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.

Wade Meckler (OF – LAA)

This time of year, fantasy-friendly schedules for teams and players can be particularly crucial in terms of identifying which players to add via waivers. That’s very much the case with Wade Meckler, who is still rostered in only 1% of fantasy leagues and is very much flying under the radar from a fantasy perspective.

Meckler is hitting .300 with a .373 on-base percentage (OBP), three home runs and six stolen bases as of the start of play this week in 270 plate appearances. He isn’t making much in the way of loud contact, with a .358 xSLG, a 3.2% barrel rate and just a 33% hard-hit rate.

But Meckler is making plenty of actual contact, with a 19.8% strikeout rate and solid whiff rate (22.3%) and chase rate (23.8%) metrics. Those numbers point to Meckler’s batting average continuing to remain decidedly high over the course of the season, and he should see a number of fantasy-friendly matchups moving forward between now and the fantasy playoffs.

This week in particular, the Angels will finish a three-game set with Boston on Wednesday before heading to Washington to face the Nationals. Entering play this week, the Red Sox’s home ballpark was tied for the second-highest overall park factor in the sport, per Statcast. Washington, meanwhile, has the league’s third-highest collective FIP as a pitching staff, with a 4.74 number, as of the start of play on Monday.

After that, the Angels will close out the season with nine of their last 13 games against the Seattle Mariners (seven), as well as two on the road in one of the league’s most hitter-friendly locales against the Athletics.

Seattle hasn’t been the most fantasy-friendly matchup for opposing batters in recent years, but since the start of August, no team has a higher FIP than the Mariners. Seattle, at 5.10, is the only team in the league with a FIP over the 5.00 mark during that span.

Adam Frazier (2B, OF, DH – LAA)

Sticking with the Angels and making plenty of contact at the plate, Adam Frazier is worth a look for fantasy managers in deeper leagues. For the season, the veteran is batting .235 with a .311 OBP, a home run and two stolen bases in 61 games and 136 plate appearances. However, he’s been much better lately.

Since the start of August, Frazier has appeared in 20 games and hit .289 with a .341 OBP and a pair of stolen bases. He’s walking only 2.3% of the time during that stretch, but also has just a 20.9% strikeout rate during that span.

And while the lack of power production this season (Frazier has a 2.3% barrel rate so far) limits his fantasy ceiling, with fantasy eligibility at both second base and in the outfield, Frazier can help a variety of different fantasy rosters in the season’s closing weeks.

And then there’s the upcoming schedule.

Everything about the Mariners and Athletics currently being fantasy-friendly matchups for hitters for the rest of the season still applies, but it’s worth noting that both teams rank in the bottom third of the league in strikeout rate since the start of August when looking at collective pitching staff numbers.

The Mariners, in particular, have the league’s 10th-lowest strikeout rate, at 20.9%, since the start of August.

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) ranking updates on his own Substack, Ben Rosener’s Fantasy Baseball Help. He only refers to himself in the third person in bios.