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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Fantasy Baseball Waiver Wire & Trade Targets
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.
Orlando Arcia (SS – COL)
The newest member of the Colorado Rockies, Orlando Arcia, struggled mightily to start the season with Atlanta, hitting .194 with a .219 on-base percentage and just a 21 wRC+ in 32 plate appearances for the National League East franchise, driving in a run and scoring a run in the process.
Arcia has been far more productive from a counting stat standpoint in years past.
Just last season, the infielder hit .218 with a .271 on-base percentage, 17 home runs and a pair of stolen bases in 602 plate appearances. Before that, he hit .264 with a .321 on-base percentage, another 17 home runs and a stolen base in 533 plate appearances.
Arcia’s fantasy production benefited from a strong lineup in Atlanta. From 2023 to 2024, he collected more RBI than Brendan Donovan, Ha-Seong Kim, Steven Kwan and Xander Bogaerts. While the Rockies might not be as productive as those Atlanta teams were, Arcia’s fantasy production could benefit notably from reasonably regular playing time and playing home games at Coors Field.
In the seasons in which he’s logged at least 500 plate appearances, Arica has hit at least 15 home runs. Per Statcast data, Arcia’s expected home run tally for Coors Field sits at 98, six above Arcia’s actual 92 career home runs. The 98 number is also the second-highest among all ballparks for the infielder, after Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park.
While the Rockies have several young infielders on the team in Ezequiel Tovar and Adael Amador, not to mention long-time Colorado slugger Ryan McMahon and veteran Kyle Farmer, Amador has logged just a 22 wRC+ in 102 plate appearances as of the start of play on Wednesday and McMahon (and Farmer, for that matter) is a speculative trade candidate, given Colorado’s 9-46 record and -174 run differential.
Arcia is more of a deeper league waiver wire add ahead of time at the moment. However, he has the potential to be a quality starter in leagues with 14+ teams if he can play regularly, something that doesn’t seem particularly out of the question given how the Rockies have struggled to score runs so far.
Adrian Houser (SP, RP – CWS)
Adrian Houser has made only two starts for the Chicago White Sox so far. He’s yet to allow a run in 12 innings of work, logging a 2.74 FIP, a pitcher win and eight strikeouts in the process while scattering four walks.
Starts at home against the Seattle Mariners and on the road against the New York Mets are hardly the easiest two-start stretch for a pitcher making his debut with a club.
While Houser will certainly give up an earned run at some point, he’s no stranger to fantasy success. From 2021 to 2022, the starter pitched to a 3.46 ERA and a 4.28 FIP in a combined 245 innings. During that span, he won 16 games, including 10 in 2021 with the Milwaukee Brewers in 60 appearances, 57 of which were starts.
It remains to be seen if Houser will get the chance to get to 10 pitcher wins with the struggling White Sox this season. However, if he keeps pitching like this and inducing ground balls at such a high rate, the 32-year-old could find himself traded to a contender by the time July rolls around.
Of course, that’s all speculative on my part, but Houser has logged a 54.8% ground ball so far. It’s a small sample size, but if the season ended today, it’d be his best ground ball rate in a season since that aforementioned 2021 campaign.
Houser is more of a long-term addition play for those in leagues where rotation options are few and far between via waivers, but he’d have quality fantasy potential if the White Sox ended up trading him to a contender in need of rotation reinforcements in the next few months.
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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.
