2024 Trade Value: Nos. 1-10

As is tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the lead-up to the 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 2025-2029, 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 2029 (assuming the player is under contract or team control for those seasons). Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2023 post. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for his technical wizardry. At the bottom of the page, there is a grid showing all of the players who have been ranked up to this point.

A note on the rankings: As we ascend towards the top of the list, the tiers matter more and more. There are clear gaps in value. Don’t get too hung up on what number a player is, because who they’re grouped with is a more important indicator. There are three distinct tiers in today’s group of 10 players, and I think they have clearly different valuations; I’d prefer everyone in a given tier over everyone below it, but I’m far less certain within each group. I’ll note places where I disagreed meaningfully with people I spoke with in calibrating this list, and I’ll also note players whose value was the subject of disagreement among my contacts. As I mentioned in the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, I’ll indicate tier breaks between players where appropriate, both in their capsules and bolded in the table at the end of the piece.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the final batch of players.

Every 15 spots or so on this list, I end up writing about how much trouble I have evaluating catchers. That’s less true for the next two players on this list, though. I had an easy time with them. I’m pretty sure that Smith is a robot. He has a 125 wRC+ this year. It’s 121 over the past two years, 124 over the past three, and 125 over the past four. His expected stats barely ever budge. He walks a lot and doesn’t strike out much. He hits for power over average, elevating to all fields, but he does it with a swing designed to maximize contact.

That kind of bat would play at first base just fine, particularly given Smith’s contract. He’s making $126 million over nine years with some deferrals, but the Dodgers have already paid a chunk of that as a signing bonus. Nine years is a long time for a catcher, but $78 million isn’t very much. If you think of it as a four-year deal paying him around $20 million a year, then you’re getting five more years for free on the back end. That’s pretty comparable to Kyle Schwarber in terms of both total offensive output and contract. But, uh, Smith is a catcher.

And right now, he’s a fairly good catcher. That hasn’t always been the case, but Smith has worked hard at his craft throughout the years. He’s average at controlling the running game at this point. He’s a below-average receiver, but not by much, and getting a first baseman’s bat out of a reasonable defensive catcher almost feels like a cheat code given the state of catcher offense across the majors.

It’s unlikely that Smith will keep up this pace into his mid-30s. Catching wears on you more than any other position. I think he took the Dodgers’ extension offer because he wasn’t going to hit the market until after next year, and that’s just too late to get an enormous deal as a free agent. But again, Smith is a good enough hitter that his overall value to the team isn’t tied to his ability to play incredible defense, and I think that gives him a big cushion.

By WAR, Smith has been the best catcher in baseball for the last half-decade; per the projections, only Adley Rutschman has a clear edge on him going forward. His skill set feels safer to me than catchers who rack up massive value with their receiving. He and the next three players on the list could go in any order without much argument from me.

The Orioles didn’t overthink the 2019 draft, and their reward was a perennial All-Star who has done nothing but succeed since day one. Rutschman crashed onto the major league scene in 2022, jump-starting Baltimore’s arrival as a playoff contender, and all he’s done since then is hit. I guess he’s done a little bit of playing defense, too, but the team has DH’ed him quite a bit to keep him fresh. He’s a key offensive cog, after all, and catching leads to days off.

That left me in a bit of a bind when it came to placing him, because Rutschman’s WAR has certainly taken a hit from all that DH’ing. The O’s have mostly done it when they want to sit Ryan O’Hearn against a lefty, so it hasn’t impacted their offense too much, but Rutschman’s overall value is obviously lowered when he moves from the toughest position to the easiest. He’s a plus defender, but he’s having a down year behind the dish, and it wouldn’t shock me if consistency has a part to play in that.

Luckily, Rutschman is in the same boat as Smith: He hits so well that his offense would be valuable anywhere. He has a remarkably similar offensive profile: solid approach, solid contact skills, and plenty of power. He’s a switch-hitter, which makes him hard to plan for. He mashes fastballs and adjusts to everything else with aplomb. He’s chasing a hair too much this year, but that feels like an ebbs-and-flows kind of thing instead of a sea change. I didn’t talk to a single person who was worried about his offense.

Despite Baltimore’s roster-based shenanigans, I’m evaluating Rutschman’s trade value as a full-time catcher. He’s around for three more years after this at arbitration salaries, and I think that most teams would prefer that he don the tools of ignorance as much as possible to maximize the pickup over his poor-hitting backstop counterparts. Having a catcher with this much thump changes the length of your lineup.

