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.
Cam Booser (RP – CWS)
The Chicago White Sox might not be as bad as they were last year, when they logged a .253 winning percentage, but the team has still struggled out of the gate so far, with a 13-29 record and a -31 run differential as of the start of play on Wednesday.
As such, saves have been reasonably hard to come by. As of the beginning of play on Wednesday, the team had two. For reference, no other Major League team had recorded fewer than six.
Cam Booser had one of Chicago’s two saves. Brandon Eisert had the other.
And while it’s still early, it looks like those two might be the favorites for saves moving forward (at least at the moment) in a Chicago bullpen that has the league’s fourth-lowest collective fWAR.
Eisert has been the better pitcher so far, with a 26.3% strikeout rate and just a 6.6% walk rate, a 4.67 ERA and a 3.51 FIP in 17.1 innings. The White Sox have used him in a variety of different situations as of late, including twice as an opener in the last few weeks.
And while Eisert still looks like a key part of Chicago’s bullpen, the team may continue to use him earlier in games than the ninth inning in higher-leverage situations.
Which could open the door for more save chances for Booser.
The 33-year-old has struggled at times for the White Sox with a 4.50 ERA and a 5.29 FIP in 18 appearances spanning 16 innings of work (adding 17 strikeouts compared to eight walks allowed in the process). He’s also missing bats at a fairly elite rate so far, with a 31.4% whiff rate that sits in the 85th percentile league-wide.
The walks could certainly be better, and make Booser more of a fantasy option in deeper leagues with 14 or more teams, but he’s worth a look for those searching for potential saves ahead of time.
Alexander Canario (OF – PIT)
Alexander Canario’s surface-level stats don’t jump off the page. He’s hitting .190 with a .266 on-base percentage (OBP) in 64 plate appearances as of the start of play on Wednesday.
The Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder has added a pair of home runs in the process, but has turned in just a 65 wRC+.
A 25% strikeout rate and a 38.3% whiff rate are reasonable causes for concern, but if the 25-year-old can continue to see playing time for the Pirates, that surface-level production is going to improve considerably.
Canario, simply put, has been excellent from a quality of contact standpoint.
It’s still a reasonably small sample size early in the season, but there’s a lot to like about the outfielder’s .373 xwOBA, 21.4% barrel rate and 50% hard-hit rate so far. That his chase rate (25.7%) is reasonably solid to go along with a .468 xwOBAcon and an average bat speed of 77.1 miles per hour(MPH is perhaps even more encouraging.
The 25-year-old just needs more plate appearances. As long as those happen, his batting average, on-base percentage, home run total and fantasy scoring stats in general will all see a significant improvement if he keeps making this kind of contact at the plate for the National League Central club.
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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.
