Fantasy baseball streaming starting pitchers plus arsenal changes for Eury Perez, Roki Sasaki, more

Welcome to your fantasy baseball starting pitcher happy place. This is a new column for me this year that will combine a few things I’ve done in the past. In this article, every Monday, you’ll not only get a list of my favorite streaming starting pitchers for the whole week, but underneath that, you’ll get a breakdown of a few pitchers who are making interesting changes to their pitch mix. Today I covered Roki Sasaki, Eury Perez, Lucas Giolito, and Bryce Miller.

It’s a little bit of rankings and a little bit of analysis, and hopefully a lot of help for your teams.

As far as which pitchers on this list you’ll want to stream, your decisions will change based on your league type and settings. Since I’m listing starters for all week, I’m not going to be able to give a detailed analysis for each one; I’ll just highlight the matchup and some quick thoughts. As is usual with my articles, a streaming starter pitcher is rostered in less than 40% of Yahoo formats, so just keep that in mind as we’re going through because I won’t be mentioning pitchers who are rostered in more leagues than that, and I also won’t be mentioning pitchers who I would not start in any format.

Check out this week’s MLB Power Rankings!

Starting Pitcher Streamers of the Week

Washington will throw a lot of lefties at Christian Scott, which worries me a bit, but I think he’s a good pitcher, so I’ll trust the spot. I like the ballpark here for Noah Schultz, and I think he’ll be fine for you, but maybe not put together any kind of stud performance. J.T. Ginn, JR Ritchie, and Walbert Urena are all in solid two-start weeks this week, but I think they’re more 15-team options but they just haven’t shown the type of consistency we’d like to see.

I’m still a Reid Detmers fan. I believe in the talent, and getting the A’s on the road works for me. Griffin Jax has some command issues to sort out, but the arsenal is deep enough to work as a starter, and this Baltimore offense hasn’t been that great. Martin Perez is also a sneaky option. You won’t get many strikeouts, but he’s been pretty solid all season, and there’s a good win chance here.

No options I trust love here, so it’s all about your risk tolerance.

Joey Cantillo and Eduardo Rodriguez are both close to being out of the streamer conversation, but they’re in good spots this week, so we can trust them.

I just don’t know what Connor Prielipp needs to do to get more love. Also, the Padres have really struggled against lefties, so Jeffrey Springs on the road is in play.

I’m choosing to list Trevor McDonald here because I just don’t think the Giants can take him out of the rotation. He’s been too good. I broke down Roki Sasaki and Lucas Giolito below.

These are all two-start pitchers, except for Peter Lambert, who I would still hold, but I don’t like this start.

Starting Pitcher Pitch Mix Changes

Eury Perez – Miami Marlins (Sinker Usage)

On Sunday, Eury Perez went to his sinker 25 times, throwing it 38% of the time to right-handed hitters as his most-used pitch. He then dialed back the four-seamer to 26% to righties. The four-seamer became more of a pitch to use when he was ahead, and he posted a 17% swinging strike rate (SwStr%) on it. He also had a 61% strike rate on the sinker, which isn’t bad since the May 12th start was the first time he’s used the sinker since last June.

The reason for bringing it back made sense. Early on this season, he’s been unable to get the ball down in the strike zone, particularly with his four-seam fastball to righties. Back in 2023, Perez threw low four-seamers to righties 26.5% of the time. Since coming back from surgery, the rate jumped to 38.8% last year and 39.7% this year (before this last start). For whatever reason, he can’t seem to get the four-seamer up against righties, and the pitch has been getting hit really hard despite also missing bats. If he can throw the sinker for strikes, then, in theory, even if he misses his spot, he may just give him weak contact. On Sunday, he had the highest strike rate he’s had since May 1st and also got into the second-most two-strike counts he’s gotten in since April 19th.

For what it’s worth, he actually got his four-seamer up in the zone nearly 41% of the time to righties on Sunday. That’s up from 32% in his first nine starts. His four-seamer also allowed just a 25% Ideal Contact Rate (ICR) and a 72 mph average exit velocity on Sunday. The pitch had allowed a 41% ICR and 94 mph average exit velocity in those first nine starts. It’s only one start, but this could be a shift. If he gets more comfortable with the sinker and can get ahead, then hitters are going to sit on his four-seamer less and do less damage to it. He still doesn’t have the command of a top 20 starting pitcher, but he could be top 40 if he keeps this level of swing-and-miss but cuts down on the hard contact allowed.

Lucas Giolito – San Diego Padres (Season Debut)

I wanted to include Giolito in here because people may be interested after his season debut went fairly well, but this was not a great outing. He threw just 56% of his pitches for strikes, posted a 24% CSW, and had just five total whiffs, which led to a 6% SwStr%. His four-seam velocity was down 3 mph, his slider was down 3.3 mph, but he only had one extra inch of horizontal movement, and his changeup, which has often been his best pitch, had just a 52% strike rate and 4% SwStr%.

