This is “The Watchlist.”
The Watchlist is a column designed to help you monitor and pick up dynast 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 becoming the hot waiver commodity or trade target, whether that’s later in the offseason or when spring training rolls around.
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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 that they’ll help you find success in your fantasy league while staying ahead of the curve against your league mates.
Fantasy Baseball Watchlist
Tony Gonsolin (SP – LAD)
Reportedly adding Blake Snell to their rotation mix certainly changes things for the Dodgers’ rotation outlook.
Snell would join a group that, at present, will also feature some combination of Tyler Glasnow, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani, Clayton Kershaw, Tony Gonsolin, Dustin May, Bobby Miller and Landon Knack.
And while at first glance that might seem unideal for Gonsolin, especially if the Dodgers add even more rotation reinforcements this winter, the fact that the rotation is already crowded works in your favor here as a fantasy manager.
The Angels utilized a six-man rotation when Ohtani pitched, and if their in-state rivals do the same, it will open up more opportunities for other starters to log innings.
Furthermore, Glasnow set a new career high with 134 regular season innings last year. Snell has topped that number only twice in his career (though both were admittedly 180-inning campaigns).
Meanwhile, Yamamoto and Kershaw had injury-shortened seasons while Ohtani, May and Gonsolin didn’t pitch in the Majors last season due to recovering from injury. Ohtani due to surgery to repair a torn UCL in his right elbow and May and Gonsolin due to Tommy John surgery. May also suffered an esophageal tear in July.
Add it all up and you have a situation where there could be plenty of innings to go around if the Dodgers are cautious with any combination of their starters.
It’s also a potential fantasy rotation situation that from the outside looking in seems jumbled and unclear in terms of the exact potential of inning allotments.
Use that to your advantage in either adding Gonsolin (who made three rehab starts with Los Angeles’ Triple-A team in September) as an ancillary player in a larger dynasty trade or as someone to add off the waiver wire.
Los Angeles has been here before with mixing and matching rotation options. No starter logged more than 145 innings for the National League West club last season, but eight made at least 10 starts. All told, 10 pitchers logged at least six starts for the defending World Series champs.
Still, even if it’s a truncated number of starts, Gonsolin has a chance to thrive from a pitcher-win standpoint pitching alongside an elite lineup — one that was second in the league in runs scored and first in wRC+ last season.
It’s something he’s done before.
Over his last two full seasons, the veteran won 24 of his 44 starts from 2022 through 2023, despite posting a collective FIP (4.23) that was more decent than great and throwing just 233.1 total innings.
For reference, that’s the same number of pitcher wins as Kevin Gausman and Joe Ryan during that stretch despite considerably fewer innings. Gausman and Ryan, for reference, threw 359.2 and 308.2 innings, respectively, during those two years.
The Dodgers’ lineup? They outscored every other Major League team in those two seasons combined and had the sport’s second-highest wRC+.
The floor here is a pitcher who can get you a relatively outsized number of pitcher wins in 15 or so starts. The ceiling, if he throws a bit more, is the pitcher who won 16 games in 24 starts and pitched 130.1 innings in 2022.
That’s the fantasy potential of the Dodgers’ lineup for you.
Kyle Wright (SP – KC)
Kyle Wright’s situation isn’t entirely similar to Gonsolin’s, yet there are several fantasy similarities here that make the former Atlanta starter someone to keep an eye on ahead of time for fantasy managers in both dynasty and redraft leagues.
Wright missed the 2024 season while recovering from right shoulder surgery. He was traded last November by Atlanta to Kansas City for fellow pitcher Jackson Kowar.
After spending the year on the 60-day injured list (IL), Wright appears poised to step back into a Major League rotation.
And while the Royals aren’t quite as fantasy-friendly of a proposition as the Dodgers, there are a few key things that make the right-hander a comparatively higher ceiling option to Gonsolin.
The first is opportunity. With Brady Singer now in Cincinnati, Wright — at this point in the offseason — looks like the speculative favorite to join Cole Ragans, Seth Lugo, Michael Wacha and Alec Marsh in the Kansas City rotation.
The 29-year-old pitched to a 3.19 ERA and a 3.58 FIP in 180.1 innings in his last full season in 2022. Most notably, for fantasy purposes, Wright won 21 of his 30 starts that season while adding 174 strikeouts and surrendering 53 walks and 19 home runs.
It seems rather unlikely he’ll replicate that win total. Only 12 times (Wright in 2022 included) since 2010 has a pitcher won 21+ games in a season. Four of those 12 instances were either achieved by Justin Verlander or Clayton Kershaw, who both accomplished the feat twice.
Still, the Royals’ roster as constructed gives Wright the potential to once again log a quality, double-digit win tally. The Kansas City fantasy environment around the starter in general is the second part of this equation that raises his fantasy ceiling.
Last season, the Royals’ rotation collected 60 pitcher wins, the fourth-most in the league and just five behind the league-leading Yankees. All five of Kansas City’s most utilized starters logged at least nine pitcher wins last season.
Elsewhere, the Royals finished behind 18 teams in on-base percentage (OBP) and finished behind 13 teams in bullpen fWAR.
So far, the Royals have added Jonathan India (.357 on-base percentage in 637 plate appearances last year) and will get a full season of Lucas Erceg at the back-end of the team’s bullpen. Erceg finished with the ninth-highest fWAR among qualified relievers and logged a 2.53 FIP in 61.2 innings split between Oakland and Kansas City.
And that’s without any other offseason moves. Full seasons of India and Erceg should help the Royals not only score more but also close out games more effectively, leading to even more pitcher-win potential for their starters. Starters that look set to include Wright.
Jordan Hicks (RP, SP – SF)
Sticking with the (inadvertent) starting pitcher theme, Jordan Hicks is well worth a look for fantasy managers in 2025, regardless of whether it be in dynasty or redraft formats.
The 28-year-old pitched to a 4.10 ERA and a 4.37 FIP in 109.2 innings last season, spanning 29 appearances and 20 starts.
A full-time starter for much of the year, the right-hander made his last start on July 23.
Hicks was quoted as saying the following in an article from Evan Webeck in The Mercury News on July 22:
“I knew going in it wasn’t going to be the whole season,’ Hicks said. ‘Now that we’re kind of getting to that point, it’s just about making those last final starts, being strong with it and then just accepting and finding the right plan going forward after.”
Later in the article, Webeck wrote the following:
“Hicks, 27, described this season as a ‘building year,’ and the expectation is that he would resume starting duties again in 2025.”
And while Hicks’ stats as a reliever after July 24 — a stretch that included a 4.91 ERA and a 4.89 FIP in 11 innings and 4.91 strikeouts and 4.91 walks allowed per nine frames — aren’t as crucial here, his early-season starting splits are.
In 11 starts spanning 58 innings through May 25, the veteran pitched to a 2.33 ERA and a 3.60 FIP while allowing just 2.95 walks and 0.62 home runs per nine frames. Perhaps most crucially, he limited batters to a 39.0% hard-hit rate and induced grounders at a 53.4% rate during that run of starts.
And while Hicks might not overwhelm with strikeouts — his strikeout rate through May 25 was just 20.4% — his ability to limit damage and induce a bunch of weak contact should continue to play well in one of the league’s most pitcher-friendly ballparks, one that has the third-lowest overall park factor in the sport in the last three seasons, per Spotrac.
If he’s anywhere like his early-season form last season, the former reliever should be a viable fantasy rotation option in leagues with 12 or more teams. Furthermore, his ability to induce grounders and weak contact should keep his ERA and WHIP totals low. That makes him a fit for just about any kind of fantasy roster construction strategy.
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