If you wanted to knock both Rutschman and Smith down a peg or two on these rankings because catchers have more inherent uncertainty than other position players, I wouldn’t fight you too much. But they also have scarcity value, and both of these guys are top-notch hitters at a position with an aggregate 92 wRC+ on the year. Improving a weak link matters a ton to me, which is why I’d trade a small fortune in prospects to get either of these guys on my team.

It’s wild to me how underrated Alvarez still is, but I think I understand why. Our brains tend to lump things into broad categories and treat everything in that category the same. Having put Alvarez in the “great hitter” bucket, the degree to which he stands out relative to his peers in that group can get lost. But Alvarez isn’t just a great hitter; he’s a really great hitter, even compared to the other standouts.

Alvarez has the second-best batting line among active players, behind only Aaron Judge. He’s batting .297/.389/.581 for his career, a 164 wRC+. He’s posted a 159 wRC+ so far this year. His worst season was 2021, when he posted a 137 wRC+ a year removed from season-ending knee surgery. Bryce Harper’s career wRC+ is 143, and he’s one of the best hitters in baseball. Alvarez is a cut above in a way that doesn’t quite compute.

Another way of putting it? Take a look at those ZiPS projections. ZiPS knows Alvarez is mainly a DH, it just thinks that his offense more than makes up for it. Models work in inscrutable ways, but it’s not exactly hard to see what it likes. Alvarez’s swing allows him to cover the entire strike zone with massive power. Weirdly, it’s not even optimized for the short porch in Houston; he only has one Crawford Box homer this year, and a single-digit total for his career. He just smashes the ball so hard that where the walls are doesn’t matter. He’s a bat speed god, and he squares the ball up at a crazy rate too. When you think you’ve found a hole in his swing, he’ll turn a pitch thrown to that hole into a 400-foot homer at the drop of a hat.

Am I worried about Alvarez’s lack of defensive value? I mean, yeah, theoretically. If he were a shortstop, clearly I’d like him more. But you’d play this bat anywhere, regardless of cost, and be deliriously happy. There are 16 hitters in history with a higher career wRC+ than Alvarez, and only four (Bonds, Mantle, Judge, Trout) from the post-integration era. Sure, it’ll head down with time, but we’re not just talking about a plus bat. We’re talking about a hitter who is one of the best of all time.

Alvarez’s knees give people pause, and I’ll level with you: I’m not confident that he’s going to be an amazing hitter when he’s 36. He needs to keep mashing to provide any value; when he stops hitting, he’ll stop playing. But he’s 27 right now, and his contract takes him through his age-31 season at a below-market rate. If you know ball, you know that Alvarez is a capital-D dude, and he’s on an excellent contract too.

More than one person I asked about Ohtani just laughed. Does Ohtani even have trade value? He has a no-trade clause and hand picked his destination. He suggested his contract terms. He’s not a Dodger because they blew the other suitors out of the water in a wild bidding spree; he’s a Dodger because he wanted to be one and made it work. Even more so than all the guys on this list who aren’t getting traded, Ohtani isn’t getting traded.

I’ll tell you what I told those people: This series is entertainment, and speculating about trading Ohtani is definitely entertaining. He’s making the most money in the game (albeit not by a huge amount thanks to the deferrals), and I’m confident that teams would still back up the prospect truck for him if he were somehow made available.

All that praise about Alvarez up above? I think that Ohtani is probably a better hitter. He’s improving with time, and this year, with no pitching to worry about, he’s setting the league on fire. He hits home runs to parts of Dodger Stadium that I didn’t even know existed. He’s power incarnate, and he’s adept at getting to that power by hunting fastballs. He adjusts well to soft stuff, and he’s so strong that he frequently gets fooled, keeps his hands back, and sort of wrist-flips the ball into the seats anyway. He’s fast, too, and consistently adds value with his baserunning. He’s always going to rack up his fair share of strikeouts, because his swing is vicious and he’s aggressive early in the count, but that’s a tradeoff anyone would take given what happens when he connects.

Oh yeah, and he’s gonna start pitching again soon too. I think that 2024 has alleviated concerns around what would happen if Ohtani had to give up pitching, because it seems like a greater focus on hitting (even while still rehabbing his elbow) is working for him. I think he’d be a plus corner outfielder right away, and maybe an elite one with time. But he has also posted a five-win season on the mound, and has the career numbers (3.01 ERA, 3.31 FIP) of an upper-echelon starter.

