2022 Trade Value: #1 to #10

As is tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the lead-up to next week’s trade deadline to take stock of the top 50 players in baseball by trade value. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at the players who fell just short of the top 50, be sure to read the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, which can be found in the widget above.

For those of you who have been reading the Trade Value Series the last few seasons, the format should look familiar. For every player, you’ll see a table with the player’s projected five-year WAR from 2023-2027, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money, if any, the year through which their team has contractual control of them, last year’s rank (if applicable), and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2027, if the player is under contract or team control for those seasons. Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2021 post. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for his help in creating the tables in these posts. At the bottom of the page, there is a grid showing all of the players who have been ranked up to this point.

Now, let’s get to our final batch of players.

The way pitchers work these days, I can’t imagine how one could place higher on this list than Alcantara. He has everything you could reasonably want: a solid track record, oodles of team control, best-in-class durability, and a fastball that tops out above 100 mph. Over the past two years, he’s hit another gear, sharpening his command and improving his changeup from an afterthought to perhaps his best pitch. I’d take Corbin Burnes, Max Scherzer, and Gerrit Cole over him if I needed to win exactly one game, but he’s squarely in that tier.

Thanks to a contract extension he signed before his star turn, he’s also a tremendous value for the Marlins. He won’t reach free agency until after the 2027 season, and the last year is even a moderately priced team option. Alcantara isn’t quite a 1970s throwback as a starter (though he’s the closest thing going these days), but he’s an early 2000s throwback contract-wise. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve acknowledged how frustrating it is that teams care so much about contract status, but well, they care so much about contract status, both in terms of years of control and average annual value.

Only one thing is stopping Alcantara from a higher place on this speculative list: the very real attrition rate among pitchers. Of the guys on the pitching WAR leaderboards from five years ago, Scherzer and Aaron Nola are examples of how things can work out. Chris Sale, Corey Kluber, Stephen Strasburg, Luis Severino, Carlos Carrasco, Zack Greinke, Jimmy Nelson, and Chris Archer, meanwhile, are examples of the various ways things can go wrong. Was 2017 a particularly bad year? It sure was – I picked it to make a point. But pitchers are inherently volatile, and while having an ace with a bunch of team control is great, there are limits to how great.

Last season was a crash course in what happens when Vlad is going well. He has the rare combination of pitch selection and ludicrous bat speed that makes you fear for the health of the people standing near him. His blend of feel to hit and raw power is reminiscent of some of my favorite great sluggers of the past; Gary Sheffield, early-career Larry Walker, and Manny Ramirez come to mind when I watch Vladito work.

This season has been a crash course in what happens when he’s not going well. The same old problems – too many grounders, basically – are keeping him from reprising last year’s masterpiece. But a funny thing happened: Guerrero has gotten so good at what he does that even in a diminished, grounder-heavy form, he’s still 34% above average despite underperforming his batted ball metrics. He’s hitting the ball harder, targeting pitches to hit more frequently, and generally delivering enough screaming contact that even when he’s not playing up to his potential, he’s a far more complete hitter than he once was.

A concept that I’ve been circling around quite frequently in these blurbs is how teams want high-floor players. That’s too simplistic, though. I like to think of it as a kind of hedging: none of us know a player’s future talent level, or even their true current talent level. When I say teams are looking for a high floor, I mean they’re looking for players with the skills teams are more certain about, giving those players a solid worst-case outcome. That could be defense, but it could also be preternatural feel to hit.

One example: Some people I talked to thought I had Austin Riley too low, and some thought I had Guerrero too high, but no one had Riley ahead of Guerrero. Riley’s having a better season, but talent evaluators (and models, too, for what it’s worth) like Guerrero’s odds of doing better going forward, both because of his blowout 2021 top end and because he has such strong underlying skills. He’s a high-floor slugging first baseman, essentially, and I think teams would consider that in their offers for him.

To put it mildly, Robert does not have a high-floor bat. The power is there, of course, and he has impressive bat-to-ball skills; running near-league-average contact rates despite swinging at more bad pitches than anyone else in baseball is hard to do. But if you’re trading for Robert, there has to be a voice in the back of your head wondering about the approach. How could there not be? He doesn’t strike out at an unacceptable rate now, but I’m not sure how many more bad pitches he can swing at and keep above water offensively.

