Fantasy Baseball 2026: Winners and Losers From Week 12

Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber turned Saturday night in Philadelphia into batting practice with the Mets unfortunately standing in. Harper hit for the cycle, his first career and the 11th in franchise history, and Schwarber went deep three times, twice in an eight-run third inning, finishing 4-for-5 with six RBI. Schwarber's 28th homer leads baseball. Freddy Peralta gave up a career-worst 10 earned runs and the final was 15-3. No analytical angle here. Sometimes two great hitters just decide the other team isn't playing today.

Miguel Vargas deserves more than a mention buried under fireworks. He's third among all qualified third basemen in homers, RBI and runs scored. Only Yordan Alvarez and Bobby Witt Jr. have more hard-hit, sweet-spot batted balls than he does this season. None of that shows in his last nine days, where he's hitting .226 with a wOBA of .240 against an xwOBA of .423, the largest underperformance gap in the entire hitter pool I pulled this week. That's not a guy losing it. That's the best swing profile at his position running into a wall of bad luck. If someone in your league is souring on him over one cold week, that's your cue, not theirs. That kind of bad luck generally belongs in the Losers section, but we wanted to give Vargas his props, since not enough fantasy owners are providing them this season.

Jackson Chourio keeps doing damage that the expected stats actually believe in. Five homers in his last 37 plate appearances, a .471 ISO, and an xwOBA of .407 that backs up almost everything the surface stats are saying. This isn't a hot streak built on warning-track power finding grass. It's real.

Byron Buxton hit a grand slam in the fifth inning of a game the Twins had already broken open, part of a 16-0 lead through five before Minnesota's bullpen spent four innings trying to give it back. Final was 16-8. Zac Gallen got hit so hard and so often in the fourth that "BABIP'd to hell and back" is an actual phrase a beat writer used, and it's the most accurate phrase in this column. The Twins are a game off .500 and nobody's noticed because nobody can stop talking about Colorado.

Losers

The Pirates. Paul Skenes threw six innings, allowed two runs, struck out eight, and lost anyway, his seventh straight start without a win, an absurd number for the reigning Cy Young winner. Pittsburgh had the winning run on second with two outs in the ninth Saturday in Colorado, a bases-loaded jam that ended not with a strikeout or a fly out but with pinch-runner Billy Cook's cleat clipping third baseman Kyle Karros's glove on a slow roller, ruled interference after the umpires gathered to confer. Game over. 2-1 Rockies, and Pirates manager Don Kelly sprinted out to argue a call that even he admitted afterward was correctly applied. Pittsburgh is 38-39 and that record undersells how snakebitten this team currently is. No fantasy angle here. Only sympathy. In a related note, the Pirates really need Oneil Cruz and Konnor Griffin back. Their energy is dissipating like that uncomfortable old air mattress you slept on at your cousin’s apartment last weekend.

Kevin Gausman's ERA since June 1 reads 8.00, which looks like a pitcher in real trouble until you realize his last start at Wrigley produced seven earned runs in the first inning alone, four walks included, the worst inning of his career. Strip that out and his xERA over the window sits at 3.23, nowhere close to the disaster the raw line suggests. One bad afternoon at Wrigley isn't a finding. Don't bench him because of a box score that's lying to you.

Roki Sasaki's ERA since June 1 is even uglier at 9.00, and the explanation is nearly identical: a career-worst seven runs allowed in 4.1 innings against the White Sox on June 13, sandwiched between a four-start stretch with a 3.12 ERA and a cleaner outing against Baltimore right after. His xERA over the window is 4.65, still not great, but a different conversation than the headline number implies. Treat this as one disaster start attached to a pitcher trending the right direction, not a pitcher who forgot how to pitch.

Eugenio Suárez is the most entertaining contradiction in the data set this week. A 41.9 percent strikeout rate. A literal zero percent walk rate over 31 plate appearances. And somehow a .355 wOBA running nearly .135 points ahead of his .221 xwOBA, the largest such gap of anyone I looked at. Three homers will do that to a results-based line. None of the underlying numbers think this is sustainable, and neither do I. If you're holding him as a building block instead of a streak, sell now while the box score still looks good.

Zach Neto's strikeout rate sits at 48.8 percent over his last 41 plate appearances, the worst mark of any hitter with real playing time in this stretch. That's not bad luck showing up in a contact-quality gap, that's a guy not making contact at all. Nothing about this profile says buy-low yet. Check back when the swing-and-miss numbers actually move.