Fantasy baseball weekend takeaways: Roki Sasaki surges, Bryce Miller flashes ace upside

Before we get those lineups for Week 12 set, a few quick thoughts on some things you need to know:

For more on what you need to know about for Week 12, keep reading for lineup advice, the biggest takeaways from this weekend's action, plus the rest of the news and notes you need to know:

For more deep-league targets, plus my thoughts on each of those players and more, head here.

1. Mariners @BAL4, @WAS32. Athletics MIL3, COL33. Giants WAS3, CHC34. Cubs @COL3, @SF35. Astros @LAA3, @KC3

1. Blue Jays PHI3, NYY32. Phillies @TOR3, @MIL33. Red Sox @TB3, TEX34. Rangers @KC3, @BOS35. White Sox ATL3, LAD3

You can check out Scott's two-start pitcher rankings here, too. He ranks every projected two-start pitcher for the upcoming week, tiering them from must-starts to no-thanks.

Roki Sasaki and Reid Detmers had a heck of a duel

Both pitchers continued their strong runs, with Detmers tossing six shutout innings with six strikeouts and then Sasaki one-upping him in every way possible with seven shutout innings with 10 strikeouts. Detmers has 27 strikeouts to five walks over 19 innings of work, and all of his peripherals suggest he deserves something more like a 3.00 ERA – and even if you account for the fact that he's underperformed his peripherals by about three-quarters of a run for his career, hey, a 3.75 ERA with Detmers' strikeout numbers isn't bad.

Of course, whether he'll sustain that velocity is an unanswerable question right now. When he's sitting at 96, the fastball is pretty bad; he can survive averaging 97 with it, but his best chances of thriving always come when the fastball has elite velocity to overcome middling shape. This might just be a hot streak for Sasaki, though I do have a hard time seeing him regressing so badly from this point that he just isn't usable anymore. He's down enough to improve his overall arsenal that even if the fastball does revert back to being sub-97, I think Sasaki can survive. But if he can sustain the 98 mph version? He might just be a must-start pitcher, and the potential for that does at least make him must-roster right now.

The Mariners pulled the plug on their awkward piggy-back experiment with Miller and Luis Castillo, and Miller responded with one of the best starts we've ever seen from him Saturday. He pitched six one-hit, shutout innings against the Tigers while striking out nine, continuing his run of excellent pitching since coming back from the IL. Miller dominated primarily with the fastball this time around, as he sat at 96.3 mph with it and generated nine swinging strikes – he added five with his splitter and two more with his cutter, though the secondary pitchers continue to mostly be a small part of his arsenal.

Miller is throwing his four-seamer, splitter, and slider a combined 82% of the time, up from 67.8% in 2025. Miller has always used the four-seamer as his primary pitch, while the splitter has been his most-used secondary since his second season, but it's the slider that really stands out here. It mostly looks like the same pitch it's always been – he's throwing it harder this season, but that's because he's throwing everything harder this season. But the biggest difference might be that he has fixed a mechanical flaw that was telegraphing the pitch – when Miller broke into the majors, his release point on his slider was about three inches lower and wider than on his four-seam fastball, a gap that has shrunk a few inches since in each direction. The movement profile otherwise looks the same, but hitters might just be having more trouble picking the pitch up, and those couple of inches could make all the difference.

Either way, Miller is sustaining his velocity bump across the board, is generating a ton more swinging strikes, and so far hasn't had to deal with any side effects from either skill change. His 1.33 ERA is backed up by a 1.82 xERA, and while I don't expect him to remain this good, I'm not necessarily viewing Miller as a sell-high candidate right now, either. It all looks pretty legitimate to me right now.

I was starting to get pretty worried about Benge, who put up solid quality of contact numbers and poor production in Triple-A last season, and then was doing the same early in his MLB career this season. But while his swing still isn't geared to maximize his above-average raw power yet, Benge is starting to find ways to contribute at the MLB level. He went 5 for 5 with a homer and a triple Sunday and is now hitting .327 with four homers, 19 runs, 15 RBI, and four steals in 25 games since being moved to the leadoff spot back in mid-May. That's the kind of solid five-category production we were hoping for from Benge, and he has the underlying numbers to back it up, including a .386 xwOBA over his past 100 plate appearances. I think he might be a top-30 outfielder in all formats right now.