Now, there’s the major caveat that it was his first start of the season, and he may not be fully ramped up yet after ending last season hurt. However, that big a velocity drop after a previous season injury is a red flag. He also only threw his slider 21% of the time to righties, which was down 14% from 2025. That caused him to increase his four-seam fastball usage by 16%, which we don’t love on the surface. However, one positive note is that his extension was WAY up on all of his pitches, including being up four inches on his fastball to an elite 7.1 feet. It didn’t add any vertical movement, but he already has elite vertical movement, so that could make this four-seamer much better if it sticks around. That’s the one silver lining to watch for.

Roki Sasaki – Los Angeles Dodgers (Fastball Shape, New Splitter)

Sasaki is coming off his best outing of the season, striking out eight batters and walking none in seven innings against the Angels. There’s not a lot of talk about his new splitter since he seems to be throwing both a splitter and a forkball, and I thought I’d just break that down for a second. On the surface, there is not a lot of difference between the pitches. The “new” splitter is 2.4 mph harder than the “old” forkball. The splitter also has four inches more arm-side movement and about one inch less drop. That’s not really a significant difference from a stuff perspective.

On Sunday, the new, harder splitter had a 22% SwStr%, compared to 9% from the forkball, and had no called strikes, while the slower forkball had a 27% called strike rate. If you look at pitch plot graphs, Sasaki keeps his forkball up in the zone more and tries to get his splitter in the bottom half of the strike zone or under. Could he simply be throwing the same pitch but with different emphasis or finger pressure based on the movement profile he wants? Yes, 100%. But that’s not a bad thing. The slower forkball does have a better strike rate, and he did need to throw more strikes, so perhaps the slight difference in splitter variations is keeping hitters off balance and getting him ahead in the count more. He has gotten into two-strike counts 57% and 58% of the time in his last two starts, which is above his season average. We just need to note that he also had a 57% PutAway rate on Sunday, and that’s not sustainable, so the strikeout numbers will come down a bit.

Sasaki has also changed the movement profile on his four-seam fastball, which is good because that pitch doesn’t miss bats and gets hit really hard. Over the last two starts, he’s added over three inches of horizontal movement on the pitch. It’s still not missing bats, with an 8.1% SwStr%, which is right in line with his 8.3% average before the change, and it’s still getting hit hard, with a 50% ICR that’s actually up from his 46% mark before the change. It does have a 73.3% strike rate and 50% groundball rate, which are both up from a 62% strike rate and 39% groundball rate before the movement change. So, similar to Eury Perez, maybe the hope for Sasaki here is that the four-seamer will get more groundballs with the increased break in on the hands of righties. That could mean the hard-hit balls are grounders and not fly balls, which would be nice. He just doesn’t have the whiff potential on that pitch that Eury does.

The other change for Sasaki, at least on Sunday, was a 64% strike rate on his slider, which led to a 28% SwStr% and 44% CSW. To righties, he kept the pitch low in the zone 67% of the time and outside 67% of the time. That’s huge because his season-long rate of outside sliders to righties is just 43.6%. He’s thrown over 28% of his sliders to righties in the middle of the strike zone (meaning not outside or inside). On Sunday, he did that less than 17% of the time. To me, that’s bigger news than the forkball/splitter gap, but I do still need to see this against a better offense.

Bryce Miller – Seattle Mariners (Velocity Increase, Cutter Shape/Usage, Sweeper Shape/Usage)

Bryce Miller debuted this past week with a huge uptick in velocity. He was 97.6 mph on his four-seamer, which was up 2.6 mph from 2025. He even sat around 97 mph into the sixth inning, which means this wasn’t just adrenaline. His splitter was also up 2.4 mph, and his slider was up 2.6 mph as well. Considering he also got elite 19.1 inches of vertical movement on the four-seamer, if that pitch is going to be around 97 mph, it’s going to be a major weapon. But does the added velocity scare anybody else since he had loose bodies and an elbow issue last year?

Another change here was that he used both his slider and sweeper 10% more to righties. Statcast has a cutter and a harder slider, but they’re both 88.6 mph, and the only difference is 0.5 inches of vertical movement, so I think it’s the same pitch. You can call it a slider or a cutter or whatever you’d prefer. The pitch has more horizontal movement than last season and got plenty of whiffs to righties with just a 33% strike rate, while the sweeper was in the zone more consistently, racking up a 30% called strike rate, while also getting some whiffs. That four-seam, slider, sweeper, splitter combination to righties should be plenty for Miller.

Against lefties, he threw his slider about 25% of the time, which is up about 20% from last season. Four of the six of them found the strike zone, and he got three swinging strikes. Not bad. His splitter wasn’t really impactful to lefties here either, so that’s the pitch to watch next. We’ll also be watching his usage because it seems like he’s going to piggyback with Luis Castillo, which could hurt both of their fantasy value.