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 they become 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.
Mickey Moniak (OF, DH – COL)
Mickey Moniak, who was mentioned in this column earlier this season, has done nothing but produce from a fantasy standpoint lately. Really, that statement applies to the entirety of the season for the outfielder, who is batting .270 with a .307 on-base percentage (OBP), 22 home runs and nine stolen bases in 430 plate appearances in his first season with the Colorado Rockies.
Along the way, the 27-year-old has added 57 runs and 65 RBI while sporting a .347 xwOBA and a wRC+ that’s nine points above league average.
Moniak has also been even more productive as of late, with four home runs and three stolen bases in 49 plate appearances since the start of September. In the process, Moniak is batting .326 with a .367 OBP, a 150 wRC+ and a .261 ISO during that span. Entering play on Wednesday, he had three home runs in his last two games.
Yet, Moniak is rostered in just 8% of leagues. With such a low rostership rate, you’ll want to add him to your fantasy team before someone else in your league does the same. But there’s more to it than simply that. You’ll want Moniak in your starting lineups for the rest of the week.
Colorado finishes the week at home with a Thursday game against the Miami Marlins and then three games against the Los Angeles Angels to close out their home schedule for the year.
That Colorado doesn’t have even more home games to finish the year could certainly be better from a fantasy perspective, but the Angels (with a 4.82 FIP for the season) and the Marlins (a team with a 4.32 FIP this year) have two of the league’s 10 highest collective FIP numbers this season. The Angels, in particular, have the sport’s highest FIP behind only, coincidentally, the Rockies.
Jake Burger (1B, 3B, DH – TEX)
Speaking of batters who are on far too few fantasy rosters, Jake Burger is rostered in just 32% of leagues. And while that’s significantly higher than the percentage of leagues Moniak rostered, it’s still rather low for a hitter with significant power potential.
Burger hit 63 home runs from 2023 to 2024. Since the start of 2023 through the start of play on Wednesday, only 24 batters hit more home runs than the Texas Rangers slugger, who hit as many as Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and more than Bryce Harper during that span.
Burger is yet to hit above .250 in a full season, thus limiting his fantasy upside; he still has the potential to go on a hot streak at the plate from a power production standpoint. That’s more or less what’s happening now.
Since the start of August, the corner infielder is batting .308 with a .348 OBP, five home runs, a .277 ISO and a 157 wRC+ in his last 69 plate appearances. Four of those five home runs have come since the start of September. More home runs could, in theory, be on the way.
Of course, that’s all entirely speculative, mind you, but the Rangers finish the regular season with six games at home against the Miami Marlins and Minnesota Twins (three each) and then head to Cleveland for three more games.
For the season, the Twins’ (9.2%) and Marlins’ (8.9%) pitching staffs have given up the third- and fifth-highest barrel rates, respectively, giving Burger plenty of opportunities to collect even more home runs before the season comes to a close.
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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.
