Three up, three down: Andrew Painter stumbles after promising turnaround, but there's reason to keep the faith

. Dayn Perry breaks down the best and worst moves of the trade deadline with a month of hindsight to help.  

Hitting the Wire

, OF, (28%) – When it comes to waiver-wire adds, often even just flashing outlier skills is enough to justify interest, and Montes certainly has that. He put his biggest skill on display Tuesday with a massive 474-foot blast, the longest homer by any player at T-Mobile Park during the Statcast era. Montes was supposed to have legitimate elite raw power, and there's your evidence for it. He has also struck out nine times in 19 plate appearances and probably won't start against most lefties, so there are definitely trade-offs here that keep him well short of "must-add" territory. But if you're chasing upside, Montes has it.

, SP, Astros (66%) – Wesneski is doing some stuff really well. He isn't generating many strikeouts (he never has, really), but he's doing a great job of generating a lot of weak swings on pitches out of the strike zone, and that's not a bad alternative to strikeouts if you can manage it. It's hard to sustain a low-3.00s ERA without missing many bats, so I don't have much faith in Wesneski as a long-term concern. But with just two-plus weeks left in the season, "long-term" doesn't really enter into the conversation, so he's a fine short-term streamer.

, 1B, (66%) – Eldridge is going to be a popular breakout candidate for 2027, in part because we've already seen it for stretches here in his rookie season. He's in the midst of one such stretch right now, with a .318 average, five homers, and 21 RBI over the past 24 games after he hit his 16th homer of the season Tuesday. The power is still more "good" than great, but the underlying skill set remains very impressive for a player as young as Eldridge, who profiles as a potential 30-homer hitter as soon as 2027.

, SP, (51%) – It was a surprise to see Burnes get up to 57 pitches Tuesday, since he had maxed out at just 17 in his lone rehab start before this. But that jump in pitch count does potentially give Burnes a path to mattering for Fantasy down the stretch. Of course, he needed those 57 pitches to get three just three innings, and he walked two while striking out just two with five whiffs, and his velocity was down across the board from when we saw him last, so we're dealing with a clearly diminished version of Burnes right now. That doesn't mean he can't get back to his previous levels, but it does make it tough to get excited about what we saw from Burnes the rest of the way. 

Three Up, Three Down

Three Up

I've been waiting for the Detmers breakout for so long that, when it finally started to happen, I couldn't really bring myself to buy into it. The stuff has always been there, but the consistency never has, so when Detmers started to show flashes of figuring things out earlier in the summer, I was skeptical that it would last – we've been burned by him before, after all, and when he struggled to a 4.62 ERA in July, skepticism seemed like the prudent choice. But he locked back in around the All-Star break and really hasn't looked back, and after limiting the to just one hit and a one walk over six innings while striking out nine, he now has a 1.37 ERA with 68 strikeouts in 59.1 innings in 10 second-half starts.

There hasn't been much of a change in his approach in the second half, but his control has improved dramatically (10 walks in those 10 starts), and he has basically stopped allowing hits. That latter bit is harder to sustain – much depends on an iffy defense behind him – but everything else about the breakout looks legit, including a 3.25 xERA and 3.10 FIP before Tuesday's start. Given his iffy track record and history of disappointing us, there's going to be some renewed skepticism around Detmers this offseason, though that could change pretty quickly if he gets moved away from the Angels (he was rumored to be on the move at the deadline, after all). Either way, he sure looks like a top-30 SP right now, and barring injury, that's probably where I'll rank him for 2027.

has fixed his biggest flaw

For as good as De La Cruz has been in his MLB career, he's never quite put it all together before this season. In large part because he was, well, kind of a switch-hitter in name only:

vs. RHP, 2023-25: .271/.350/.496
vs. LHP, 2023-25: .220/.278/.329

He was a superstar-level hitter about two-thirds of the time, but he wasn't showing much growth from the right side of the plate. That's changed this season, and we saw it on display Tuesday against the best left-handed pitcher in baseball, . De La Cruz put three batted balls in play against Skubal (lowering his strikeout rate vs. LHP to 25.7%), one of which he hit 109.4 mph and 444 feet. It was his 10th homer against lefties and his OPS against them is now nearly 500 points higher against them than it was coming into the season. Some of that can be explained away by the inherently small sample sizes we're dealing with (just 163 plate appearances), but the underlying numbers back it up, too – his .370 xwOBA vs. LHP is the first time he's even been above .295 in the majors.

