Fantasy Baseball Waiver Wire: Why Fantasy Managers Should Consider Giving Up on Brayan Bello, and More

Typically, I write about the main targets of waiver transfers add of any given day’s action, but today is going to be a little different, at least here at the summit. Because while it’s important to emphasize who you should add, there’s another side of this coin: who you should remove. And today it’s Brayan Bello.

I admit that I never fully understood the hype surrounding Bello. As a young pitcher, he’s certainly not without merit, but he’s also probably been a bit overrated in Fantasy for quite a long time now. We’re talking about a guy who worked his way into the top 100 as a prospect solely through a partial season in 2022, but who hasn’t entered any seasons in the top 100. He’s had flashes at MLB level, but also has a career 4.66 ERA, 1.44 WHIP and just 7.9 K/9 in just over two full seasons.

And he’s been even worse than that this season. The Blue Jays hit him for seven earned runs in just 2.1 innings Tuesday, bringing his ERA for the season to 5.55. He throws hard, but never misses his fastball, and his slider and changeup are more decent than truly elite pitches at this point.

There was a bit of bad luck, of course, with a 4.10 xERA entering Tuesday, but we’re still talking about a guy who, thus far in his MLB career, has never had a 21% strikeout rate – the league average is between 22.2 and 22.7% in his three seasons in MLB – and is not so good at limiting hard contact that he can compensate .

Bello has the talent to come out next time and make it ridiculous, of course. But we’re almost 290 innings into his MLB career with an ERA north of 4.50, and yet he’s always 75% registered. There are too many good pitchers right now to justify that kind of price for Bello.

Wednesday’s main waiver targets

Mark Vientos, 3B, Mets (44%) – Vientos continues to do what he can. He hit two more home runs Tuesday against the Yankees, his second straight game with a home run and his fourth in five games, which now gives him six in the month of June. He accomplished this by hitting .275/.329/.565, and that followed a .918 OPS in a smaller sample size in May. He displays improved batting discipline just about everywhere, hitting more often on pitches in the zone and less out of the zone, while also making contact more often when he strikes out, which helps him reduce the strike rate. strikeouts from 30.5% last season to just 21.6%. He sacrificed some contact quality along the way, but it was clearly a tradeoff worth making, with Vientos’ expected wOBA dropping from .304 to .353. It’s fair to be skeptical about the sustainability of all this, but it’s been around long enough that it’s worth sticking with it.

Ty France, 1B, Mariners (35%) — A broken heel derailed what was starting to look like a breakout for France, so it was nice to see him get on the board with his first homer since the injury on Tuesday and his second and third hits. France went to DriveLine to work on his bat speed this offseason and hit .278/.352/.474 in May, so hopefully that will help him get back on track.

Bo Naylor, C, Guardians (25%) – Maybe Naylor is just an extremely slow starter. He really struggled early after his call-up last season and was hitting just .177/.255/.269 through the end of May this season, leading many Fantasy players to abandon ship as he started to lose the game. Well, even though he hasn’t been a world beater in June, he’s hitting .289/.325/.553 after going 3-for-4 with three runs, a double and a triple Tuesday. Naylor still possesses a rare skill set for a catcher, capable of pulling off a handful of steals while ideally sporting an OPS near or above .800, as he did last season. It’s been a rough start, but there still aren’t many No. 2 receiver types with that kind of upside, and I’ll bet on that upside.

Hayden Birdsong, SP, Giants (4%) – Birdsong was widely considered a low-end, top-10 prospect for the Giants heading into the season, but he appears to have progressed en route to what should be his season . debut Wednesday against the Cubs. His promotion is surely partly a matter of desperation, but Birdsong has pitched well enough to warrant an aggressive promotion after just two games at Triple-A. In 13 starts between Double-A and Triple-A, Birdsong has a 2.52 ERA with a 31.1% strikeout rate and 10.8% walk rate. The arsenal is headlined by a mid-90s fastball that presents as a lack of bat, then a slider/cutter, curveball, and changeup that are all likely behind the times compared to where the current situation is. the fastball. He’s had some issues in two starts at Triple-A and has only thrown more than 90 pitches once this season. So Birdsong is by no means a can’t-miss prospect that you should add before its debut. But if you’ve taken any chances with Drew Thorpe or Cade Povich recently, I don’t think Birdsong is as far behind them in the hierarchy.