What do you do when a player’s production varies wildly from what their skill set suggests they should be doing? That’s a question we face a lot in Fantasy Baseball, but rarely as acutely as we are right now with Zack Gelof.

On the surface, Gelof is having the breakout season we’ve been waiting for. After another big game Tuesday, he’s up to a .286/.335/.500 line, and his improvement is even more pronounced of late. Buoyed by a huge performance in the two series at the A’s launching pad of a temporary home in Las Vegas, he’s hitting .372 with an OPS north of .950 during a 20-game hitting streak, with four homers and two steals. 

And if you buy into the underlying numbers, he looks like one of the absolute biggest flukes in baseball. He’s sitting on a .363 wOBA right now, but his expected wOBA via Statcast is down to .286 – improvement from his previous two seasons, but still bad enough to make him one of the worst hitters in baseball if it comes true. And this isn’t a case of an especially slow start holding him back; quite the opposite, as Gelof’s xwOBA is actually just .268 in the month of May, and is down to .236 over his past 100 plate appearances, which covers that 20-game hitting streak.

Gelof has made improvements this season, to be sure. He’s cut his strikeout rate down to 25.5%, his chase rate is down to a career-low 23.9%, and his zone contact rate is 75.7% – still a very poor mark, but nonetheless, a career-best one. He’s just doing very little damage when he makes contact. His .355 xwOBA on contact is the worst of his career, his average exit velocity and barrel rate are both below average, and he’s sporting a massive 10.1% pop-up rate, a totally useless type of batted ball. The improved contact skills, relatively high 18% pulled air rate, and generous home ballpark help, but this all still looks like a pretty obvious regression candidate.

And I’d bet on that regression hitting Gelof sooner rather than later. We don’t have an especially long track record of him being a viable big-league hitter, after all – quite the opposite, at least over the past two seasons. His all-around skill set makes him very useful in Roto leagues while he’s hitting, but even his hot streak hasn’t really made him especially valuable in a points league. Which is all to say, I’m not particularly moved to make his 67% roster rate go any higher. If you want to add him in a categories league, that makes sense, but even with 2B, 3B, and OF eligibility, I just don’t think there’s much appeal here for points leagues. 

Here’s what else you need to know about from Tuesday’s action around MLB:   

Wednesday’s top waiver-wire targets

Here’s who we’re looking to add coming out of Tuesday’s action: 

Alec Bohm, 3B, Phillies (52%) – Bohm was an outright disaster for the first month-plus of the season, hitting a homer on Opening Day and then going until May 9 for his next one. His OPS for the season is below .650, and he’s still hitting just .224, so you’d be forgiven for not realizing that Bohm has actually more or less looked like himself for a lot longer than he was struggling at this point. After his two-hit, three-RBI game with a homer Tuesday, he’s now hitting .288 with eight homers and 23 RBI in 34 games since May 9. Bohm obviously won’t sustain that 35-homer pace (his career-high is 20, after all), but the helpful batting average and RBI pace? Yeah, that’s what we’ve come to expect from him, and that’s what I expect moving forward from him, making him a viable corner infield option in all leagues. 

Curtis Mead, 1B, Nationals (52%) – That being said, if both are available, I might prefer to take the flier on Mead over Bohm. He had slowed down recently, but bounced back with a three-run homer Tuesday, his 11th of the season. Mead started the season starting almost exclusively against lefties, but he’s been playing pretty much every day lately and hasn’t exactly looked like just a lefty-masher – he has an .800-plus OPS against righties with six homers and viable underlying skills. In fact, over his past 100 plate appearances – which mostly coincides with him becoming an everyday player – he has a .354 expected wOBA, an excellent mark. The iffy batting average is holding him back, but even there, the expected BA of .263 is more than good enough to be worth using as a corner infielder, and the fact that he has both 1B and 3B eligibility is a nice little bonus, too. 

Jacob Webb, RP, Cubs (2%) – The Cubs have different pitchers get a save the last time Daniel Palencia was on the IL, and none of them got more than two. Webb only got one, so if I had to guess right now, I’d guess the Cubs continue to go with a committee approach with Palencia placed on the IL with elbow inflammation Tuesday. But if I have to pick one reliever in this bullpen to add, it would be Webb, who pitched before Palencia in each of his final three appearances. It’s just a hunch, but that’s the best we’ve got to go on right now. 

Spencer Jones, OF, Yankees (38%) – He’s making it work right now, hitting .318/.423/.636 since returning to the majors eight games ago after going 1 for 3 with a homer and a couple of walks Thursday. If he’s going to make it in the majors, Jones is going to have to do both of those things in abundance, of course, because the strikeout rate is still 35% in that span, and that’s too much for most hitters to make work. He might have the chops to follow the Munetaka Murakami path to relevance despite striking out that often, especially with some plus athleticism on his side, but that’s asking a lot. But with Jones doing more than keeping his head above water right now, at least those of you in deeper five-category leagues can look his way. 

