We’re officially into June and must take an honest look at who’s playing well, who’s playing poorly, and who we can truly count on to help us out through the long summer months ahead.
With that, the waiver wire has been picked over and it’s getting more difficult to find impact players readily available in most leagues. Fear not, because there are still a handful of available players that have the chance to be difference makers in both the short and long term.
Tarik Skubal struck out 59 batters and walked just two while posting a 2.20 ERA in the month of May.
D.J. Short
D.J. Short
Here are three players that are under 40% rostered on Yahoo leagues that you should strongly consider adding.
If you want a larger list, Eric Samulski wrote his extended waiver wire piece on Sunday.
Edward Cabrera, SP Marlins
(20% Rostered on Yahoo)
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Cabrera might be taking a step forward.
So far this season, he’s running the lowest walk rate of his career at 9.6% and has thrown his highest rate of pitches in the zone at 49.7%. At the same time, he’s maintained a strikeout rate in line with his career norms and a 4.14 ERA through nine starts.
While those numbers don’t jump off the page, they’ve been underscored by a very different movement profile from most of his pitches because he’s dropped his arm slot.
For Cabrera, moving his arm slot down has given all of his pitches more horizontal movement and reduced their vertical movement.
Look at his pitch movement plots from each of the last two seasons courtesy of Baseball Savant and check out how each pitch besides his curveball has drifted towards the right of this chart in 2025 compared to 2024.
With this new movement profile, Cabrera has become much more comfortable throwing his sinker. Its usage has risen from 9.2% to 24.4% from last season to this season and it’s now his most thrown pitch against right-handed batters.
Also, it has the highest zone rate for any of his individual pitches at 65.6%. Cabrera has never thrown a pitch in the strike zone at least 60% of the time for a full season in his entire career.
Yet, it’s being hit very hard. Opposing hitters have a .556 SLG against it. Perhaps he can massage its usage a little bit – especially against left-handed batters – but it may just be important for Cabrera to literally throw pitches in the zone that some damage is tolerable.
That’s because his secondaries are incredible. Each of his changeup, curveball, and slider have at least a 28.9% whiff rate and each have at least a 106 Stuff+. And no one on earth can throw a 95 mph changeup quite like Cabrera can.
At worst, there are adjustments happening here to help Cabrera avoid walks, which have always been his kryptonite. His stuff remains electric and he has a guaranteed rotation spot plus a great home park to pitch in with the Marlins.
The glimmer of hope in a good situation makes him worthy of a speculative add.
Matt Wallner, OF Twins
(14% Rostered on Yahoo)
Wallner returned off the injured list this past weekend from a serious hamstring strain that kept him out since April 15th.
In his first at-bat back, he smacked a home run at 100.8 mph against Bryce Miller and hit a 108.2 mph groundout later in the game. Despite going 1-for-5 last night, he had three batted balls hit harder than 104 mph with the hardest being 111.1 mph.
That is the story with Wallner: he hits baseballs incredibly hard. Since the start of the 2024 season, his 19 batted balls of at least 110 mph are tied for 36th-most in the league.
That may not seem special, but he’s only played 96 total games over that span. For comparison’s sake, he’s tied with Marcell Ozuna with 19 such batted balls and Ozuna has played 217 games over the same span.
Wallner’s gaudy exit velocities are paired with near top of the league bat speed and one of the highest pulled fly ball rates in the league. In terms of a batted ball profile, few have a better one than Wallner.
On the other hand, he’s always struggled to make contact consistently. Heading into this season, his strikeout rate for his career was an obscene 34.5%. Somehow, that came with a chase rate that was better than league average. He knows which pitches to swing at, he just takes such aggressive swings that he often misses.
Regardless, he had a career .866 OPS in spite of that high strikeout rate, and he’s cut it down to 25.9% in 21 games so far this season.
His incredibly high quality of contact has made him productive enough in spite of that awful strikeout rate to be viable in 12-team leagues. If he can manage to keep it down while maintaining his same elite bat speed, he could flirt with a 40 homer pace.
The one caveat to his value is that he’s in a strict platoon. He hasn’t played against a left-handed pitcher yet this season and don’t expect that to change.
So, his value is hurt in weekly leagues where you can’t manipulate your roster as much. He’s still a great option in daily leagues where you can be sure he’ll be in your lineup every time the Twins face a righty.
Sawyer Gipson-Long, SP DET
(7% Rostered on Yahoo)
This is one to keep a close eye on. Gipson-Long is scheduled to make his season debut today, on Tuesday against the White Sox.
That outing is expected to be somewhat abbreviated though because Gipson-Long has thrown just 56 and 53 pitches in each of his most recent rehab starts. The Tigers need someone to step in though for the injured Jackson Jobe, so this will likely be something like a 75-pitch rehab start in the majors for Gipson-Long.
Once he’s built up to a regular starters’ workload, he could be a very interesting option.
When last healthy in 2023, Gipson-Long burst on the scene somewhat out of nowhere with a 31.7 K%, 9.8 BB%, 2.70 ERA and 1.10 WHIP across four starts as a 25-year-old rookie with next to no prospect pedigree.
He found success by leaning on his excellent command and secondary pitches. Against right-handed batters, he mixed his sinker and slider evenly as dual-primary pitches and was able to lean on his excellent changeup to generate swings and misses.
It’s rare that a pitcher can find such effectiveness with their changeup against same-handed batters, but Gipson-Long did so with ease.
Against left-handed batters, he leaned on his fastball with that same slider and changeup flanking it. While his fastball doesn’t look so special sitting at 93 mph with a pedestrian movement profile, Gipson-Long releases it with 7.5 feet of extension. That helps a pitch that appears ordinary play up.
In all, this is a pitcher who has multiple weapons against hitters from each side of the plate and should be a stable option as long as he maintains his command from pre-surgery. He’ll have a decent runway to prove his worth too with Jobe out indefinitely.
