Fantasy Baseball Waiver Wire Week 17
Let’s dig into the numbers and figure out who to target at various positions to help our fantasy rosters.
MLB Fantasy
Waiver Wire Week 17 Waiver Options For 12-Team Leagues
Chas McCormick, OF, Houston Astros (47% rostered) – Perhaps the league’s best hitter over the last few weeks remains criminally underrated and under-rostered in fantasy right now. Fresh off a n AL Player of the Week award, McCormick continues to rake and is now batting an even .400 with four home runs over the last two weeks. Also over the last two weeks, only four major league player have a higher wRC+ than McCormick’s 263. He has a .500 OBP in that span and even threw in a steal for good measure. McCormick was always a decent bat, great-defense outfielder (remember the game-saving catch in Philadelphia during the World Series last fall?) but this level of offense is off the charts. It’s unsustainable with a .500 BABIP in his last two weeks, but he is now up to .285/.370/.534 on the season and is just what the Astros needed to stay afloat amongst all the major injuries to players like Jose Altuve and Yordan Alvarez. McCormick will continue to play every day even with Yordan back, so he is a sage pick-up right now.
Jeimer Candelario, 3B, Washington Nationals (39% rostered) – If you’re like me, you see Jeimer Candelario and you think he must be 35 years old by now. But that’s not even close. Even though he has been in the league for eight seasons, he is still 29 years old and in the prime ages of his offensive production. So far this season, he is putting together a career year with a .259/.334/.485 slash line with 15 home runs and five steals, with almost 50 runs and 50 RBI. The reason? He has significantly reduced his strikeouts to just barely over 20% this season and he is drawing walks at an 8% clip as well. He is lofting the ball and hitting more flyballs than ever before in his career (42.3%) and has his third-highest hard-hit rate of his career (37.7%). Candelario is now batting second or third in every Nationals’ game and the only thing that can slow down this pace would be a trade to a contender who needs a utility player of some kind and doesn’t commit to playing him every day.
Edouard Julien, 2B, Minnesota Twins (24% rostered) – Second baseman Edouard Julien is a rock-solid fantasy option when he starts for the Twins these days, but it comes with one big caveat. He hasn’t started a game against a left-handed pitcher since June 19th and has sat out eight straight against them. Julien is a daily fantasy league-only play right now unless his weekly docket lines up against a bunch of right-handers. But when he plays, he is batting second in the order and is lighting it up. In fact, despite a couple of benchings in his last two weeks, he is the 1th-best fantasy bat in the Yahoo rotisserie game. He is hitting .625 with three home runs and a steal plus eight runs scored. Now safely in between Carlos Correa and Alex Kiriloff in the lineup, it has allowed him to see good pitches to hit resulting in a 45.9% hard hit rate in his first 48 games.
Nick Pivetta, SP, Boston Red Rox (16% rostered) – At just 16% rostered, I guess some fantasy managers are getting turned off by the fact that Pivetta has been serving as the long-man option after Boston began experimenting with an opener the past couple of weeks? But considering he doesn’t even need to go five innings in those scenarios to secure a win, fantasy managers should be clocking to Pivetta considering his performance in his appearances over the last month. In that span, he has a 2.41 ERA with a 0.75 WHIP and 34 punchouts in 18 innings. He has wins in his last two appearances despite not starting either of them. Manager Alex Cora has already come out and said he will start at some point in the near future, but he would be rostering Pivetta no matter what his role. Pivetta has ramped up the cutter and slider usage this year and it is finally starting to pay dividends. He has a .118/.196/.255 line allowed in July and is a pitcher that can help even the most pitching-secure fantasy squads.
Kendall Graveman, RP, Chicago White Sox (31% rostered) – Like everyone else in the fantasy baseball world, I wanted Liam Hendriks to kick cancer’s ass and then come back to reclaim his closer role for the rest of the season for the White Sox. Unfortunately, he is injured again so the role falls to Kendall Graveman and he is truly excelling. This is a player who needs to be 100% rostered even if the “other” Chicago team isn’t that good this season. Graveman has been phenomenal with a 3.07 ERA and almost nine strikeouts per nine innings, leading to eight saves on the season. The walks (4.17 per nine innings) are a bit worrisome, but he has managed to get around that with a 81% left-on-base percentage this year. He is giving up more fly balls than ever before (almost 45%), but his hard-hit percentage of 27.1% is quite a bit below his career 28.9% rate. The long-term role is somewhat uncertain depending on Hendriks’ availability, but it was an elbow issue for the incumbent, and with his other health problems, there is a chance this is an extended absence.