Andre Pallante, SP, Cardinals (36%) – With his general lack of strikeouts, Pallante will never be an especially exciting option for Fantasy. But he’s pitching well right now and finding similar success to that of the much more hyped Dustin May on his own team, albeit on a smaller scale. He lowered his season-long ERA to 3.76 (with the peripherals to match) Tuesday, and he did it with his third start of two runs or fewer in a row and fifth in six starts. The Brewers are running one of the best defenses in the league out there, which matters a great deal for a pitcher like Pallante, who generates a ton of groundballs. He isn’t a long-term target, but he’s on pace for a two-start week against the Diamondbacks and Marlins next week and should at least be worth using there. 

Robert Gasser, SP, Brewers (8%) – Can we call it a win for nominative determinism if a pitcher named “Gasser” has a great fastball but only throws around 92-93 mph? Despite his lackluster velocity, Gasser generated seven whiffs on 17 swings Tuesday with the four-seamer, pushing his whiff rate for the season to 40%, an absolutely absurd range. That likely won’t prove sustainable, but it’s a sign that the pitch does something to consistently befuddle hitters. Gasser has missed bats well in both the majors and minors this season, and if he can continue to limit walks like he did Tuesday (two in 5.2 innings), there could be something here. Betting on Brewers pitchers when they are cheap is never a bad idea. 

Kody Clemens, 1B, Twins (51%) – I rarely want to bet on one-dimensional sluggers, because homers are valuable but rare, and Clemens doesn’t really have many ways of impacting the game if he isn’t going deep. That being said, we are seeing some signs this season – he has his strikeout rate down to 21.4%, and he has a career-high six steals in just 61 games. But the power is the main attraction here, and he went deep yet again Tuesday, his 11th of the season. I don’t expect him to be a long-term contributor, but Clemens does have his average exit velocity up to 92.5 mph, one mph up from last season’s mark, so he’s a fine hot hand play for now. 

Tuesday’s standouts

Hunter Brown, Astros vs. DET: 5.2 IP, 3 H, 1 ER, 3 BB, 7 K – Brown made his return from a shoulder injury Tuesday and more or less looked like himself. More than the result, that’s what we’re hoping to see. His velocity was where it usually is (down just 0.3 mph on his four-seamer), though the movement profiles on his pitches were off a bit – an inch or two in both directions for every pitch except the fastball, which lost three inches of arm-side run. If those trends continue, it could raise some questions about how effective he’ll be, especially if they are accompanied by changes to his release point – that data won’t come out until it is processed tomorrow, so it’s hard to say one way or the other. For now, I’m taking this performance as a cautiously optimistic sign that Brown will be the borderline ace you drafted him to be moving forward. 

Logan Gilbert, Mariners vs. BAL: 7 IP, 2 H, 1 ER, 1 BB, 10 K – Okay, I’m not saying correlation equals causation here, but Gilbert ditched his cutter and had his best start of the season. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but that cutter has been arguably his worst pitch this season, and its reintroduction into his arsenal has coincided with his four-seamer taking a significant step back. The four-seamer gained an inch of movement both horizontally and vertically and generated a whopping 12 whiffs on 33 swings Tuesday, so maybe there’s something here. Gilbert has always been a tinkerer, and it’s part of what has made him so great, but the introduction of the cutter this season seemed like an answer in search of a question, so I don’t think losing it will hurt him. I’ve been expecting Gilbert to turn it around all along, so I’m inclined to believe he has figured something out with four starts of one or zero runs in his past five, especially with an exclamation point like this one. 

Jesus Luzardo, Phillies vs. MIA: 7 IP, 5 H, 2 ER, 2 BB, 9 K – It’s time to play everyone’s favorite game: “What does Jesus Luzardo’s season look like if you take out his two worst starts?” Let’s take out the two starts where he gave up six and eight runs, leaving three where he gave up five, and see what it looks like: 3.15 ERA, 1.24 WHIP, 86 K in 74.1 innings. Look, real life isn’t that simple, obviously, and if Luzardo keeps having these big blow-up starts, it’s not like we can just pretend they don’t happen – they do actually hurt your team! But his peripherals continue to suggest he’s a low-to-mid-3.00s ERA pitcher with borderline elite strikeout numbers, so I’m going to keep treating him like one, frustrating as he can be. 

