Typically, I'm writing about the top waiver-wire targets to add from any given day's action, but today's going to be a little bit different, at least here at the top. Because, while it's important to highlight who you should be adding, there's another side of that coin: Who you should be dropping. And today, that's Brayan Bello.
I'll admit, I've never totally understood the hype around Bello. As a young pitcher, he certainly isn't without his merits, but he's also probably just been kind of overrated in Fantasy for a pretty long time now. We're talking about a guy who pitched his way into top-100 consideration as a prospect only thanks to a partial season run in 2022, but didn't enter any season as a top-100 guy. He's had flashes at the MLB level but also has a career 4.66 ERA, 1.44 WHIP, and only 7.9 K/9 over the course of just over two full seasons.
And he's been even worse than that this season. The Blue Jays jumped on him for seven earned runs over just 2.1 innings Tuesday, putting his ERA for the season to 5.55. He throws hard, but doesn't get whiffs with his fastball, and his slider and changeup are more decent pitches than truly elite ones at this point.
There's been some bad luck, to be sure, with a 4.10 xERA entering Tuesday's start, but we're still talking about a guy who, so far in his MLB career, has never had a strikeout rate of even 21% – league average is between 22.2 and 22.7% in his three MLB seasons – and isn't so good at limiting hard contact that he can make up for it.
Bello has the talent to come out the next time around and make this look silly, of course. But we're nearly 290 innings into his MLB career with an ERA north of 4.50, and yet he's still 75% rostered. There are too many good pitchers out there right now to justify this kind of roster rate for Bello.
Wednesday's top waiver targets
Mark Vientos, 3B, Mets (44%) – Vientos just keeps getting it done. He homered two more times Tuesday against the Yankees, his second straight game with a homer and fourth in five games, now giving him six in the month of June. He's done that while hitting .275/.329/.565, and that's coming off a .918 OPS in a smaller sample size in May. He's sporting improved plate discipline pretty much across the board, swinging at pitches in the zone more and out of the zone less, while making contact more often when he swings, helping him cut the strikeout rate from 30.5% last season to just 21.6%. He's sacrificed some quality of contact along the way, but it's clearly been a tradeoff worth making, with Vientos' expected wOBA jumping from .304 to .353. It's fair to be skeptical about how sustainable this all is, but it's gone long enough that it's worth buying in.
Ty France, 1B, Mariners (35%) – A heel fracture 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 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 this helps him get back on track.
Bo Naylor, C, Guardians (25%) – Maybe Naylor is just an extremely slow starter. He really struggled early on after his callup last season, and was hitting just .177/.255/.269 through the end of May this season, leading plenty of Fantasy players to abandon ship as he started to lose playing. Well, while he hasn't been a world-beater in June, he is hitting .289/.325/.553 after going 3 for 4 with three runs, a double, and a triple Tuesday. Naylor still has a rare skill set for a catcher, capable of chipping in a handful of steals while ideally sporting an OPS near or above .800, as he did last season. It's been a tough start, but there still aren't many No. 2 catcher types with his kind of upside, and I'll bet on that upside.
Hayden Birdsong, SP, Giants (4%) – Birdsong was largely viewed as a lower-end top-10 prospect for the Giants coming into the season, but he seems to have leveled up on his way to what is expected to be his season debut Wednesday against the Cubs. His promotion is surely partially about desperation, but Birdsong has pitched well enough to justify 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 profiles as a bat-misser, and then a slider/cutter, curveball, and changeup that all probably lag behind where the fastball is right now. He's run into some troubles in two starts at Triple-A, and has thrown 90-plus pitches just once this season, so Birdsong is by no means a can't-miss prospect who you have to add ahead of his debut. But if you've taken chances on the likes of Drew Thorpe or Cade Povich lately, I don't think Birdsong is that far behind them on the pecking order.