Waiver Wire Week 17 Waiver Options for 17-Team Leagues
Trent Grisham, OF, San Diego Padres (9% rostered) – Despite batting ninth most days now in San Diego, Trent Grisham is putting up fantasy numbers that make us reminisce about what might have been when he his 15 homers and stole 13 bases in just 132 games in 2021. Over the last 30 days, Grisham is batting .291 with four home runs and five steals, chipping in 16 runs and 14 RBI from the end of the order. What caused him to be so successful lately? The BABIP is normal (.289). The walk rate (13%) and strikeout rate (28%) are in line with career norms. It’s because he has added 10% to his flyball rate between the first and second half. That’s allowed him to jump up to a 25% HR/FB rate despite a 40% groundball rate. Grisham will play literally every day in this lineup and the Padres are fourth in the majors in runs scored over the last 30 days.
Mike Tauchman, OF, Chicago Cubs (2% rostered) – Mike Tauchman is a lot like Edouard Julien in that he won’t play against left-handers. In fact, his last start against one was on June 21st. Coincidentally, the Cubs have had an unprecedented stretch of facing five left-handers in their last 10 games so Tauchman has started the game on the bench half the time the last two weeks. But in the games he has started, he bats leadoff and is actually one of the top fantasy producers in the last 10 days. He is hitting .310 with a couple of bombs over the last two weeks despite getting just 29 at-bats. His exit velocity, barrel rate, and hard hit rate are all up over last season, and that should grant him the strong side of the leadoff platoon for at least the rest of the season.
Triston Casas, 1B, Boston Red Sox (23% rostered) – Baseball fans who have followed top prospects for some time all know what kind of elite plate discipline and bat control Casas has. Casas had walk rates between 12% and 20% in all of his minor league season, but that was accompanied with elite power numbers as well. That completely disappeared in his 27 MLB games last year, but has finally started to return in 2023. Casas has 12 homers in just 84 games and is up in slugging percentage (.430) around 30 points over 2022. Three of those home runs and a .333 average have come his was over the last 14 days as the ultra-talented rookie seems to be turning a corner that combines his patience and power at the MLB level. Before things really start to get going for Casas, I recommend stashing him now if you need 1B or CI help for the stretch run.
Brandon Bielak, SP, Houston Astros (14% rostered) – Brandon Bielak will miss the cushy series against the Oakland Athletics this weekend, but that’s only because he made it through the Coors Field gauntlet unscathed. He held the Rockies score less at home over 5.2 innings on Wednesday and he has only allowed two earned runs total over his last three starts. His 3.46 ERA as a starter isn’t due to strikeout stuff. He has an 18% K rate and has only struck out more than five batters twice since he entered the rotation. He’s mainly doing it by way of a 50% groundball rate and a flyball rate that is more than 10 percentage points lower than it was in 2022. The BABIP is .293 so it’s not as if he is getting really lucky. With Jose Urquidy, Lance McCullers, and Luis Garcia out of the rotation indefinitely, Bielak has a chance to stick for a while and should get much more run support when Altuve and Alvarez return soon.
Justin Lawrence, RP, Colorado Rockies (20% rostered) – I know that there are zero fantasy managers out there who actually want to roster a Colorado Rockies relief pitcher these days. We have already seen Coors Field chew up and spit out Pierce Johnson and other quality pitchers this year. But there has officially been a changing of the guard, and super-deep fantasy managers should be trying to scrape the barrel for every last save they can. Justin Lawrence has a save and a hold in his previous six times on the mound. Overall, he has three wins, six saves, a 9.4 K/9 rate, and a respectable 2.57 ERA in 49 innings pitched, including 28 of them at home. This is a pitcher who was in AAA as recently as last season, but has cut down his walks (11.5% to 9.4%) and ticked up his groundballs to over 53%. Strikeouts and ground balls are the only successful formula in Coors Field, so Lawrence may have a hold on the job for quite some time.
