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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.
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.
Similar to Javier Sanoja and the Miami Marlins a few weeks ago, Dalyen Lile and the rest of the Washington Nationals lineup will get consecutive series on the road against the Athletics and the Colorado Rockies in two of Major League Baseball’s two most hitter-friendly ballparks.
Lile doesn’t have quite the same low strikeout rate as Sanoja does (the Marlins infielder finished the first half with just an 8.6% strikeout rate). The Nationals outfielder finished the first half with a 17.6% strikeout rate that ranked in the 70th percentile league-wide.
Lile hasn’t been able to replicate his .348 xwOBA or .299 batting average and .347 on-base percentage (OBP) from last year in 351 plate appearances, but Lile has provided solid fantasy counting stats in one of the league’s best lineups.
The 23-year-old has collected 10 home runs, nine stolen bases, 49 runs scored and 44 RBI in 403 plate appearances for the National League East franchise.
The high-scoring nature of Washington’s lineup so far (the Nationals have the league’s fourth-best wRC+, second-most home runs and second-best xwOBA) means you’re probably going to want to consider some Nationals hitters as streaming options anyway.
Their upcoming schedule and Lile’s ability to make contact at a reasonably high rate give him short-term fantasy upside in the season’s second half, following the All-Star break. That Lile is approaching double-digit stolen bases certainly doesn’t hurt his fantasy ceiling either.
Sticking in the Nationals’ outfield, Jacob Young’s numbers for the season look reasonably similar to Lile’s. He’s hitting .224 with a .275 OBP, eight home runs and nine stolen bases to go along with 34 runs scored and 31 RBI in 288 plate appearances. The 26-year-old is also striking out just 18.8% of the time in 288 plate appearances so far.
The road ballparks in the first two series out of the All-Star break are certainly part of the potential short-term upside for Young, but it’s the stolen base potential as well.
The outfielder stole 15 bases in 120 games and 364 plate appearances last season and registered 33 in 150 games and 521 plate appearances in 2024. He has 70 for his career in 389 games since the start of 2023. Only 34 players have more stolen bases than Young in that span.
Put slightly differently, Young has only one fewer stolen base than the Brewers’ Christian Yelich during that span despite nearly 600 fewer plate appearances. The Nationals outfielder has just seven fewer stolen bases than the Marlins’ Xavier Edwards during that stretch despite 121 fewer plate appearances.
Heading into the second half, the Nationals will follow up a road series against the Athletics and then one against the Rockies with three series against Arizona (at home), Toronto (at home) and Atlanta (on the road).
Colorado is the league’s fourth-worst team in Statcast’s catcher-caught-stealing above-average metric. Atlanta is the league’s worst. The Blue Jays and Athletics have both been in the top 10 in the league in that metric.
However, the upcoming schedule, the combination of hitter-friendly ballparks and stolen base opportunities in the team’s first handful of series out of the All-Star break, makes Young a potentially under-the-radar, quality fantasy option to consider in the short term.
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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.
