We're really in the home stretch now. Rosters expanded over the weekend, and many H2H Fantasy championships are starting in the next two weeks. Those of us playing in Rotisserie leagues still have the whole month left to play out, but one way or another, you pretty much know if you have a chance to win the whole thing by now.

Which, of course, means a whole bunch of you already know you don't really have much to play for over the final month of the season. And we're here for you, too. 

For the former group, you'll want to check out Scott White's breakdown of last weekend's most significant performances, including the return of some significant prospects – and one once-significant, former prospect who I still believe has a chance to be a difference-maker for Fantasy, in Jordan Walker. Scott writes about Walker's big return, Kyle Manzardo's two-homer game, and a whole bunch more, so check that out in case you missed a bunch of baseball while grilling and hanging out with family over the holiday weekend. 

For those of you whose seasons are effectively over, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have something to read about, too. So, in today's newsletter, we're taking a look ahead to the 2025 Fantasy Baseball draft season and looking at 12 players with the most to gain over the final month of the season. Some of them are aging veterans looking to stay Fantasy relevant; some are recent breakouts looking to prove it's real. All of them could see their 2025 value change dramatically depending on how the final month works out.

As the month goes on, we're going to be trying to balance these two competing goals – making sure you're equipped with everything you need to dominate the stretch run and keeping an eye on what that might mean for the 2025 season. So, let's get to the 12 guys with the most at stake over the next four weeks. 

JT Realmuto, C, Phillies – Realmuto will turn 34 before Opening Day next season, and frankly, it's a minor miracle we haven't seen the big dropoff from him before. He's rebounded a bit with the bat recently, putting him roughly where we hope he would be as a hitter, but he's been a big disappointment as a Fantasy option mostly because he has just one stolen base in 78 games. The June knee surgery he underwent would seem to explain most of his slowdown, except that Realmuto had just one steal on three attempts in his first 28 games before he suffered the initial injury in early May. He hasn't so much as attempted a steal since then, so clearly the knee injury has exacerbated the issue, but there were already warning signs before that. If Realmuto isn't running, he needs to be even better as a hitter to be much more than an also-ran at the catcher position, so we need to either see some signs of the athleticism returning or a really big closing stretch with the bat to return some of his value. 

Josh Naylor, 1B, Guardians – The entire Guardians lineup has struggled in the second half as they've seen their seemingly insurmountable division lead collapse. But maybe nobody has collapsed more than Naylor, who has gone from a .816 OPS (and 130-RBI pace) in the first half to just a .659 OPS and 22 RBI in 35 games since the break. To be clear, it's still been a very good season, and he's almost certain to finish with 30-plus homers and 100-plus RBI. But all of a sudden, what looked like a true breakout early on now looks like just another season for the 27-year-old. He might have been drafted as a top-five first baseman if the season had ended in July, and maybe he can still get there with a strong finish. But right now, there's some risk of that hot start being written off as a fluke. 

Jackson Holliday, 2B, Orioles – It's been a wild ride for Holliday, who was the top prospect in baseball before the season, made it to the majors by April 10, was back in the minors just two weeks later, but then looked like he might actually be figuring it out when he came back from the minors and homered five times in his first 10 games back. However, as of Sunday, he has now gone 20 straight games without homering since, with a 35% strikeout rate in that span. At his best, Holliday has looked the part, but more often than not, he has just looked overwhelmed at the major-league level. That doesn't matter too much from a long-term perspective – he's still younger than all but one of the top-10 picks in this year's MLB draft, after all. If Holliday doesn't figure it out until 2026, he'll still be the same age most players are when they are drafted. But, of course, if he doesn't figure it out until 2026, that would mean he isn't very good in 2025. The power since his return from Triple-A has been encouraging, but Holliday still too often looks overwhelmed by breaking stuff, and as a hit-tool-first hitter, he was never supposed to be an all-or-nothing player. 

Luis Garcia, 2B, Nationals – Garcia is enjoying a heck of a breakout season, with 15 homers and 21 steals heading into the final month of the season – he had never had more than nine of either in four MLB seasons prior to this. And he's got the underlying numbers to back him up, with an xwOBA of .347 that actually slightly outstrips his .337 mark. But Fantasy players have been fairly slow to buy into Garcia, mostly because he just hasn't been an everyday player, as the Nationals have largely protected him from lefties. It's a strategy that, frankly, doesn't make much sense – isn't it a lot more valuable to find out if your 24-year-old, potential franchise cornerstone can handle lefties than whatever marginal gain you get from having Ildemaro Vargas out there instead? The Nationals owe it to themselves to see if Garcia can be an everyday player down the stretch. If Garcia plays semi-regularly against lefties and holds his own in September, we could be talking about a top-100 player for 2025. 

Royce Lewis, 3B, Twins – How many games in a row would Lewis have to play before you stopped being worried about his ability to stay healthy? 200? Whatever the answer is, he's not going to answer it definitively over the season's final month. But his playing time has been so sporadic over the past couple of seasons, that there's still plenty at stake for him down the stretch. If he suffers another significant injury down the stretch, that's just one more to the ledger and another reason to think he'll just never be able to stay on the field long enough to be the impact player we hope he can be. But there's something else at stake here: Lewis is actually kind of struggling for the first time as a big-leaguer right now. He has an OPS of .752 since coming back from the IL in late July, with a 26.5% strikeout rate, and his homer Sunday was his first in 16 games. That's still not horrible production, but the thing with Lewis has been that, when he's on the field, he isn't just good, he's absolutely dominant; if he finishes the season with two straight months of subpar production, doesn't the bullish case for him take a significant hit? And before you accuse me of overreacting, remember this: Those 30 games since coming back from the IL represent almost one-quarter of Lewis' total MLB sample size. 

