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.
Jeff McNeil (2B, OF – ATH)
Acquired in a trade with the New York Mets during the offseason, infielder Jeff McNeil is off to a relatively slow start at the plate in his first season with the Athletics, at least where his surface-level metrics are concerned.
McNeil is batting .235 with a .305 on-base percentage (OBP) and a 72 wRC+ in 224 plate appearances. If the season were to end today, all three numbers would be career lows for the veteran. He’s also collected a pair of home runs, 15 runs, 15 RBI and a stolen base as of the start of play this week, while walking 8% of the time and striking out 13.8% of the time.
McNeil’s surface-level numbers haven’t been ideal since the start of May either. He’s hitting just .193 with a .252 OBP and a wRC+ that is 64 points below league average during that stretch.
However, better production is coming. At least if McNeil keeps making contact like this.
Since the start of May in 119 plate appearances, the infielder is striking out just 16% of the time with a .222 batting average on balls in play (BABIP). Only 16 qualified batters during that stretch have a lower BABIP. Just 41 batters, for what it’s worth, have a lower strikeout rate.
Elsewhere, the Athletics will play their next 13 games at home, as well as 19 of their next 25 overall. Per Statcast, the Sutter Health Park has the league’s highest overall park factor this season. The Athletics’ home stadium also had the league’s second-highest overall park factor last year, also per Statcast.
The only road games during that 25-game stretch are three games in San Francisco against the Giants and three in Anaheim against an Angels team with the league’s third-highest ERA. The Giants have the league’s eighth-highest ERA. McNeil is a quality streaming option for fantasy managers looking for second base reinforcements over the next few weeks.
Colin Rea (SP, RP – CHC)
Colin Rea is more of a deeper league streaming option at the moment, but he’s still someone you’ll want on your roster for the next few weeks. Particularly on Tuesday against Colorado. Assuming Chicago’s rotation continues as is without any interruptions, his two starts after that will be against the San Francisco Giants and the Toronto Blue Jays.
On paper, pitching on the road in Colorado seems like a daunting task, but the Rockies actually entered play this week with the league’s third-lowest home wRC+ (81) and the league’s fifth-fewest home runs (28) hit at home.
Elsewhere, the Giants and Blue Jays both rank in the bottom third of the league in runs scored this season. They both entered play on Monday having scored the same number of runs (272).
Furthermore, San Francisco’s home ballpark has the fourth-lowest overall park factor this season, per Statcast. And, the National League West club has just a 93 wRC+ at home, a number that ranks ahead of only five other teams.
While Rea’s 4.59 ERA and 4.47 FIP in 64.2 innings this year are both somewhat unideal, he could make an impact for fantasy managers in the next few weeks as a streaming option.
And despite said run prevention numbers, Rea has allowed three earned runs or fewer in five of his last seven outings. He’s also sporting a 46.8% groundball rate on the season. That should help from a fantasy standpoint against a Blue Jays team that entered Monday with the fifth-highest groundball rate.
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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.