not a total disaster, of course – Skubal has 21 strikeouts to just two walks in those 16.1 innings, and his 1.10 WHIP is still fantastic – and it’s not like he’s lost a ton of velocity in a way that suggests there is real reason to panic since his surgery. He’s just been a bit off a few times a game, and opposing hitters have made him pay. It’s weird to see Skubal struggling at all, but I don’t really see any reason to think he won’t be an impact pitcher moving forward.
Yeah, Jose Soriano has officially turned back into a pumpkin
Remember April? Ah, April, that was fun, wasn’t it? Jose Soriano added a four-seam fastball to his repertoire, was commanding his entire arsenal of pitches well, and looked like one of the best pitchers on the planet, with consecutive double-digit strikeout games and a 0.84 ERA at the end of the month. Ah, April … it was so long ago. Soriano was clubbed for five runs over just three innings of work Wednesday and while his 3.41 ERA is still easily the best mark of his career, everything else looks just about as mediocre as it ever has. His FIP is up to 4.21, and his 4.20 expected ERA entering Wednesday’s start was actually tied for the worst mark of his career. He still has a career-high strikeout rate, but his control is now as bad as it has ever been and he’s lost some of his standout contact suppression skills as a tradeoff for his improved strikeout rate. Getting that tantalizing glimpse of how good Soriano can be in April will make it tough to ever truly give up on him, but it sure looks like that was just a random hot streak at this point. Don’t drop him, but don’t feel like you’ve gotta start Soriano every time out now.
Shota Imanaga is still getting killed by the long ball
Three more homers allowed by Imanaga on Wednesday bring him to 20 on the season, the third-most in baseball. Everything else about Imanaga’s season looks great, but as it turns out, homers are a pretty big deal. It’s not like Imanaga gets hit unusually hard – his average exit velocity is 88.5 mph on the season and the worst expected wOBA on contact of his career came in 2025 with a .376 mark, hardly worse than the league average of .369. The problem is that, while Imanaga gives up hits less often than nearly any pitcher in baseball – he has a .242 BABIP for his career and .230 mark this season – the hits he does give up tend to be unusually damaging, and it doesn’t seem like a fluke. He’s an extreme flyball pitcher, so the homers are just a part of life with him. I think it’ll lead to better results moving forward than his current 4.40 ERA, but you’re probably still looking at an ERA close to 4.00 in the long run. After his rookie season, we hoped Imanaga might be more than that, but we’re going on two seasons of an ERA at or near 4.00. We probably just have to take him for what he is.
Extra Innings
Eury Perez wasn’t quite himself in his return
Which is totally understandable. Perez was expected to miss at least eight weeks with a strain on his inner thigh, but he recovered quicker than expected and the Marlins‘ rotation needs saw him return just four weeks later, and he clearly wasn’t 100%. He wasn’t terrible, allowing just one earned run in 4.2 innings of work, but he hardly looked like himself either, generating just one strikeout and four swinging strikes over 68 pitches. His velocity was down a bit across the board, though he did actually ramp up a bit in his final inning, so I’m not too concerned about there being too many lingering issues here. But I’m not surprised Perez wasn’t great in this one, and I’m not really expecting him to be someone you can use in most Fantasy formats until he is fully stretched out and recovered. That may take a few more starts.
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