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.
Matt Strahm (RP – KC)
Recently activated from the injured list (IL), Matt Strahm immediately becomes one of the best relievers to add ahead of time for fantasy managers in search of saves down the road. Strahm certainly has the potential to step into Kansas City’s ninth-inning role sooner rather than later. Of course, that’s all entirely speculative on my part.
The veteran reliever was mentioned in this column in late March as someone to potentially add ahead of time for similar reasons.
However, Carlos Estevez had landed on the IL early in the season, and Lucas Erceg took over as Kansas City’s closer, making Strahm perhaps the top ancillary saves option and the next in line for saves at the time.
Fast forward to now, and Estevez is still on the IL, but Erceg has struggled significantly lately. The reliever has allowed three earned runs in each of his last three outings, including a May 30th appearance in Texas in which the Rangers tallied five hits, three earned runs and a home run against the right-hander without making an out.
Overall on the season, Erceg has probably been better than his 6.33 ERA would indicate, with a much better 3.83 FIP. That said, he’s nearly walked as many batters (13) as he’s struck out (18) on the season and has surrendered 17 hits, 10 runs, nine earned runs, the aforementioned home run and a walk in his last five outings dating back to May 14th.
Strahm’s FIP (4.85) is actually decidedly higher than Erceg’s so far, but he’s also logged a 3.86 ERA, hasn’t finished with a FIP above 3.80 in any of the last four seasons and could be poised to step in if Erceg continues to surrender runs at this type of rate.
Again, that’s all entirely speculative on my part, but now’s the time to add Strahm before your league mates do.
Yoendrys Gomez (SP, RP – MIN)
Sticking with relievers, specifically relievers in the American League Central, Minnesota Twins hurler Yoendrys Gomez is very much worth a look ahead of time as a future saves option, much like Matt Strahm.
However, unlike Strahm, Gomez is already seeing somewhat consistent save chances.
Sure, his last save was in the 11th inning. Sure, he’s pitched in two non-save situations since then.
However, the former Rays and White Sox hurler does have the Twins’ last save and has posted a 9.87 ERA and a 2.30 FIP in 12 appearances spanning 10.1 innings for the club, logging a 31.7% strikeout rate against a 9.8% walk rate.
And while 11 different Twins pitchers have registered a save so far, Gomez is one of just four of those pitchers who have logged two saves.
Granted, no Minnesota reliever has more than two saves, and they very well might continue a committee approach, but given Gomez’s strikeout rate and overall effectiveness since joining the team, he looks at worst like a significant part of that committee.
Given said strikeout rate, he might just be the Twins’ reliever to roster at the moment.
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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.