This weekly waiver-wire watch column is designed to help you monitor and pick up players in the coming weeks. These are the players you’ll want to add now before becoming the hot waiver commodity in a week or two. Using underlying and advanced metrics, this “watchlist” will help you get ahead of the competition in your league and reap the rewards from your pickups later.
The players could be anyone from a prospect in an ideal situation close to the Majors, a reliever in a saves+holds league, or even a starter doing well with misleading surface-level stats like ERA. They might even be hitters with quality underlying stats. Or they could be none of those types of players and entirely different.
The point is that they’ll help you find success in your fantasy league while staying ahead of the curve against your league mates.
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Fantasy Baseball Waiver Wire Watch List
Dynasty Addition/Trade Target of the Week
Logan Gilbert enjoyed a quality sophomore season for the Seattle Mariners in 2022, pitching to a 3.20 ERA and a 3.46 FIP in 185.2 innings for the American League West club while adding 13 pitcher wins in the process to go along with 174 strikeouts and 49 walks.
It was a solid enough season for Gilbert, especially in terms of fantasy production, though it probably would’ve been better if he added a few more strikeouts.
Fast forward to 2023, and the right-hander has done just that in his third season in the Majors.
Gilbert is striking out 10.27 batters per nine frames this season, in large part thanks to a newfound ability to get batters to chase outside of the zone at a high rate.
Logan Gilbert Chase Rate By Season:
- 2021: 26.3% chase rate, 32nd percentile
- 2022: 25.8% chase rate, 12th percentile
- 2023: 33.7% chase rate, 89th percentile
Both the increased strikeouts and chase rates may have something to do with a slightly tweaked pitch arsenal. Gilbert is getting reasonably similar results in terms of whiff rate on both his four-seamer and slider, but his curveball is getting considerably more swing and misses this season (to go along with more vertical and horizontal movement), and he appears to have scrapped his changeup in favor of a new split-finger offering – per Statcast data – that’s been decidedly very good so far.
The 26-year-old’s curveball is posting a 33.8% whiff rate so far, up from 23.3% last season, and while it admittedly has a .340 xwOBA against it this year, batters have struggled to make contact at times.
Then there’s the split-finger offering.
Thrown 14% of the time, opposing hitters are batting just .109 with a .135 xBA, a .130 slugging percentage, a .184 xSLG, a .100 wOBA, and a .134 xwOBA against the pitch, managing just five total hits and only one extra-base hit.
Among all splitters in the league (minimum 10 plate appearances), it has the fifth-best run value (-5), the seventh-lowest hard-hit rate, and the 12th-highest put-away percentage in the league.
And that’s all without mentioning that the right-hander has cut down on his walks considerably.
The former 14th-overall pick’s walk rates were anywhere from good (6.4% in 2022) to very good (5.6% in 2021) in his first two Major League seasons. Now, this time around, his walk rate has been elite at a 4.3% metric that ranks in the 93rd percentile league-wide.
That Gilbert has upped his strikeouts (and overall swing-and-miss metrics) while cutting down on his walks are both significant positives moving forward where his long-term fantasy ceiling is concerned. That he did so while also adding a new pitch that’s quickly become elite only boosts his fantasy upside in the future.
All of this makes him an intriguing dynasty trade target, but perhaps helping his case even more so – at least for fantasy managers looking to acquire him – is that his 4.08 ERA is decidedly misleading. Gilbert’s 3.14 FIP and 3.03 xERA are a lot more indicative of how effective he’s been this year. If the fantasy manager in your league is concerned by the surface-level numbers, now’s the perfect time to try and swing a deal.
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