This is ‘The Watchlist.’ This column is designed to help you monitor and pick up fantasy baseball players in the coming weeks and months. Whether they’re waiver wire or trade targets, these are the players you’ll want to add now before becoming the hot waiver commodity or trade target.
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- MLB Prop Bet Cheat Sheet
- Rest-of-Season Projections
Using underlying and advanced metrics, ‘The Watchlist’ will help you get ahead of the competition in your league and reap the rewards later from your pickups.
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 a different kind of player entirely. The point is they’ll help you find success in your fantasy league while staying ahead of the curve against your league mates.
Fantasy Baseball Waiver Wire & Trade Targets
Tony Gonsolin (SP – LAD)
Tony Gonsolin was mentioned in this column back in December, and many of the same reasons for adding him to your fantasy team still apply.
The pitcher win upside is one. Gonsolin has 34 pitcher wins in 79 appearances and 71 starts since the beginning of the 2019 season, including 16 in 24 starts in 2022 and eight in 20 starts in 2023. The veteran has also amassed 15 quality starts combined over those two seasons.
Pitching for a Los Angeles Dodgers team with the best lineup in the league certainly helps from a pitcher-win standpoint.
It also helps that Gonsolin has a lifetime 3.19 ERA and 4.00 FIP in 375.2 innings in the Majors. If he’s in the Dodgers’ rotation, pitcher wins will follow, along with solid run-prevention stats.
What has changed is that the Dodgers could use the pitching reinforcements.
The team entered play Wednesday ranking behind 16 other teams in rotation fWAR. While Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Dustin May have pitched well, Blake Snell is on the injured list (IL), and Landon Knack and Justin Wrobleski have struggled mightily.
Knack is sporting a 9.45 ERA and a 6.47 FIP in two starts and 6.2 innings with a 17.6% walk rate in the process.
Wrobleski has made just one start, and while he pitched to a 29% CSW rate in five innings against the Washington Nationals, the Nationals logged eight batted ball events with an exit velocity between 95 and 111.2 miles per hour (MPH) against the left-hander.
Even if Gonsolin is a short-term addition (he’s currently making rehab starts at Triple-A), with Snell and Clayton Kershaw both on the injured list, he could help turn the tide in weekly matchups with his pitcher win upside.
The same can be said in roto leagues, particularly considering the Dodgers entered play Wednesday in the top 10 in the league in wRC+, runs scored, on-base percentage (OBP) and slugging percentage. The National League West club also entered play Wednesday tied with the Yankees for the most home runs in the league.
Even for a few weeks, a short-term statistical boost like that can make all the difference in the standings in either type of league format come the end of the year.
Jordan Leasure (RP – CWS)
Figuring out who the favorite for saves in the Chicago White Sox bullpen is decidedly easier said than done.
Entering play on Wednesday, Tyler Gilbert, Brandon Eisert, Mike Vasil and Penn Murfee are tied for the team lead in fWAR among relievers.
Eisert has the lowest FIP among relievers with at least five innings pitched. Per FanGraphs, Cam Booser has the best stuff, with a 116 stuff+ number.
And the White Sox don’t have any saves yet. Zero.
Murfee and Jordan Leasure have each blown a save so far, but it might be Leasure who looks like the leader in the clubhouse for saves moving forward.
Of course, just how many save chances he (or the White Sox in general) sees remains to be seen, but Leasure looks like the White Sox reliever to roster for now in fantasy leagues. Considering the White Sox have yet to record a save this season, adding Leasure from the waiver wire now essentially could amount to adding a closer to your fantasy team.
Entering play on Wednesday, the 26-year-old had made six appearances for the Chicago-based club, pitching to a 3.38 ERA and a 4.15 FIP in 5.1 innings while scattering three walks, six hits, a pair of earned runs and a home run. He’s struck out eight of the 25 batters he’s faced so far.
The 26-year-old also ranked in the 99th percentile in whiff rate, with a 43.5% number, while generating grounders at a 57.1% rate, good for an 86th percentile ranking. His slider has been front and center where the missed bats are concerned, with the pitch sporting a 56.5% whiff rate so far (while also logging a 42.2% usage rate).
Perhaps most crucially for fantasy managers, Leasure leads the team with high-leverage ninth-inning appearances with two. Just two other White Sox relievers have a high-leverage relief appearance this season. One of them, Mike Clevinger, was just designated for assignment on Wednesday.
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Ben Rosener is a fantasy baseball writer whose work has appeared on the digital pages of FantasyPros, Pitcher List and Bleacher Report. He also writes about fantasy baseball for his own Substack page, Ben Rosener’s Fantasy Baseball Help Substack. He only refers to himself in the third person for bios.
