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.
Evan Carter (OF – TEX)
Oftentimes, a player’s upcoming schedule can play a key role in determining whether said player is worth a look as a short-term or long-term fantasy option.
That’s very much the case with the Texas Rangers, Evan Carter and a number of his teammates.
The American League West club has a decidedly fantasy-friendly schedule for much of the rest of August. Or rather, for most of the next two weeks. Texas opened a series on Monday on the road against the Los Angeles Angels.
They’ll play four games at home before facing the Athletics on the road for three games. Following that is a six-game homestand split evenly between the Nationals (three games) and the Angels again (three games).
Entering play this week, the Athletics’ pitching staff had the sport’s highest FIP with a 4.95 number. The Nationals’ pitching staff (4.75) isn’t far behind, ranking third in this metric.
The Angels? Only eight teams have a higher FIP than the American League West club.
All of those matchups certainly shouldn’t hurt the short-term fantasy upside of Carter as a streaming option for the next few weeks.
Carter is a candidate for somewhat of a bounce-back in terms of his surface-level stats, with a .194 batting average and a .238 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) in 99 games and 332 plate appearances as of the start of play this week.
The outfielder’s 23.5% strikeout rate could certainly be lower, but it isn’t egregiously high either. With such a low BABIP, Carter stands a good chance of seeing some of his numbers bounce back to a degree at some point here. That could very well come in the next few weeks against a fantasy-friendly group of pitching matchups.
If you’re looking for an outfield streaming option for the next few weeks, particularly in deeper fantasy leagues or in leagues where there are five starting outfield spots, Carter is very much worth a look.
Nicky Lopez (2B, 3B, SS – TEX)
Sticking in Texas with the Rangers, Carter’s teammate Nicky Lopez is already making a bunch of contact (what with a 16.0% strikeout rate) and is batting .278 with a .318 on-base percentage (OBP) and a .331 BABIP in his first 200 plate appearances this season as of the start of play on Monday.
That production includes a .286 batting average and a .326 OBP in 195 plate appearances in Texas, and the infielder, who is four for his last 15 at the plate as of the start of the week, should continue to find success from a fantasy scoring standpoint in the coming weeks given the Rangers’ upcoming matchups.
The Nationals, it should be noted, have the league’s third-lowest strikeout rate (19.4%) as a staff. The Athletics (21.6%) also rank in the bottom half of the league in terms of lowest strikeout rates.
Among the 298 batters with at least 200 plate appearances in the Majors this season, only 59 have a lower strikeout rate than Lopez.
With fantasy eligibility at both second base and at shortstop, Lopez, like Carter, should provide quality fantasy production as a streaming option over the course of the next few weeks.
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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.