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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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.
Mickey Moniak (OF – COL)
Mickey Moniak was featured in this column earlier this season as someone to add to your fantasy team ahead of time if he could hit his way into an everyday role, given the immensely hitter-friendly nature of Coors Field.
Fast forward to mid-June, and Moniak is more or less doing just that, playing a reasonably regular role for the Rockies. He hasn’t started as much against left-handed pitching, more on that shortly, but he’s been productive when he’s been in the lineup, logging quality power numbers.
For the season, the 27-year-old is batting .237 with a .292 on-base percentage (OBP), nine home runs and three stolen bases, registering a 95 wRC+ in the process. However, he’s also sporting a .237 ISO, a 10.7% barrel rate, a 73.5 mile-per-hour (MPH) average bat speed, a 47.3% hard-hit rate and a .406 xwOBAcon in his first season with the National League West club.
Moniak has been particularly impactful at the plate recently, hitting .375 with four home runs in 28 plate appearances since the calendar flipped to June.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s been successful at the plate at home. Moniak owns an .824 OPS and a .241 ISO at home this season.
While only 32 of his 192 plate appearances this season have come against left-handers, Moniak’s ability to log quality counting stats in terms of home runs and stolen bases helps him make up for potentially fewer plate appearances from a fantasy scoring standpoint. This helps provide a solid fantasy floor.
The ceiling, however, is a 25 home run hitter with near double-digit stolen base totals, particularly if Moniak’s recent hot streak continues.
You’ll want to add him now before that happens, and before the other fantasy managers in your league do.
Paul Blackburn (SP – NYM)
Paul Blackburn has been here before in terms of providing quality fantasy production.
Blackburn logged a 3.62 ERA and a 3.66 FIP in 18 first-half starts (and 97 innings) in 2022 and logged a 4.43 ERA and a 3.96 FIP in 103.2 innings the next season in 2023. Now, the veteran is potentially looking at an extended stay in the New York Mets’ rotation with Kodai Senga and Tylor Megill recently landing on the injured list (IL).
While Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas will return from the IL at some point reasonably soon, Blackburn is worth a look for fantasy managers in need of rotation reinforcements. Particularly for those in Roto formats looking for additional pitcher win production.
The Mets entered play on Wednesday with the 11th-most runs scored in the sport and the joint third-best collective wRC+ with a 114 number.
Perhaps most importantly, at least for fantasy managers, is that New York leads the league in rotation pitcher wins as of the start of play on Wednesday with 30.
Some of that is due to pitchers like Senga, Megill, Clay Holmes, Griffin Canning and David Peterson enjoying quality seasons, but the lineup has provided plenty of run support as well.
What’s more, each of those five pitchers has made either 13 or 14 starts this season. All have at least five pitcher wins.
The longer Blackburn sticks in the rotation, the more pitcher win chances he’s going to get. Even for those in head-to-head leagues and not roto formats, he’s very much worth a look as a short-term rotation option with the upside to stick on fantasy rosters for an extended period.
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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.