Gerrit Cole, Yankees vs. CHW: 6 IP, 3 H, 2 ER, 2 BB, 6 K – Cole’s stuff has generally looked pretty good in his return from Tommy John surgery, so it continues to be baffling how few bats he’s missing this season. We’ll take the six strikeouts in six innings in this one, but he still had just six swinging strikes on 90 pitches, a dreadful mark. I don’t have a good explanation for why whiffs have been so hard to come by for Cole, and his overall production has been fine in spite of it, so I won’t want to dwell too much on it. But it’s the one thing keeping me from embracing him as an ace again. 

Michael King, Padres @STL: 4.1 IP, 5 H, 3 ER, 3 BB, 1 K – King got off to an excellent start, but he continues to look pretty shaky since. He has more strikeouts than walks just twice in his past five starts, and one of the two exceptions was a two-strikeout effort across six innings, which hardly seems like it should count. His whiff rates have collapsed despite his velocity looking fine, which makes it especially tough to make sense of. I’m inclined to chalk it up to a cold streak where he isn’t executing well, but it’s not like we have a long track record of King dominating outside of that 2024 season, so I’m starting to get pretty worried here. He may not have the stuff to thrive if his command isn’t on point. 

Reid Detmers, Angels @ARI: 7 IP, 3 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, 3 K – If you had told me Detmers followed up our “all-in” moment with a three-strikeout effort, I would have definitely assumed he gave us a disaster start. Instead, we got a phenomenal one, albeit one lighter on whiffs than we’re used to. His pitch mix was pretty normal, but his slider feel was off – he threw it 1.1 mph with two more inches of drop than we’re used to, which is a problem when his slider has accounted for 46% of his strikeouts entering this start. That Detmers still found ways to limit both walks and hard contact when he didn’t have his best stuff is a pretty good sign, and he still has 39 strikeouts (to just five walks) over his past five starts, so we’re not complaining. I’m still a little wary, but I’m not panicking. 

Justin Wrobleski, Dodgers vs. TB: 6 IP, 3 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, 5 K – Wrobleski is doing a better job lately of missing bats, though even that relatively muted praise comes with some caveats, as he had just one strikeout in his last start before this one. I still just don’t see much reason to think his success is likely to last, with his peripherals mostly agreeing with his 4.19 xERA rather than his much better actual ERA mark. He remains a pretty obvious sell-high candidate in my eyes. 

Davis Martin, White Sox @NYY: 3.1 IP, 8 H, 9 ER, 3 BB, 4 K – I never quite understood why Martin became such a better pitcher all of a sudden at 29 years old, so I’m inherently inclined to believe the regression is just starting to hit him now. His peripherals have actually mostly been very good this season, but that doesn’t necessarily tell us anything other than that he’s been pitching well. A stat like xERA or FIP or SIERA has more predictive power than ERA (which has almost none, by the way), but it still requires a pitcher to continue to pitch well in order to prove predictive, and Martin’s track record suggests that has never been a good bet to make. Unfortunately, you may have missed your sell-high window with Martin, allowing four-plus runs in three of his past five starts, so I think you probably just hold him for now, hope things turn around, and get ready to drop him if he has a few more poor outings in a row. 

Zebby Matthews, Twins @TEX: 7 IP, 7 H, 2 ER, 0 BB, 4 K – Good start, but I don’t see much reason to buy it. He just isn’t missing bats like he did last season and still isn’t doing a great job limiting hard contact. He’s been better than he was last season, but still not good enough to view him as anything more than a streamer, one who gets the Dodgers in his next start. No thanks. 

Kodai Senga, Mets @CIN: 4 IP, 2 H, 4 ER, 4 BB, 5 K – I was open to the possibility that Senga might have something left in the tank, but there have been basically no positive signs in the past year. He needs to show us something before he deserves to be rostered in any leagues. 

Foster Griffin, Nationals vs. Royals: 6 IP, 6 H, 1 ER, 2 BB, 6 K – With the bases empty, Griffin has a .266 BABIP allowed. With runners on, it’s just .185. At the risk of oversimplifying, I think that explains most of his success so far this season. That’s not to say he’s totally worthless as a Fantasy pitcher, but I do think it explains why basically every ERA estimator agrees he deserves something like an ERA a run or so higher than his actual 3.32 mark. There’s a bit of strikeout upside here and good control, but he’s just giving up too much loud contact to sustain a sub-3.50 ERA. It’s fine to use him as a hot-hand play as he continues to get results, but I think it’s more likely you’re dropping him by the All-Star break than viewing him as a key part of your rotation. 

Merrill Kelly, Diamondbacks vs. LAA: 5.1 IP, 11 H, 6 ER, 1 BB, 4 K – Other than the name, I don’t think there’s any reason to have faith in Kelly right now. He’ll have stretches moving forward where he pitches better than this, but the upside isn’t so high that you have to ride out the bad times, either.