Fantasy Baseball Watchlist: Waiver Wire & Trade Targets (2026)

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 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.

Myles Straw (OF – TOR)

Straw has appeared in 99 games for the Blue Jays so far this season, batting .216 with a .273 on-base percentage and a .097 ISO while connecting on three home runs and stealing six bases.

The three home runs are actually one away from equaling a career-high for Straw, who has always made more of an impact in the field and on the basepaths.

The ability to steal bases at a high rate, in particular, has helped Straw to a number of quality fantasy seasons in the past. He stole 71 bases combined from 2021 through 2023, including a career best 30 during the 2021 campaign.

Looking more at this season, the veteran outfielder has seen significant time as a pinch hitter in 2026, so potentially stepping into a more regular role down the stretch now that Toronto has traded away Daulton Varsho could lead to plenty of stolen base opportunities.

While he’s hitting just .216, he’s also doing so with a .232 BABIP and a 12.8% strikeout rate. As long as keeps making that much contact, his batting average should improve considerably as well.

Straw’s power production will limit his fantasy ceiling, but in deeper leagues or in leagues with five starting outfield spots, he’s an intriguing option for fantasy managers in search of potential stolen base production.

Anthony Seigler (2B, 3B – BOS)

Seigler is already a mainstay in the Red Sox lineup as of late, routinely hitting leadoff for the club in the past month.

The 27-year-old entered play as of the trade deadline batting .237 with a .305 on-base percentage, three home runs and a pair of stolen bases in 132 plate appearances, but better surface-level numbers could very well be on the horizon.

Seigler hasn’t hit for significant power, what with a 6.2% barrel rate and a .308 xwOBA, but he’s also striking out just 17.4% of the time with a 21.6% whiff rate.

Also, if the infielder’s recent underlying data in July is anything to go by, his batting average and on-base percentage (as well as his RBI and run scored opportunities with them) should improve in the coming weeks.

Seigler is batting just .179 with a .253 on-base percentage since the start of July in 88 plate appearances, but that stretch has also come with just a 15.9% strikeout rate and a .190 BABIP. The BABIP in particular is the fourth-lowest among all qualified batters during that stretch entering play on Monday.

Furthermore, the Red Sox will take on the White Sox and Athletics in their next two series. The White Sox have the league’s 13^th-highest FIP this season with a 4.15 number, the Athletics the league’s highest FIP at an even 5.00. Both teams also rank in the bottom half of the league in strikeout rate.

All told, Seigler is an impact streaming option for the short-term and is someone with the potential to turn the tide in multiple categories (runs scored and batting average) in the next week or two.

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.

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