Of course, there is a pile of reasons to tell that voice in your head to pipe down. If you’re looking for a walking avatar of hard-hit rate, Robert is the closest you’ll get. His swing is explosive, and it punishes poorly-located fastballs and breaking pitches with equal violence. The loudest “ooh” I’ve ever heard on a major league field came from the A’s dugout after a Robert home run in their 2020 playoff series. The sound and look of his batted ball quality just can’t be faked.

The same is true of his defense and baserunning. He’s a rangy fielder with excellent closing speed in center. He’s also a threat to steal, and one of the best in the game at taking an extra base. That only matters if you reach base, which may never be Robert’s forte, but it’s a meaningful tailwind nonetheless.

For the next three years, Robert is due modest salaries. The White Sox also have two $20 million team options, which will easily be worth exercising if Robert continues at his current clip. These aren’t decline years, either: Robert turns 25 next week, which means the options cover his age-28 and 29 seasons. The combination of excellent defense, superstar potential, and affordable team control would have clubs swinging out of their shoes — much like Robert when he sees a pitch he likes — if the White Sox decided to put him on the market.

Just when you thought Ramírez would fall off this list, he signs an extension and works his way back on. Ramírez is up to his usual tricks, launching home runs and doubles with wild abandon while walking more than he strikes out. He’s adding his customary excellent defense and top-notch baserunning, naturally. Another top five MVP finish seems likely, which would be his fourth in six years; he also finished sixth once.

Will he keep up this production forever? Obviously not. He’s 29, and at some point age will come for him. But he’s been one of the 10 best hitters in baseball since his 2017 breakout, rarely misses a game, and is somehow second only to Trea Turner in baserunning value over that stretch. Truly, Ramírez is a unicorn of a player, and his new, $20-million-a-year contract runs through the 2028 season, which will give Guardians fans plenty of time to appreciate the homegrown star who wanted to stay.

The downside with Ramírez is that he’s so maxed out on every skill that there’s nowhere to compensate if one of his tools starts to decline. What is he going to do if he loses bat speed, start pulling the ball more? He already pulls the ball the most. Is he going to make up for it by striking out less? He already has one of the lowest strikeout rates in baseball. As you can see from the projections, ZiPS thinks he’s in for a steep late decline, and it’s hardly alone in that assessment.

If the Guardians were trading Ramírez, I think teams would consider that downside, shrug, and still offer a massive haul for him. Even if ZiPS is right, the back half of his contract is hardly underwater, and he’s a huge bargain right now. Several high-spending teams could use a star third baseman, and he’s more consistent, a better value, and signed to a longer-term deal than all of the other elite options. He’s not getting traded. He has a full no-trade clause in his contract, and wants to play in Cleveland his whole career. But (almost) no one this high is getting traded, so that’s immaterial.

Almost no one. I’ll be honest: Soto’s placement on this list is partially a statement about how star power can matter more than surplus value. I think there’s still a prevailing feeling in front offices across the game that years of team control, particularly discounted years of control, are more valuable than superstardom. But Soto might challenge that feeling.

Perhaps Soto wouldn’t fetch the sixth-best offer if every player were put on the market at once. In that world, if you missed, you could just use those prospects to bid on Ramírez or Adley Rutschman. But not every player is being put on the market at once. Juan Soto is, though, and if you want to turn some prospects on your team into a 23-year-old with a career 154 wRC+, your options are Soto or no one. That scarcity/availability combination means something.

If you’re wondering why Soto isn’t ranked first, it’s because he isn’t under contract for enough years. If every player were going to stay on their new team forever, it would be a different story, but that’s not how baseball works. If you’re wondering why he’s in the top 10, well, read on.

Trading for Soto gets you a premium bat — he’s projected to be the best player in baseball each of the next two years according to ZiPS — for the 2022 stretch run and two full seasons after that. Maybe you could accomplish something like that in free agency this winter, but probably not; there aren’t enough marquee free agents to satiate every team’s demand for great players, and certainly not 23-year-old great players.

Soto’s defense and baserunning have been quite poor this season, but no one I spoke to thinks that’s his true talent out there. His contact quality is down slightly, too, though not a ton considering the league context. Mostly, though, he’s BABIP’ing .242 for a dead-end team and getting on base at a .400 clip anyway. He’s just a great hitter. He makes the best swing decisions in baseball and also won the Home Run Derby.

One bonus: If you trade for Soto, you’re a contending team. And if you’re a contending team, that gives you nearly three years to convince him that he should stick around. I’m not saying you’ll get a bargain of an extension or anything, but you might get him to stay, and just having a Soto-caliber player on your team is really valuable. Take the Cardinals, who have a penchant for developing average players and supplementing them by trading for and extending stars. Plenty of teams have a talent for drafting and developing solid role players, but finding superstars to play with them is tricky business.

