Now that the MLB trade deadline has come and gone for the 2025 season, it’s likely that many fantasy league trade deadlines have either done the same or are coming up imminently. If your league has not yet had its trade deadline, then this week is for you — three more players to try and target while you still can. And if your league already has had their trade deadline pass, then I will note that next week I plan on getting back to the format earlier in the season of under-rostered players in points leagues, with the goal of helping you find the extra piece or two off the wire that can make a real difference in the final weeks of the regular season and on into the playoffs.
First, this week’s column will focus on another pair of veterans in the midst of scorching hot streaks at the plate. We will then break down a rookie who is knocking on National League Rookie of the Year voters’ doors of late with his performances.
Cody Bellinger
2025 Stats (432 PA): .276/.327/.500; 20 home runs; 65 RBI; 62 runs; 9 stolen bases
Cody Bellinger has been a steady and vital part of the New York Yankees lineup in his first year in the Bronx, especially while fellow superstar Aaron Judge has been injured. A reliable presence in the heart of the order, Bellinger has maintained consistent production for the better part of three months now after a slow start to his season.
Bellinger’s approach is a balanced one that combines elite contact metrics with pure athleticism, using his bat-to-ball skills and uppercut swing to provide consistently quality at-bats. While his decision-making could use some improvement, he whiffs rarely enough for it to matter, keeping his strikeout rate in elite territory.
Striking out less than 90% of his peers, Bellinger rarely wastes an at-bat, putting himself in position for success more often than not. And though he recently turned 30 years old, the fact that his sprint speed remains better than 77% of his peers suggests there is plenty of the raw athleticism left in the 2019 National League MVP. And while Bellinger’s current OPS of .818 comes nowhere close to the massive number he posted that MVP year, it would be the fourth-best season of his up-and-down career, suggesting his current form is much, much closer to the peak Bellinger we have seen in the past than to the valleys when he struggled and looked lost at the plate.
With the Yankees seriously counting on Bellinger to carry a heavy load on offense for them to have any chance at making a run in the final stretch of the season, count on the slugger to continue to step up and deliver. Now is the time to make one last effort to secure that production for your fantasy team.
Willy Adames
2025 Stats (465 PA): .235/.321/.408; 16 home runs; 57 RBI; 65 runs; 4 stolen bases
The overall season numbers for Willy Adames don’t inspire much confidence when targeting him for a trade, but this suggestion is more of the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately type, and in that sense, Adames has done plenty.
Coming off a month in which he put up a staggering OPS of 1.096 that included seven home runs and 21 RBI, Adames is now one of the hottest hitters in the league after a very disappointing first half of the season. His Barrel rate of 13.2% is in the 82nd percentile of the league, and his walk rate of 10.9% is 76th percentile — other than that, many of Adames’ full-season metrics are currently being dragged down quite a bit by that aforementioned first half. Taking your walks and putting barrel to ball are two encouraging attributes to still hold on to during a bad slump, though, and now that he has snapped out of that slump, those barrel skills are being put to very productive use.
Adames’ Power+ rolling chart confirms the fact that he was a very average hitter for the first few months of the season, struggling to maintain any sort of consistent approach that would produce results.
His chart has gone nowhere but up since the beginning of June, though, and that is a long enough stretch now to convince me that Adames will be able to contribute at an elite level for most of the remainder of the season. Even his previously negative contact metrics have taken a turn into the positive of late, to go with already-elite power metrics for the shortstop position, and high-quality decision-making. This has put him back in the discussion for one of the most valuable shortstops in fantasy, ranking fourth in points among the position over the past month, above the likes of Bobby Witt Jr., Elly De La Cruz, and Corey Seager.
Given that his overall numbers still aren’t that eye-popping, it would be wise to try and get some kind of bargain on this bat that could end up being one of the more sneaky big-time difference makers in the fantasy playoffs.
Agustín Ramírez
2025 Stats (360 PA): .241/.286/.465; 17 home runs; 50 RBI; 48 runs; 5 stolen bases
Currently my favorite swing in the league to watch, Agustín Ramírez has been showing all season why the Yankees may have picked the wrong prospect to give up in the Jazz Chisholm Jr. deal with the Miami Marlins last year. Ramírez was able to show them up close and personal this past weekend, going off for four hits, including two home runs, in the first two games alone against his former club.
As mentioned, Ramírez has a swing that is very pretty to the eye — he is clearly swinging for the fences, with one of the fastest bat speeds in the league already at his young age, yet he does not look out of control while doing so. And while the 23-year-old Dominican backstop has been catching some flak for his defensive grades, thankfully, we don’t have to worry about that over here in fantasy baseball land. The one thing we are worried about, points production, Ramírez has been providing in week-winning bunches of late. Ranked inside the top-55 points league players in all of the last 30-day, 14-day, and 7-day time periods, Ramírez is finding his groove when it matters most to fantasy managers. And there are very few, if any, holes in his underlying metrics to suggest that his success cannot be sustained throughout the remainder of this season. His Process+ rolling chart, for one, has been rock-solid all season, sustaining a borderline-great approach, and is showing signs of getting ready to take off to the next level.
While Ramírez’s power has really begun to take off as the summer has rolled along, it was his contact metrics that were actually carrying most of the success in his approach prior to recently. This suggests that even if his power dips for periods in the future, he has the underlying contact skills to avoid dipping too deep. Even more encouraging, though, are the hints that he is beginning to find a way to merge both approaches into one that includes not only elite power metrics, but well-above-average contact metrics as well. If that rolling average line cutting through his Process+ chart were a stock chart, I would be paying extra attention to the last two-week period where that line has been steadily climbing and looks about ready to break out past its previous-high territory. His other metrics all heavily suggest that is where he is headed.
As mentioned, his bat speed is already one of the fastest in the league, and he can only be expected to get stronger as he matures both in age and major league experience. What stands out to me the most right now is the fact that Ramírez is already putting his barrel to the ball more often than 80% of his peers, and when he does so, the ball jumps off of that barrel in serious point-producing ways. Ramírez is also crushing it in two of my favorite PL hitting metrics, Hard-Contact rate and Ideal Plate Appearance rate — his HC rate of 36.9% ranks 10th among all qualifying hitters, while his IPA rate of 32.2% ranks 23rd.
Unless you are already rostering one of the few elite points-producing catchers in Cal Raleigh or Salvador Perez, it’s worth at least checking to see if Ramírez is languishing on a team falling fast out of fantasy playoff position, and seeing what it would take to get the up-and-coming slugger on your squad for the stretch run.