Luis Matos is headed to the major leagues Wednesday with Mitch Haniger suffering a fractured forearm after being hit by a pitch on Tuesday. Matos struggled last season but has been outstanding this season, hitting .309 in AA before being sent to AAA and hitting .369 with six homers in just 63 games. All came in this most recent week, where he had more homers than swings and misses. Matos' calling card is his ability to make amazing contact, and he has just an 8% K% across the two stops this season with around a 9% BB%. He's worth a pickup in 12 team leagues as there's extremely nice offensive upside here and he should get a ton of playing time with Haniger out for the future.
Gunnar Henderson's tear in June has continued with a 3-for-5 game out of the leadoff spot, hitting his 10th homer of the season and driving in four runs. For the month of June he's slashing .458/.480/1.000 and has four homers. Henderson struggled a ton over the first few months of the year with swing and miss, but he's cut that number from 35% in April to 29% in May, and now he's posting just a 17% whiff rate in the month of June. While the swing and miss had dropped, the hard-hit rate has also skyrocketed and is near 65% for the month. He came into the season as an elite talent and the elite talent is starting to show after a slow beginning to the year.
Max Scherzer got crushed by the Yankees Tuesday, giving up seven hits and six runs over 3.1 innings. He struck just two batters and allowed a pair of homeruns. Despite the horrible stat line he was able to generate a good amount of swing and miss with a 24% whiff rate, but the wheels fell off with five of his earned runs coming in the top of the fourth inning. Homeruns have been an off and on an issue for Scherzer and he's up to 10 allowed for the year, and the barrel rate against him is up around 10% for the first time in his career. Walks were a huge problem for him to start the season but he's manage to right that ship, allowed one or fewer walks in each of his last five starts.
Tanner Bibee got hit hard by the Padres allowing six runs over 4.0 innings. This was by far the worst start of his major-league career. Strikeouts have plummeted over the last two starts with just five strikeouts over his last nine innings, after striking out five or more batters in five of his first seven starts in the majors. This start saw just a 12% whiff rate, with zero coming on his slider (33.3% whiff rate for the season) and walks are now becoming an issue a little bit for him with two walks in each of his last three outings.
Zach Neto hit his fifth homer of the year, and his third in three days on Tuesday. Neto is in the middle of a hot streak with seven hits over his last four days, and June as a whole has been a great month for him with an OPS over 1.000. A huge step up in a two-week sample compared to his sub-.700 OPS that he posted in either of the prior two months of the season.
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