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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- Rest-of-Season Projections
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.
Kody Clemens (1B, 2B, 3B, OF – MIN)
Kody Clemens was mentioned in this column earlier this season after making an early impact with the Minnesota Twins, and he’s largely continued to make loud contact regularly.
Overall, the 29-year-old is batting .213 with a .296 on-base percentage (OBP) in 170 plate appearances split between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Twins.
However, he has been much more impactful than that initial collection of stats might suggest. What with 12 home runs in those 170 plate appearances, a .287 ISO, a .370 xwOBA and a wRC+ that is 18 points above league average.
And while Clemens’ plate discipline numbers are around league average, at best, including a 27.6% chase rate, a 23.7% whiff rate, a 24.7% strikeout rate and an 8.2% walk rate, he’s probably due for an improvement in his surface-level production at some point.
Or rather, his production is due to bounce-back at the plate.
Because Clemens is making all that loud contact while sporting just a .206 batting average on balls in play (BABIP), among batters with at least 150 plate appearances this season. Only four other batters have a lower BABIP.
Among the 39 batters with a BABIP lower than .250 this season (minimum 150 plate appearances), none have a higher xwOBA than Clemens. Better production is coming, and you’ll want him on your fantasy team when that happens.
Furthermore, if Minnesota ends up trading some veterans at the deadline, it would only open up more opportunities for Clemens to hit further up the Twins’ lineup.
Griffin Jax (RP – MIN)
Sticking with the Minnesota Twins, there are a few different avenues for Griffin Jax to be an impact fantasy reliever in the season’s second half. Both are trade-related in terms of whether the Twins trade Jax to a team where he could close regularly or whether the Twins trade current closer Jhoan Duran, thereby opening up regular ninth-inning work for Jax in the Twin Cities.
While it’s not a surefire thing that either happens, the upside makes Jax more than worth a look as a potential addition ahead of time for fantasy managers.
We’ll start with his 3.92 ERA.
It’s not the lowest number in the world, but it’s also on the misleading side of things, what with the right-hander sporting a 1.87 FIP, not to mention logging 14.37 strikeouts per nine innings compared to just 2.18 walks and 0.87 homers allowed per nine frames.
Jax has admittedly struggled with loud contact. He’s sporting a 10.2% barrel rate and is allowing opposing batters to manage a 44.9% hard-hit rate against him this season. Both numbers rank in the 23rd percentile or lower this season.
The veteran has also been elite at missing bats.
That elite bat missing ability has been key in not only posting a strong FIP number, but it’s also a key reason why the 30-year-old could be a top-10 fantasy closer if he were ever able to step into a ninth-inning role for an extended period.
Sporting a 45% or higher whiff rate on both his sweeper (45.4%, 44.7% usage rate) and change-up (51.4%, 25.7% usage rate), Jax ranks in the 98th percentile or better in strikeout rate, whiff rate and chase rate this season.
All told, he’s just one of four qualified relievers to rank in the 95th percentile or better in all three metrics.
The other three?
Ronny Henriquez, Mason Miller and Josh Hader.
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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.
