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 becoming the hot waiver commodity or trade target.

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• MLB Prop Bet Cheat Sheet
• Rest-of-Season Projections

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.

Matt Mervis (1B, DH – MIA)

Oftentimes with rebuilding clubs, they tend to take a chance on former well-regarded prospects who’ve yet to establish themselves in the Majors.

That’s very much the case with Matt Mervis and the Miami Marlins.

The former Cubs prospect has just 127 career plate appearances in the Majors, hitting .155 with a .222 on-base percentage, a 34 wRC+ and three home runs during parts of two seasons with the Cubs in 2023 and 2024.

Mervis has been much more productive in the upper Minors in his career, including a 2022 season in which he slugged 36 home runs to go along with a .399 on-base percentage in 578 plate appearances at the Triple-A level.

While looking purely at stat lines in the Minors, particularly ones from a few years ago isn’t ideal, there are several bits of data in Mervis’ underlying metrics that suggest he could be an intriguing fantasy option if given an extended look in the Majors, something he hasn’t had so far.

We’re dealing with smaller sample sizes here, mind you, but sometimes that’s what’s required to find undervalued fantasy players.

Mervis struggled mightily in a 28-plate appearance sample size last season, but showed promising bat speed in the process, logging an average bat speed of 74.9 MPH (miles per hour) that would have (if he qualified) ranked in the top 30 in the league, per Statcast’s bat tracking data.

Generally speaking, faster bat speeds tend to lead to louder contact. Giancarlo Stanton, Oneil Cruz, Kyle Schwarber, Aaron Judge and Jo Adell ranked (in order) in the top five in average bat speed last season.

Mervis’ average bat speed, if it had been throughout a full season, would’ve put him just behind Christian Walker and just ahead of the likes of Fernando Tatis Jr., Riley Greene, William Contreras and Bobby Witt Jr.

Again, tiny sample size, but there’s enough upside to see what the Marlins’ first baseman could potentially do over an extended sample size, especially considering he accumulated eight barrels on his first 58 batted ball events in 2023.

If Mervis can combine the bat speed and barrels at a reasonably solid rate (his barrel rate in 2023 in that small sample size was 13.8%) in an extended run of plate appearances in the Majors, he could be a solid source of power production and RBI in a Marlins lineup that isn’t overflowing with depth, especially with Jesus Sanchez set to begin the year on the injured list (IL). The team is also without a surefire starter at first base after trading Jake Burger in the offseason.

Amed Rosario (2B, 3B, SS, OF, DH – WSH)

Amed Rosario’s versatility lends itself to both plenty of pathways to playing time in 2025 with the Washington Nationals and to boosting his fantasy ceiling.

The infielder/outfielder saw time at second base, third base, shortstop and in right field last season. That should give him plenty of chances to play often when Luis Garcia Jr., CJ Abrams or one of the team’s outfielders needs a day off. But, it could also help the veteran see plenty of time at third base if the Nationals opt for a platoon situation.

Fellow infielder Paul DeJong hit .227 with a .276 on-base percentage, 24 home runs, two stolen bases and a 95 wRC+ in 482 plate appearances for the Chicago White Sox and Kansas City Royals last season, striking out 32.4% of the time.

However, against left-handed pitching, his already high strikeout rate jumped to 36.6% and his wRC+ dropped to 72. All told, just five of DeJong’s home runs came against left-handed pitching, and there was a nearly .060-point gap between his ISO against lefties (.162) and righties (.213).

Rosario, meanwhile, hit .294 in 126 plate appearances last season against left-handed pitching with a wRC+ that was 11 points (111) above league average and well above his wRC+ (88) vs right-handed pitching.

Overall, he’s hit below the .280 mark just once in a full season since 2019, thanks to routinely low strikeout rates that often finish below the 22% mark.

Rosario is more of an addition for leagues with 14+ teams at this point, but he could make an outsized impact with his ability and track record to hit for a high average. Additionally, the veteran has reached at least 13 stolen bases in each of the last four seasons.

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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.