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 next hot waiver commodity or trade target.
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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 waiver wire 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 despite 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.
Stephen Kolek (SP – KCR)
Starting in the American League Central, Stephen Kolek is very much worth adding. The Kansas City Royals starter has made one start in the Majors this season, allowing four hits, three earned runs and a home run in six innings while striking out three batters against the Cleveland Guardians. Kolek earned the win that day.
Looking back to last season, the 29-year-old left-hander thrived in a five-start, 33-inning stint with the Royals after being acquired from the San Diego Padres at the trade deadline. Kolek recorded a 1.91 ERA and a 2.71 FIP in those five starts.
And while more strikeouts would be nice (Kolek struck out 21 batters with the Royals last year, good for just a 16.8% strikeout rate), he helped make up for that, fantasy-scoring-wise, by scattering just five walks and a home run. If you’re doing the math at home, that’s a 4% walk rate and just 0.27 home runs allowed per nine frames.
Overall, Kolek pitched to a 3.51 ERA and a 3.82 FIP in 19 starts spanning 112.2 innings between the Royals and Padres last season. He finished with a 16.7% strikeout rate, a 6.7% walk rate, a 6.1% barrel rate and a 51.7% groundball rate between the two clubs. The walk rate (73rd percentile), barrel rate (82nd percentile) and groundball rate (87th percentile) were all particularly good.
The groundball rate, in particular, is key here when looking at the 29-year-old’s fantasy upside, given Kansas City’s roster construction and the ability to turn Kolek’s grounders into outs at an elite rate.
The Royals entered play on Monday with the league’s sixth-highest outs above average (OAA) as a team with a +7 number. Perhaps more crucially for fantasy purposes, the team’s infield features both Bobby Witt Jr. (+11 OAA at shortstop) and Maikel Garcia (+5 OAA at third base). Witt Jr. leads all qualified players in OAA, while Garcia is tied with four others for fifth.
Patrick Bailey (C – CLE)
Sticking in the American League Central, Patrick Bailey was acquired by the Cleveland Guardians from the San Francisco Giants last week in a trade that sent pitching prospect Matt Wilkinson and a draft pick to the Giants.
Bailey is hitting .141 with a .207 on-base percentage (OBP) this season in 92 plate appearances, adding a home run and a pair of stolen bases. He’s never hit higher than .240 in a season or posted an OBP above .300.
The catcher has been more of an impact performer behind the plate for San Francisco in his career. Still, he’s someone to keep an eye on and potentially add in deeper two-catcher leagues. Cleveland has long valued glove work behind the plate, and it’s possible Bailey could see significant playing time moving forward.
If Bailey can keep stealing bases at a reasonable rate, he could be a solid option in those leagues, particularly if he can steal anywhere close to 10. And while that might seem like a high number for a player with six career stolen bases entering the season, he already has two so far.
Furthermore, Bailey is moving to an arguably better lineup.
Bailey only hit eighth in his Cleveland debut, but the catcher joins a Guardians lineup that has seen eight different batters (minimum 40 plate appearances), sporting a wRC+ above league average, ranging from Rhys Hoskins‘ 101 number in 113 plate appearances to Chase DeLauter‘s 152 number in 153 plate appearances.
What’s more, despite playing for a Giants team that was in the bottom half of the league in both runs scored and wRC+ combined over the last two years, Bailey still finished with more RBI than J.T. Realmuto (in 63 fewer plate appearances), and just 12 fewer runs scored than Adley Rutschman (in 103 fewer plate appearances) during that span.
Regular playing time in Cleveland should lead to more RBI and run-scoring opportunities.
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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 weekly fantasy baseball columns and provides weekly dynasty (top 700) and redraft (top 500) rankings updates for his own Substack page, Ben Rosener’s Fantasy Baseball Help Substack. He only refers to himself in the third person for bios.