Maybe Soto is dead set on testing free agency. If so, you’ll still get three playoff runs with a fearsome hitter anchoring your lineup, and even if you’re just a count-up-the-WAR surplus value type, Soto fares quite well, easily in the top 25, because his career-to-date production and thus his projections are top-notch. Sprinkle in some value for his star-level production and the carrot of potentially extending a 23-year-old on a Hall of Fame trajectory, and I think teams should be willing to offer a boatload to bring him into the fold.

Alvarez was 11th on this list last year and I was worried he might be too low. In June, he signed a six-year, $115 million deal that starts next season and tops out at a reasonable $26 million per year after discounted years up front. Extensions signed this far before free agency are generally value-additive; the tradeoff involved in those contracts is invariably that the player accepts discounted free agency years in exchange for certainty in their arb years. Well, Alvarez’s 2022 campaign so far gives you a good sense of just how valuable those free agent years might have been. He has hit at an historic pace; his .309/.413/.674 line (as of Wednesday) is good for a 201 wRC+. Since 2000, two players other than Alvarez have done that for a full season (to be clear, he’s not there yet): Soto in 2020 (over just 47 games, far fewer than Alvarez) and Barry Bonds (four times). Alvarez isn’t Bonds, but what he’s doing is Bondsian. Oh yeah – he’s running a reasonable .301 BABIP, and his underlying contact quality outstrips his batted ball results. A full 20% of his batted balls are barreled, and he’s hitting the ball 95 mph or harder 60% of the time, the best mark in baseball.

At the same time, he’s vastly improved when it comes to pitch selection. He has a career-high walk rate and a career-low strikeout rate. He’s swinging at more pitches over the heart of the plate than he did before, and swinging less often at borderline and bad pitches. It no longer feels like you can get him out with good breaking balls; he’s learned to spit on them and wait for something he can crush out of the park.

Being a DH hurts, of course, but it doesn’t hurt that much. ZiPS has him pegged for the eighth-most WAR in baseball over the next five years, just ahead of Ramírez and Aaron Judge. He’s only 25, too, and he’s been more bad than atrocious in left field. For my money, Alvarez is the best hitter in baseball right now, narrowly ahead of Soto, and his contract means he’ll be doing that great hitting for the Astros for a long time to come.

The error bars on Rodríguez’s value are huge. He’s played just over half a season in the major leagues, and he’s been awesome. His elite bat speed leads to loud contact, and he’s putting plenty of that contact into the air. He looks like a perennial 30-homer threat. He’s also a perennial 30-steal threat, and scouting consensus notwithstanding, he’s playing standout defense in center field. If he keeps all that up, or even improves on it (he’s just 21, after all), he could be the best player in baseball very soon, and on a league-minimum contract to boot.

But again, the error bars are huge. A voracious approach at the plate has led to some contact issues; he’s striking out 27% of the time and running a 15.8% swinging strike rate. I’m not too worried about it, and he already appears to be making adjustments, but he’s not without risk.

Obviously, I’m not particularly concerned about those risks, or at least not enough to keep Rodríguez out of the very top tier when it comes to player trade value. The combination of top-notch athleticism, preposterous raw power, and a steep learning curve that’s seen him improve markedly in his first year in the majors is too much to pass up. This is what it looks like when a phenom debuts.

If you wanted to put him first on this list, you’d have a good case to make. It’s mostly immaterial anyway; for me, all of the guys in the top five have the same coveted combination of superstar top-end talent and gobsmacking amounts of team control, and all of them carry risks. Time will tell whether Rodríguez is more All-Star or MVP, but you can’t argue with the early returns.

Wow, was placing Tatis on these rankings difficult. If you make the list in a rule-based way – most controllable WAR, or most surplus value over the cost of WAR in free agency, or something like that – he invariably finishes second, behind only the player actually ranked number one on the list (read on to find out!), even with projection systems knocking his future expected statistics down due to limited playing time. Having this many years of team control of a player who just put up a 7.3 WAR season at age 22 is staggering and unprecedented.

Tatis also hasn’t played since last year, and the injury record is getting scary at this point. On a per-PA basis, he’s played his entire career at an MVP level, but the next season in which he reaches 550 plate appearances will be the first. This kind of guaranteed money for a player with injury issues scares teams, and you can understand where they’re coming from.

