Fantasy Baseball Watchlist: Waiver Wire & Trade Targets (2025)

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.

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.

Nathan Lukes (OF – TOR)

Now might be the last chance to add Nathan Lukes, who is currently on just 2% of fantasy rosters, to your team for the stretch run.

The outfielder and first baseman entered play Wednesday batting .262 with a .252 on-base percentage, 10 home runs and a pair of stolen bases in 290 plate appearances.

With just an 11.7% strikeout rate — the 14th-lowest among batters with at least 250 plate appearances — and a decidedly low .268 batting average on balls in play (BABIP), there was probably always going to be somewhat of an improvement in surface-level stat production.

And that improvement in stats like batting average, RBI and runs scored might be starting to happen now.

Sure, recent games in Colorado against the Rockies certainly helped, but Lukes is sporting a 146 wRC+ in his last 55 plate appearances dating back to July 24th. Perhaps most crucially, he’s hit half of his 10 home runs this year in that stretch, and just one of those five homers came at Coors Field.

Otherwise, Lukes is sporting a .367 ISO since June 24th and doing it all while predominantly batting leadoff for the Blue Jays. The outfielder has hit leadoff in each of his last 13 starts for the American League East club.

It remains to be seen if the home runs will continue with this much regularity. Lukes does rank in just the 21st percentile league-wide with a 5.4% barrel rate. It looks like his surface-level stats should only improve from here on out in the short term.

Isaac Mattson (RP – PIT)

The Pittsburgh Pirates’ decision to trade David Bednar and not trade Dennis Santana seemingly set up the set-up reliever to finish the year as one of the league’s better fantasy closing options.

After all, the veteran is sporting a 2.57 ERA and a 3.05 FIP in 49 appearances spanning 49 innings this year.

Yet, Santana recorded one out and allowed four hits, five earned runs, two homers and a walk in his first outing following the trade deadline on August 1st. On Wednesday, the right-hander surrendered three hits and a pair of earned runs in 1.1 innings of work.

None of that is particularly ideal.

Enter Isaac Mattson as a potentially intriguing stash for fantasy managers with deeper benches to consider.

Mattson did give up a run on Wednesday as well, but he’d previously allowed just three earned runs in his prior 16 innings dating back to June 20th, a stretch that saw the 30-year-old log a 1.69 ERA and a 2.67 FIP, not to mention a 31.4% strikeout rate and a 10% walk rate.

For the season, Mattson’s ERA and FIP sit at 2.36 and 3.49, respectively, in 26.2 innings of work after Wednesday’s game.

While Santana still looks like the favorite for saves here down the stretch, another unideal outing or two could (hypothetically speaking) open the door to potential save opportunities for Mattson.

Should that happen, given how he’s pitched lately, you’ll want him on your fantasy team before then.

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.