Dylan Cease, Chicago White Sox - Dylan Cease was electric on Tuesday tossing six shutout innings against the Reds with just one hit allowed, three walks, and eleven strikeouts. Cease also did a terrific job limiting hard contact as well with zero batted balls against him registering over 95 MPH. His 37% CSW is among the best for the day (40% is elite-elite) and both his slider and changeup had whiff rates over 65% against each offering. The changeup even was a perfect 2-for-2 on swings and misses while getting another five called strikes. Cease is a perfect 2-0 this year with a 2.37 ERA and his profile has a lot of solid batted ball data along with some impressive swing and miss numbers, I'm buying what Cease is doing right now.
Byron Buxton, Minnesota Twins - The Byron Buxton show just keeps on trucking as he hit his 9th homer of the season while going 1-4 at the plate. He also struck out twice in the game giving him five for the month of May, or 1/3 of his total for all of April. It's not going to be extremely surprising if his K% does begin to climb because his whiff rate and his K% are currently almost 30 percentiles apart, so there's some regression likely to be had there. Regardless, Buxton continues to absolutely crush the ball and owns a .736 xSLG (top 1% of the league) and is still posting his top of the charts sprint speed numbers.
Cole Irvin, Oakland A's - Cole Irvin tossed a gem Tuesday to earn his third win of the season. He allowed just three hits and one walk over eight innings of one-run ball. He also struck out a season-high nine batters. Irvin's allowed just four earned runs across his last four starts (25.1 innings), but the underlying stats for him still don't look too great. Even with the season-high nine strikeouts, his 31% CSW is just barely above the league average and his whiff rate is right at 20%, the same total he had in 2019 when he had a sub-20% K%. His hard-hit rate is teetering right around 50% and his xERA is 5.47, eerily close to that 2019 season where everything was bad. This feels like a sell-high profile if I had him rostered anywhere.
Shane McClanahan, Tampa Bay Rays - Shane McClanahan pitched well once again in his second start with the major league club, tossing four shutout innings with five strikeouts. McClanahan posted a 40% CSW and his slider has become a devastating pitch in a short time with a 57% whiff rate and a 47% CSW on that offering alone. He did walk two batters in this game, but that's more than manageable when you're allowing only two hits to pair with that. It sounds like McClanahan is going to stick around for a bit and as long as he is he's worth looking into in pretty much all formats.
Willie Calhoun, Texas Rangers - Willie Calhoun hit homer number three for the season and has been on a tear since joining the team after an injury slowed him down in the spring. He's hitting .321 and his batted ball metrics look considerably better after a disaster 2020 season. Calhoun made it known that getting hit in the face last spring did affect him, and it certainly seems like he's on the right track now that he's over a year removed from the incident. Calhoun's 43.2% hard-hit rate is the highest of his career and his xBA is over 30 points high than the best number of his career. He's been hitting leadoff more and more recently and is posting a .344 OBP out of that spot so it could be something that sticks.
