When it comes to fantasy baseball, we often discuss streaming starting pitchers but rarely talk about streaming hitters. In most instances, it makes sense. We like to give hitters more than one week to show us what they’re capable of, and we more often are playing pitchers because of matchups and not hitters.
However, in the final weeks of the season, most full-season strategy goes out the window.
With just three weeks to go in the fantasy baseball season and championships on the line, we need to make sure we’re fielding the best lineup possible each scoring period. That will mean we need to make some tough cuts on hitters who have bad schedules or haven’t been performing and we need to prioritize adding hitters who may not be great overall but have an upcoming stretch that could win us weeks in head-to-head or help us make up ground in roto categories.
With that in mind, below you’ll find a look at some of my favorite hitting streamers based on the upcoming schedule. To put this together, I looked at team pitching stats since August 1st (ERA, ISO, K%, HR/9) and identified the teams we most want to target (Miami, Cincinnati, Boston, Colorado, Washington, Chicago White Sox). Then I went through the projected starters for the next two weeks and made a table with the hitters I like who are rostered in under 50% of Yahoo! leagues. Hopefully, the charts below will give you some shallow-league adds and deep-league adds and the team context should allow you to search your individual waiver wire in case some players have slipped through the cracks in recent weeks, like a Dansby Swanson or Lawrence Butler, etc.
Now let’s dive in.
There’s a lot to like in the Twins’ upcoming schedule. They’re in the middle of a series against the Angels right now and then get the Reds. We don’t love the matchup against the Guardians, but then the Twins get a struggling Red Sox rotation after that. Another thing we love to see is just one left-handed pitcher for this whole schedule, which means guys like Matt Wallner, Edouard Julien, and Trevor Larnach are going to be in the lineup often. Given that all three of them have been performing well, that added playing time is a great perk.
Both of Jose Miranda and Brooks Lee have been starting pretty much every day for the Twins, and while Lee in particular has struggled since coming off the IL, the playing time mixed with solid pitching matchups makes him a solid deep-league add if you’re looking for a MIF option over…