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.
- Fantasy Baseball Trade Analyzer
- Best Fantasy Baseball Waiver Wire Tools
- Fantasy Baseball Lineup Assistant
- MLB Prop Bet Cheat Sheet
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.
Jonah Heim (C, CI, DH – ATH)
With Shea Langeliers landing on the injured list (IL), Jonah Heim should see fairly consistent playing time moving forward. Of course, that’s all entirely speculative, but Heim has appeared in 46 games for the Athletics so far, hitting .227 with a .271 on-base percentage (OBP), eight home runs and a .195 ISO after starting the year with Atlanta. He’s mostly split time between catcher and designated hitter.
The power production has been solid, and has no doubt been helped by the veteran’s strong numbers at home. In home games since joining the American League West franchise, Heim is batting .266 with a .306 OBP, six home runs, a .253 ISO and a 120 wRC+.
And while Heim hasn’t hit consistently for average this season, it’s possible his batting average improves moving forward alongside the quality power numbers, particularly with a potentially more significant role.
For the season, the 31-year-old has a .238 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) in 211 plate appearances. He’s one of just 20 players league-wide (minimum 200 plate appearances) to have a BABIP below the .240 mark.
Of those 20, Heim is just one of six with a strikeout rate below 20% for the season.
More recently, the Athletics catcher has a reasonably similar BABIP (.234) in his last 66 plate appearances since the start of July. All told, better production overall could very well be on the way, and potentially more plate appearances as well.
If you’re looking for fantasy reinforcements in two-catcher leagues, Heim is very much worth a look in the short term.
Javier Sanoja (2B, 3B, SS, OF – MIA)
Javier Sanoja was mentioned in this column last month as someone to add ahead of time in the short term, considering the infielder and the rest of the Marlins had upcoming games against the Rockies and Athletics on the road at the time.
Sanoja doesn’t quite have the same fantasy-friendly schedule upcoming. Admittedly, you probably won’t find a two-series stretch that’s more fantasy-friendly this season than having consecutive road series against those two clubs.
Still, improved production looks likely to be on the way for Sanoja, this time due to different factors.
The infielder is batting .250 with a .282 OBP in 71 plate appearances since the start of July, but he’s doing so with just a minuscule 1.4% strikeout rate — the lowest among all qualified batters during that stretch.
Sanoja’s BABIP since the start of July? Just .254.
And while the batted ball data isn’t identical, it is worth noting that the Rays’ Chandler Simpson has a 5.1% strikeout rate and a .417 BABIP during that span in 78 plate appearances. He’s hitting .405 during that stretch.
Again, not the same batted ball data, but generally speaking, if you’re making that much contact, the BABIP can have an outsized impact on your surface-level stats. And, the more Sanoja continues to make contact at this high a rate, the more likely that BABIP is going to improve, and his other stats with it.
Once that happens, Sanoja will likely be an impact waiver wire addition in leagues that use batting average as part of the scoring. Add him now before that happens.
Subscribe: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | iHeart | Castbox | Amazon Music | Podcast Addict | SoundCloud | TuneIn
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.