De La Cruz is up to 25 homers and 25 steals, and while the latter total has dropped in every season, he still has a chance to finish with a 30-30 season and the best batting average of his career. He isn't the best player in Fantasy like some projected he might become, but I might argue De La Cruz is mildly underrated at this point and should be an easy first-rounder in 2027.

isn't washed up yet

Seager's price is going to absolutely tank in 2027 drafts. For good reason. He's going to be 33 shortly after Opening Day, he hasn't played more than 123 games since 2022 (and might not even reach 100 this season) and his numbers have tanked across the board. Which could make him one of the best buys on the board for drafts next season. Because one thing people tend to forget about injury-prone players is that you reach a point in drafts where risk just doesn't matter. Where that point is might be different for every player, but I'd argue that, after the 150th pick or so, risk really doesn't matter very much. You're looking for potential difference makers, and Seager is showing he still very much can be one of those – he homered Tuesday, his sixth in 34 games since returning from the IL at the end of July, and he's hitting .294 in that span. If I can get him in the 12th round or later as a middle infielder, I don't really care if Seager goes on the IL, because you aren't going to find many potential .300 hitters with power at that range of the draft.

Three Down

He was tagged for seven runs in just 4.1 innings against the Mets Tuesday, and he has now given up 15 runs in 16.1 innings over his past three starts. It's the second rough stretch Alcantara has run into this season, and it's the first time he has allowed more than three runs in three consecutive starts all season; he had a similar stretch in May where he had a 7.39 ERA, but he had a 2.49 ERA in 16 starts between June 1 and Aug. 24. It's frustrating to see Alcantara struggle here down the stretch, pushing his season-long ERA up to 3.78 and his FIP to 4.04, but that might just be who he is at this point. He's the first pitcher in the majors to 200 innings – nobody else is even at 182! – but the ERA is probably destined to sit closer to 4.00 than you might like. He's a solid SP3 in Fantasy who might be drafted as an SP4 in 2027 when other trendier pitchers get pushed, but there are obvious limitations here.

is ice cold

Being a catcher is hard. Not only do you have all of the normal things that make being a major-league hitter to account for, like trying to hit 99-mph pitches that move, but you have to keep those skills sharp while also tackling the most challenging defensive position in the game. There's a reason good hitting catchers are the hardest asset to find in baseball, and when you do find them, you have to understand that they are going to be inherently more fragile than at other positions.

I say all that to point out that Dingler's breakout has fallen apart. He was out of the lineup Tuesday in the midst of one of the deepest slumps any player has struggled through all season. He hasn't homered since Aug. 6 and is hitting .117 with just a .317 OPS in that span. His average exit velocity has collapsed to 85.3 in that span, and his xwOBA has collapsed to .195 over his past 100 plate appearances. Suddenly, Dingler's xwOBA and average exit velocity for the season are both worse than last season's mark, and you've gotta wonder if he's running out of gas. We don't talk about hitters that way as often as we do with pitchers, but catchers are different, and the wear and tear of playing as often as Dingler has can accumulate. He still definitely projects as a top-12 catcher for 2027, but that profile suddenly looks like a lot less of a sure thing.

looks like Just A Guy again

Well, I guess the good news is that Burke didn't issue a bunch of walks this time around. Sure, that's because he was chased in the second inning against the , but hey, I wanted to start by pointing out something positive. There hasn't been much of that to go around when it comes to Burke lately, as his breakout seems to have fully derailed. Things started to look shaky around mid-August, but he has fallen apart completely over the past three starts, which have seen him walk eight and four before he gave up seven earned runs Tuesday. There was a period where Burke's velocity was up, but when it went back down and he kept dominating in July and early August, it was a bit harder to buy in. And sure enough, skepticism was the right call. I think you basically can't trust Burke the rest of the way, and his regression here has probably knocked him out of the top 50 starting pitchers for 2027.

Extra Innings

Given the way this season has mostly turned out, I'm not going to turn my nose up at six one-run innings from Peralta in the Fantasy playoffs. In fact, this is probably the best stretch of his season, as Peralta has tossed three straight quality starts with just two runs allowed. But he also struck out just two on Tuesday and has just 13 in 18 innings during that aforementioned span, so it's not like the  have coaxed out a vintage Peralta performance here. It's more like they've turned him into vintage . And if he can keep that up for the next few weeks and into the playoffs, they'll definitely take it. But a return to form for Peralta, this is not.