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 they become 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.

Carter Jensen – (C, DH – KC)

With the Kansas City Royals out of the playoff mix, it’s possible that Carter Jansen continues to see regular playing time down the stretch in the season’s final days.

If that’s the case, he’s an ideal addition for fantasy managers in need of reinforcements at the catcher position – particularly for fantasy teams dealing with injuries to Will Smith or Willson Contreras.

Jansen is batting .289 with a .373 on-base percentage, two home runs, a .492 xwOBA and a 153 wRC+ in his first 51 plate appearances in the Majors this season.

It’s a small sample size to be sure, but it’s been an encouraging start to his Major League career for the 22-year-old, who has split his time nearly evenly between designated hitter and catcher so far.

The fact that he’s seen so many starts as the team’s designated hitter should only help him stay in the lineup for the rest of this week.

And while Jansen hasn’t stolen a base yet in the Majors, he has a history of doing so with regularity throughout his minor league career.

The former top prospect has reached double-digit stolen bases in each of his last three minor league seasons, including logging 10 stolen baes in 492 plate appearances with Kansas City’s Triple-A affiliate this season.

Minor league stolen base tallies are by no means a guarantee that a player will be that successful on the base paths in the Majors. Still, Jansen’s upside, where stolen bases are concerned, makes him at the least a must-add in two-catcher leagues and a potential starting option in other leagues, regardless of format.

Thomas Saggese (2B, 3B, SS – STL)

Saggese, like Jansen, should continue to benefit from regular playing time down the stretch with the Cardinals on the outside looking in of the playoff picture.

The rookie infielder is batting .259 with a .302 on-base percentage, two home runs, three stolen bases and an 83 wRC+ in 279 plate appearances for St. Louis this season.

And while Sagese’s 27.2% strikeout rate and .085 ISO on the season could certainly be better, he’s been more productive as of late.

Since the start of the month of August, the infielder is batting .272 with a .316 on-base percentage, a home run and three stolen bases.

Looking even more recently since September 9, and the 23-year-old is sporting a .327 average, a .375 on-base percentage and a 137 wRC+ in his last 56 plate appearances, a stretch that has included a home run, a strikeout, three multi-hit games and a seven-game hit streak.

With a lower walk rate, at just 5.7% as of the start of play on Wednesday, the infielder probably has more fantasy upside in leagues that use batting average instead of on-base percentage as part of the scoring system, but he’s a quality potential streaming option for the season’s final week for fantasy managers.

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.