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 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 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 with 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.
Acquired by the Chicago Cubs from the Baltimore Orioles ahead of the trade deadline, Andrew Kittridge has quickly settled into a high-leverage role in the Cubs bullpen – a role that looks like it could very well include ancillary save opportunities down the stretch.
For the season, the veteran has pitched to a 3.66 ERA and a 3.32 FIP in 40 appearances spanning 39.1 innings this season. He’s rattled off three pitcher wins and a pair of saves so far, with a 26.8% strikeout rate compared to a 5.7% walk rate. Kittredge’s 1.14 home runs allowed per nine innings is his lowest in a full season since 2021, when he was a member of the Tampa Bay Rays.
Perhaps most crucially of all of that encouraging statistical data is the fact that Kittredge has logged one of his three pitcher wins and both of his saves for the season in nine appearances as a member of the Cubs.
Chicago isn’t hurting for high-leverage setup options ahead of closer Daniel Palencia, with Brad Keller, Drew Pomeranz, and Taylor Rogers among the options alongside Kittredge. Still, the fact that Kittredge already has multiple saves this month – he’s also tied for the team lead in high-leverage relief appearances since joining the Cubs and has one of just two high-leverage relief appearances not made by Palencia this month – positions him for potential save chances down the stretch when Palencia isn’t available.
That alone makes the veteran worth adding now ahead of time, particularly on a contending team like the Cubs. However, if Palencia were to miss an extended stretch due to injury or ineffectiveness, Kittredge would immediately become a top 12 (or better) fantasy closer.
With so many teams going with committee approaches after trading their closers last month – see Arizona and St. Louis among others – Kittredge’s fantasy floor is helped even more so by the comparative lack of established closers in the league as opposed to earlier in the season.
Another pitcher traded ahead of last month’s trade deadline, the fact that JP Sears has been optioned to the minors already by the San Diego 8Padres might result in him flying under the radar a bit, fantasy-wise.
The 29-year-old has done an excellent job limiting walks this year, with just a 6.0% walk rate, but has otherwise struggled from a run-prevention standpoint.
For the season, Sears has pitched to a 5.12 ERA and a 5.00 FIP in 23 starts spanning 116 innings for the Athletics and Padres. He’s logged seven pitcher wins and five quality starts in the process with a 20.3% strikeout rate and the aforementioned 6.0% walk rate.
The left-hander should continue to do well from a pitcher-win standpoint, but his run-prevention numbers have the potential to improve considerably if he keeps limiting walks like this due to the significant difference in home ballparks.
Per Statcast data, the Athletics’ home ballpark sported the league’s second-highest overall park factor (114) and the eighth-highest for home runs (112).
San Diego’s Petco Park, meanwhile, is tied for the third-lowest overall park factor (96) this season and the seventh-lowest in terms of home run park factor (86).
With such a pitcher-friendly ballpark and a relative lack of walks, Sears has the fantasy ceiling not just to be a quality fantasy streaming option at times, given the right matchup, but also as a pitcher who could outperform being simply a streaming option and stick on fantasy rosters for the rest of the season.
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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 about fantasy baseball for his own Substack page, Ben Rosener’s Fantasy Baseball Help Substack. He only refers to himself in the third person for bios.