Zachary Neto, SS, Angels –  I don't know if it's because of the organization he plays for or what, but it's weird how Neto was never really talked about as a young player with much upside after his decent rookie season. But he's shown quite a bit of upside so far this season, putting together a 20-20 campaign and emerging as one of the best middle infielders in Fantasy since the All-Star break. And yet, it still feels like there's a lot of skepticism about what he's done in his breakout season. Neto clearly has solid tools, but he doesn't exactly crush the ball (34th percentile hard-hit rate, 33rd percentile average exit velocity), nor is he exactly a blazer on the basepaths (75th percentile sprint speed). It's kind of a "sum is greater than the parts" profile, and while that can work, it doesn't tend to leave a lot of room for error. If Neto slows down in September, the skeptics are going to have a field day. 

Julio Rodriguez, OF, Mariners – The worst thing about the ankle injury Rodriguez suffered immediately after the All-Star break – besides, surely, the actual pain it caused Rodriguez – is that it disrupted the first start of the season where he was actually starting to hit like himself. Rodriguez hit .375/.434/.688 in July before the injury, which was a tricky high-ankle sprain, and he has returned to hit below .200 with an OPS below .600. Given that that's basically what he was doing before July, that is the month that looks like an outlier. But what we don't know is how his season might have played out if the injury never happened and he didn't subsequently feel the pressure to rush back from it. I'm inclined to believe Rodriguez would have been a superstar in the second half because I'm inclined to believe he is a superstar, but I'd feel a lot better about that – and about ranking him as a top-25 player next season – if he were to go off on a big September. 

Corbin Burnes, SP, Orioles – Burnes is a soon-to-be 30-year-old starting pitcher who appears to be in steep decline and who is about to be a free agent represented by Scott Boras, so yeah, this is going to be maybe the defining storyline of the upcoming offseason. I still ranked Burnes as a top-five SP despite the collapse of his strikeout rate (mostly caused by the collapse of his cutter), because the profile still looks strong overall and he's still backed by one of the best teams in baseball. Even with his struggles lately, Burnes still has a very solid 3.37 xERA to go along with his 3.23 actual ERA, but with his strikeout rate down to about average for the season, he mostly looks like an SP2 for Fantasy – and the floor is certainly lower than that if the skills deteriorate further or he signs with the wrong team. A strong October, with flashes of his old cutter, would go a long way toward making me feel better about his chances of being an ace again. 

Bryan Woo , SP, Mariners – Woo is kind of like Lewis, in that the biggest impediment to his potential stardom has been an inability to stay healthy while working an MLB's starter workload. And I was hesitant to take him too seriously for Fantasy, despite sparkling ratios all season long. And then all of a sudden, everything changed in August, as Woo went from averaging 70.1 pitches per start in his first 11 to throwing at least 85 in every start over the past month. He's also become less fastball-dependent in that time while increasing his strikeout rate from 17.9% to 24.6% in August. He does an excellent job limiting hard contact, but now he's getting strikeouts to go along with it while pitching deeper into games than we've ever seen. Woo has top-25 SP upside if this is who he really is, and he could shoot up draft boards in 2025 if he follows up with a strong September. 

Spencer Arrighetti, SP, Astros – Like Woo, Arrighetti has gone from showing some flashes to finally putting it all together in August. He finished the month with 47 strikeouts to 10 walks in 32.1 innings of work, as his command has mostly taken a big step forward. That has allowed Arrighetti's quite good natural stuff to play up and makes it a lot easier to dream of him moving forward. The problem is, well, we're still talking about a guy with a 4.63 ERA at the MLB level right now, and it's not like he was dominant in the minors, either; Arrighetti had a 4.35 ERA at Triple-A and wasn't much better before then. He might just be a late-bloomer at the MLB level, or he might just be running especially hot right now. September won't answer that question definitively, but I'd feel a lot better about drafting him for 2025 if he puts together another dominant month. 

Bowden Francis, SP, Blue Jays – In theory, this one should be fairly easy to dismiss. After all, we're talking about a 28-year-old with a career 4.43 ERA in the minors . But we're also talking about a guy who just had an unbelievably dominant August, posting  a 1.05 ERA with 39 strikeouts to just four walks in 34.1 innings in the majors, including three starts out of four in that span with one hit allowed over at least seven innings. You can fake that, I suppose, but it's worth investigating whether it might be for real – and, as I wrote last week in this space, there are reasons to think it might be , starting with the addition of a splitter to his arsenal that seems to have helped solve Francis' biggest issue, homers. It's still a one-month sample size from a guy who was rightly viewed as an also-ran for Fantasy before August, so even another dominant September wouldn't be proof that Francis is a difference-maker. But It would be a lot harder to ignore and would make him one of the most controversial players in Fantasy for 2025 drafts. 

Michael Kopech, RP, White Sox – Kopech is another one who, up until about a month or so ago, had never really shown much more than flashes at the major-league level. And, what makes this situation even trickier is, by nature of being a reliever, we're dealing with inherently minuscule sample sizes all the way around. So, even if you want to be generous and include his final five scoreless outings with the White Sox, Kopech's emergence as an apparently elite bullpen arm only covers 20 innings of work. In that time, he has 28 strikeouts, five walks, five hits, and only one earned run while emerging as the Dodgers ' primary closer, but that's still fewer innings than Francis' past three outings. If we're skeptical about Francis, shouldn't we be skeptical of Kopech? But if he keeps this up and sticks as the Dodgers closer through the playoffs, we might be talking about a top-five closer in 2025 Fantasy drafts.