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Most every week, Scott White will highlight some of the more notable changes to his rest-of-season rankings. You'll find said rankings here and are urged to bookmark them if you haven't already. There's no better resource for gauging player value throughout the long season.

It was clear from the first inning that Spencer Strider was in for a better afternoon Saturday. After his fastball sat at 95-96 mph through his first five turns back from elbow surgery, it was suddenly hitting 97-98, which was more in line with the Strider we saw prior to the procedure -- i.e., the one who finished second in NL Rookie of the Year voting with 13.8 K/9 in 2022 and then led the majors in strikeouts and wins the following year. Not surprisingly, he went on to have his best start of the season, striking out 13 over six scoreless innings. Here's what that looked like:

Now, you may wonder how many of those strikeouts were precipitated by him facing a moribund Rockies lineup away from Coors Field. After all, Grant Holmes recorded 15 strikeouts against the same lineup the following day. But the fact is that Strider's outing would have been a sigh of relief even without the 13 strikeouts. Diminished velocity threatened to ruin him, but now we know it's not a permanent affliction.

I ended up elevating him only two spots in my rankings, ahead of Kris Bubic and Bryan Woo, to make him SP20. That's a far cry from the SP1 he was drafted to be last year, but he still has to prove he can sustain the velocity gain and dominate a lineup other than the Rockies. I didn't want the minimal change in the rankings to obscure the sea change that was his last start, though. Prior to it, I was hoping against hope by keeping Strider in my top 25. Now, it seems like it was the right call.