And yet, no one I talked to pushed back against having Tatis in the top tier of players. Even the most risk-averse front office member would be tempted by the chance to capture the entire prime of a shortstop with a bat 50% above league average. If Tatis gets moved to an outfield corner when he comes back, he’ll still be one of the best players in baseball; his raw power and feel to hit are just that good. If you’re trying to talk yourself into trading for him, you can even say that his injuries have been fluky rather than recurring; hopefully his motorcycle riding days are done, and while there’s no such thing as a good IL stint, at least one part of his body hasn’t betrayed him over and over.

In the end, I bowed to the wisdom of the model (and of the baseball community, which basically all thinks Tatis will continue to be great) and shoved him up near the very top of the list. His contract would keep some teams out of the market, but there are enough deep-pocketed clubs that crave young superstars that there would still be a bidding frenzy. Think of this as a provisional ranking, in essence. Because he hasn’t stepped foot on the field this year, no one is trading for Tatis right now. But if he comes back and plays for a month at roughly his pre-injury level, this is where I’d slot him.

A torn ACL ended Acuña’s season in 2021, and he’s been slowed by nagging injuries this year as well. When he’s on the field, he hasn’t been his usual self; his swing doesn’t look as fluid to my eyes, and he’s topping a lot of balls he previously lifted, leading to a career-high groundball rate.

That’s a pretty ominous opening paragraph for someone I consider to have the second-best trade value in baseball. That’s because beyond those concerns, the news gets progressively better. When he does put the ball in the air, Acuña is still crushing it. If you projected every player’s offensive production based on their strikeouts, walks, and barrel rate, he’d be one of the best hitters in the game, even with all of those extra grounders. There’s more to baseball than hitting the ball hard and in the air, but the fact that Acuña has retained that skill even as he works back from injury is extremely encouraging.

I’m inclined to give Acuña the benefit of the doubt as he finds his way because his track record is exceptional and he’s showing flashes of his previous peak tools even while scuffling overall. Another reason? Acuña’s contract runs through 2028, and tops out at just $17 million per year. The length is more important than the money for players of his caliber, at least in my estimation, but the money certainly doesn’t hurt, either; Atlanta is paying him like a solid performer instead of like a guy who has played at a 5 WAR per 600 PA pace his whole career.

Is it weird that the second- and third-ranked players on the trade value list have combined for less than 2 WAR this season? Definitely. In my estimation, however, both are helped by the sheer lengths of their contracts. If you’re going to surrender a treasure trove of prospects to get a star, it would sure be nice to have them for a long time. A so-so year marred by injury matters a lot less when it’s one of seven years under contract rather than one of three.

I’ll preface this with a macro comment about the top of the list as a whole: I was unenthused about having to say that any one of the top five players here has the highest trade value in all of baseball. All of them have meaningful question marks; defense, availability, and track record are all worrisome issues when you’re talking about the very best trade value in the game. But someone still has to be the best, and all of these players have two things working for them: enviable talent and lengthy team control. In my estimation, they make up a clear top five, but the order is both theoretical and tenuous.

Why Franco, then? Because he’s great, hilariously young, and will be a Ray for more than a decade to come. He’s the youngest player on the entire list and under contract the second-longest, behind only Tatis. His minor league track record is flawless, and ZiPS projects him as the sixth-best player in baseball over the next five years despite a middling, injury-marred 2022 so far.

Nothing about this season has changed the industry’s view of Franco. He’s a high-contact, swing-happy hitter in the Ramírez mold, though he hasn’t yet developed Ramírez’s ability to consistently get to his pull power. He’s a gap-to-gap line drive guy for now, and might always be more speed and doubles than homer-first. But remember, he’s doing that at 21, in the major leagues, as a switch hitter, and producing at a roughly 4 WAR per 600 PA pace while doing so. Projection systems aren’t making these numbers up out of thin air; he looks the part, both on the field and in the data.

Is there more risk here than in your average top player on the list? Definitely. He doesn’t have the established track record that you’d generally like to see. But when in doubt, I’m siding with the years of control and the pedigree. Computers and evaluators are in agreement that Franco is amazing, a generational talent — he’s still the only 80 FV prospect the site has had in the Future Value era. He’ll be around forever, and somehow he’ll still only be 33 at the end of his deal, even if the Rays exercise their option. Could he be more plus than plus-plus, to use pitching terminology? For sure. But in the end, the combination of high ceiling, high floor, and oodles of team control was enough for me to slot him in the top spot.