Fantasy Baseball Spotlight: Dustin May’s cutter surge, plus April-to-June rotation shakeups from Jack Perkins, Roki Sasaki and Shane Drohan

On Monday, June 8, 2026, fantasy baseball writer Eric Samulski laid out his weekly “starting pitcher happy place,” pairing streamer recommendations with a deeper look at how certain arms have been tweaking their pitch usage. The names that drove the analysis were Dustin May of the St. Louis Cardinals, Jack Perkins of the Oakland Athletics, Roki Sasaki of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Shane Drohan of the Milwaukee Brewers, with each one tied to a specific storyline about role shifts or changes to pitch selection.

May’s week-to-week appeal centers on a pitch-mix change Samulski describes as the unlock to a run of improved results. In the early part of the season, May’s workload skewed heavily toward the four-seam fastball, with very limited cutter usage. After struggling through that stretch, the column argues May shifted his distribution, cutting four-seam frequency and increasing cutter usage. Over a nine-start span that Samulski singles out, May’s performance improved to a 3.38 ERA and 1.16 WHIP, alongside a 23% strikeout rate and nearly an 11% swinging-strike rate, with the cutter and the resulting game plan against hitters framed as the core reason the numbers moved.

The streamer angle becomes more dramatic with Perkins, because the pitch-mix lesson is married to a rotation opportunity. Samulski wrote that the Athletics appear to be moving Perkins back toward starting, after his earlier big-league work was shaped around bullpen usage. In that analysis, Perkins’ arsenal is presented as evolving for the two-strike and lineup-stacking realities of a starter. Samulski describes a gyro-slider look that Perkins introduced as part of his first traditional start of the season, while also emphasizing the relationship between his cutter, his sweeper, and the new slider shape as the key to keeping hitters off balance.

In Los Angeles, Sasaki’s “why now” is framed as fastball shape and improved swing-and-miss capability rather than simply raw velocity. Samulski argued the early-season version of Sasaki’s four-seam did not miss bats and was getting hit hard, then pointed to changes in the last four starts: a higher vertical movement profile, more frequent use up in the zone, and better strikeout-adjacent indicators such as a higher swinging-strike rate and improved contact quality. The column also credited better command and usage patterns with the slider, and suggested that the combination is finally giving Sasaki a more complete starter’s kit instead of a shallow one.

Drohan’s segment connects the pitch mix to an expanded role that the Brewers have leaned on over the last two starts. Samulski described Drohan as moving away from multi-inning relief and into the rotation after a stretch of strong run-prevention and strikeout production. As a starter, the column says Drohan’s approach has included a notable reduction in cutter usage and a corresponding increase in sinker and slider usage, with the idea that the pitch sequencing and movement patterns are intended to create different looks from early counts through two-strike situations.

For fantasy managers, the immediate takeaway is that this week’s streamer decisions are not only about who is on the schedule. The column’s emphasis is on pitchers who are actively changing how they produce swings, either by rebalancing pitch selection (May), adding or foregrounding a key breaking-ball option (Perkins), changing fastball behavior to support the rest of the repertoire (Sasaki), or reshaping pitch mix to fit a starter’s role (Drohan). The MLB context matters as well: when a pitcher is trusted to start more often, those pitch-sequence adjustments can become repeatable fixtures rather than one-off outcomes.