I'll admit, I was deeply skeptical about reports that Skubal might return within six weeks. Now it's looking like he'll just beat that timetable. Skubal made his rehab debut Sunday and was dominant, throwing five scoreless innings on just 54 pitches, almost a month to the day since he underwent surgery to remove loose bodies in his left elbow. He was so dominant against High-A competition that Skubal had to go out to the bullpen to get up to his targeted pitch count of 75. 75 pitches in a competitive outing, barely four weeks after surgery, is stunning stuff, and a sign that the NanoScope procedure really might be a game changer for pitchers dealing with loose bodies in their elbows.

Skubal is the first one to undergo the procedure, and everything has gone so well that it looks like he might be back in the rotation for his next turn through. This all bodes well for Blake Snell, who had his own NanoScope surgery 12 days after Skubal did. We could see him back in the Dodgers rotation before the end of June at this pace.

It's easy enough to write off one bad season as a fluke, but when Rutschman followed up a disappointing 2024 season with an even worse 2025, it was fair to wonder if he would ever get back to being a difference maker. Well, he's back, and he just might be better than ever at this point. Rutschman put together a massive four-hit, five-RBI game Friday against the Blue Jays and sits on a .267/.343/.489 line entering play Monday, which would represent the highest OPS and second-highest batting average of his five-year MLB career. And the underlying numbers don't just back it up: They suggest better might be coming.

His xBA? .293. His xwOBA? .379, the best of his career and better even than his .365 actual wOBA. Rutschman has managed to combine both the best strikeout rate (13.5%) of his career with the highest average exit velocity (90.4 mph) and hard-hit rate (47.7%) of his career, a neat trick if you can pull it off. It's always tricky to try to project anything forward with catchers, given the high rate of attrition inherent to the position. But Rutschman looks well situated for a career-best season, and a boon for anyone who took the flier on him at the cheapest price of his career.

Homers remain an issue for Ryan Weathers

Weathers' early-season dominance never quite sat right with me. For one thing, he was doing it while actually losing velocity from recent years – a reasonable trade-off for a guy who has struggled to stay on the mound, but not one I would necessarily expect to lead to better results. And then there was the fact that Weathers was dancing around trouble with the quality of contact he was allowing – in April, he had a .318 wOBA against, compared to a much worse .338 xwOBA, for example. He was limiting walks and missing bats well enough that it didn't really matter much, but there were warning signs, most notably with his four-homer game on April 14.

Homers have continued to be an issue for Weathers, who gave up six in 30.1 innings en route to a 3.86 ERA in the month of May, and then he gave up two more in a five-run outing against the Red Sox Friday. And all of a sudden, his 3.86 ERA looks a lot more like what we've seen from Weathers previously in his career and more like what his 4.17 xERA suggests we should see. He's still missing enough bats to like him for Fantasy, but the lost velocity has led to significantly worse results on batted balls, seen in his .418 expected wOBA on contact allowed. That doesn't seem like a fluke, and I'm expecting Weathers to be more like a high-3.00s ERA guy moving forward.

Maybe the promotion of Edwin Arroyo lit a fire under him, because at this point, McLain has to be playing for his job. He's got a big of wiggle room with Elly De La Cruz out, but when De La Cruz is back, McLain will be competing with Spencer Steer and possibly Arroyo, if he gets hot. It might be a race against De La Cruz's hamstring to keep McLain's job. So he needed a big weekend, and he needs to keep stacking big games over the next few weeks to keep his job. McLain remains a very good defender, but the bat hasn't been there for him since 2023, and there isn't much to be optimistic about – he has shaved 5.5 points off his strikeout rate, but has also seen his quality of contact drop precipitously this season from an already poor baseline. Maybe the three homers McLain hit across Saturday and Sunday's games will get him going, but he needs to turn things around quickly.