The 10 biggest rankings moves for this week

  1. Not that they made a big show of it or anything, but it turns out the Phillies have been giving Kyle Schwarber very occasional starts in left field. He made his fifth such appearance Sunday, giving him outfield eligibility in leagues with standard CBS eligibility rules. Given the surplus at some of the infield positions (more on that in a bit), that's a game-changer for him Fantasy-wise and places him among the elite outfielders right away. I have him 12th in 5x5 Rotisserie and eighth in Head-to-Head points, with James Wood, Julio Rodriguez, Jackson Chourio and Oneil Cruz being the four to rank ahead of him in the former.
  2. Remember how on the fifth day of the season, Jurickson Profar was hit with a PED suspension, seemingly ending his stint with the Braves before it even began? Yeah, well, not really. Turns out the suspension has an end date, and it's July 2. We're close enough to it that he was allowed to begin a rehab assignment Tuesday, and manager Brian Snitker revealed that he plans to bat him second, in between Ronald Acuna and presumably Austin Riley, when he returns. That's a prime lineup spot if Profar hits enough to take advantage of it, but will he? I think we should be open to the possibility, even though the PED suspension makes his mid-career breakout last year more dubious. Historically, such suspensions haven't been the harbinger you might imagine. I'll play it cautiously with Profar for now, ranking him as my 61st outfielder, which only justifies a pickup in five-outfielder leagues. But there's top-30 potential as the Braves' No. 2 hitter.
  3. There's a new No. 1 at catcher, and it's ... well, the guy who's been performing that way all season long. Cal Raleigh is showing no signs of slowing down, connecting for his MLB-leading 27th home run Tuesday, and has become an even bigger outlier at the position than William Contreras (who I've stubbornly kept at No. 1) was the previous two years. To demonstrate the point, Raleigh is now averaging 4.11 Head-to-Head points per game. Only two other catchers are averaging more than three points per game. There's also a new No. 1 at first base, and like at catcher, it's the guy who's performed that way all along, Pete Alonso. Freddie Freeman, my preferred choice, has seen his batting average slip to less than superhuman this month, and his home run output is a far cry from Alonso's.
  4. Logan Gilbert returned from a seven-week absence for an elbow flexor strain with five stellar innings against the Red Sox on Monday. He recorded 10 strikeouts and registered 21 swinging strikes. His slider, splitter and curveball all had better than a 40 percent whiff rate prior to the injury, demonstrating new upside for a pitcher already with ace standing, and it sure seems like he's picked up right where he left off. So I'm inclined to rank him that way again, elevating him to sixth at starting pitcher, right in between Chris Sale and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
  5. Raleigh isn't the only notable riser at catcher. Both Ivan Herrera and Hunter Goodman have moved up three spots, past Salvador Perez and Yainer Diaz, to place fifth and sixth at the position. It's been a long time coming for both. They play virtually every day because of their teams' willingness to slot them at DH when they're not behind the plate, and their production far exceeds that of the typical catcher, with little reason to believe that a drop-off is coming.
  6. Bailey Ober takes a pretty big tumble, from 38th to 51st, with his ERA and WHIP now residing at 4.40 and 1.39, respectively. More concerning than the top-line results, though, is that his velocity continues to plummet, a symptom of a mechanical issue he's made reference to. He sounds confident he'll come out of it eventually, citing progress that he feels like he made in his latest start, and that's why I haven't buried him in my rankings yet. But he's unstartable at the moment, I'd say.
  7. I made reference earlier to a surplus at some of the infield positions, and no position embodies this more than first base, where every week seems to reveal a new player of interest. The latest is Michael Toglia, who returned from a minor-league stint to go 3 for 5 with two home runs in his second game back Tuesday. He was also pretty good during his time in the minors, batting .273 (12 for 44) with three homers and a .921 OPS. His season-long numbers are still atrocious, but contact quality isn't a problem. We also know from just last year that he's capable of the sort of power binge that can sustain a team for weeks at a time. From July 1 on, or roughly the halfway point of the 2024 season, he hit 16 homers. He follows in the footsteps of Jake Burger and Christian Encarnacion-Strand as a boom-or-bust power bat who you hope to grab just as he's heating up. Those two petered out quickly, so Toglia now slots ahead of them at 24th.
  8. Speaking of boom-or-bust power bats, first base isn't the only position to offer those. Brandon Lowe fits the description at second base and Max Muncy at third. Their lengthier track records were hopefully enough incentive for you to ride out the bad times, but things got ugly there for a while, particularly for Muncy. All of a sudden, though, Lowe is batting .344 (43 for 125) with nine homers and a 1.022 OPS in his past 32 games, and Muncy is batting .312 (29 for 93) with eight homers and a 1.025 OPS in his past 30. Given that second and third base aren't so brimming with talent, you'll notice a bigger move up the rankings for them this week, with Lowe climbing from 15th to ninth at second base and Muncy from 20th to 14th at third base.
  9. I haven't been the biggest believer in Andrew Abbott, Ryan Pepiot or David Peterson. Abbott's and Pepiot's fly-ball tendencies seem like they'd spell disaster at their homer-friendly home venues, and David Peterson has always issued too many walks for a guy who pitches to contact. But all three have looked more and more impressive as the season has played out, with Abbott working deeper into games, Pepiot finding a way to miss more bats, and Peterson doing a little of both. It's not like this success is totally foreign to them either, so I've elevated Abbott from 45th to 33rd, Pepiot from 59th to 45th and Peterson from 91st to 60th.
  10. Other starting pitcher risers from the past week include Clarke Schmidt (78th), Emmet Sheehan (80th), Will Warren (81st) and Lucas Giolito (82nd). Schmidt has six quality starts in his past eight and a 13 percent swinging-strike rate to hang his hat on. Sheehan is newly back from Tommy John surgery and has some truly outlier swing-and-miss capabilities, as I've highlighted elsewhere. Warren just turned in an 11-strikeout performance against the Angels, bouncing back from a handful of shaky outings, and has an arsenal that all the data darlings love. Lucas Giolito has seen his velocity trend up in recent starts and just recorded 10 strikeouts against the Mariners on Monday. All of them have the sort of flaws that could prevent them from being impact pitchers in Fantasy, but all are trending up.