Then there’s the marketing piece, which is tricky to precisely account for, but which would absolutely drive Ohtani’s market. He’s the biggest star in the game by a ton, and beyond the revenue, there’s the cultural cachet of having a player who’s recognizable to sports fans who might not be baseball diehards in your organization. If you aren’t willing to pay Ohtani $46 million a year (NPV’ing the deferrals), what are you doing running a baseball team? The top salaries in baseball are artificially suppressed by the previous top salaries – everyone one-ups the last guy by just a little. Every team loves to stack up cost-suppressed players going through arbitration, but they don’t hand out trophies for the most surplus value — they hand them out for being the best baseball team. Save elsewhere and use your cash to add Ohtani. I mean, you can’t, because he’s never getting traded – but if you could, you should.

I’m alone on an island on this one, and I might as well acknowledge it right up top. I was the highest on Tatis out of every team source I checked with. The overall list is shaped by the views of people I talk to, but this ranking was absolutely not. I just think that Tatis is a young star who you can have around for the next decade, and I’d give up a lot to add that guy to my team.

The downsides are obvious. The injuries. The PED suspension. The position change. It’s not hard to imagine how this could pan out poorly. Tatis might be “just” a corner outfielder with a bat that’s 25% better than average, and with some availability concerns. There’s no way around that fact. If you trade for him, you’re assuming that risk.

I think the reward is worth it, personally. Tatis was one of the best hitters in baseball before he missed the 2022 season, and after a down year in 2023, he’s heating up again. His plate discipline gets better every year. He’s belligerently aggressive in the strike zone and spits at tough breaking balls and changeups. He’s trying to hit everything for a homer, which makes for some swing-and-miss, but also makes for loud contact to all parts of the ballpark in all counts. He’s in the 90th percentile or higher in basically every Statcast metric you can imagine: xwOBA, xBA, xSLG, xOBP, barrel rate, exit velocity, maximum exit velocity, hard-hit rate — the list goes on.

He’s also just 25. He picked up a new position on the fly while rehabbing from a major injury and won a Platinum Glove in his first year there. Fine, I think advanced defensive statistics overrated him last year, but I think they’ve underrated him this year – they’re noisy in both directions. He’s played at a borderline MVP candidate pace throughout his career despite all kinds of turbulence. He’s always going to be injury prone, it seems – he’s on the IL right now, in fact. But I’m willing to gamble on these injuries costing him months (like this season and in 2019) instead of years (2022) in the future.

I get that there’s risk. I get that this ranking isn’t reflective of what most major league teams would offer for Tatis. That’s why these are my rankings, though. In a world where you could actually trade for these players and I ran a team, I’d end up with Tatis, because I value him more than most of the league. And hey, all it takes is one GM who thinks like I do. Oh yeah, one quick note on tiers: I have Tatis and the next three guys clustered pretty close. There was a lot of order-switching, so don’t read too much into that; the important thing is that I think they’re the sixth- through third-best trade values in baseball.

A quick note here: Meg and I had some initial ranking-related panic over Rodríguez’s IL placement, but while the Mariners don’t seem inclined to rush him back, the injury also doesn’t seem to be season-ending or anything, and we’re proceeding under that assumption. You can consider this ranking provisional if you’d like, but sometimes people run into walls and twist their ankle; it happens.

With that out of the way, here’s another Tatis-ian player, and again, I don’t particularly mind if you want to shuffle the order of this group around a bit. The pitch here is simple: You’re getting a young superstar who averages about 5 WAR per 600 plate appearances and is only 23. You’re getting him for a long time, at a… well, at a confusing rate. Rodríguez is making $18 million a year for the next five years, and then the team has an option (hence the asterisk above) that works out to something like eight years at $32.5 million a year, depending on how award voting goes in the next half decade. Julio has an option of his own if the team declines theirs, at $18 million a year for five years. It’s a contract that an interest rates structuring specialist would love, and I’d know because I used to be one.

Rodríguez is having a down year at the plate, and he’s been tremendously streaky so far in his major league career, so you can look at his metrics at a given point in time and say, “Woof, the last month was awful.” That said, he’s been awfully consistent over time on the process side. He’s an aggressive hitter with plenty of swing-and-miss in his game, but that’s how he taps into his power. I think he’s probably a 130-135 wRC+ true talent guy in the long run, but with fairly wide error bars around that. He’s sure to have stretches where he looks unstoppable and stretches where he looks lost. I certainly wouldn’t bet on Rodríguez ascending to Yordanian levels of offensive prowess, but I agree with projection systems that there’s certainly some upside potential here.

I have Rodríguez ahead of Tatis for a few reasons. First, the absolute fail case doesn’t sting quite as much thanks to his contract structure. Second, I like his defense more. He’s a plus center fielder, maybe even an elite one, which provides a nice value floor even when he isn’t hitting. Third, there’s less injury risk here, which matters a lot when you’re paying hundreds of millions of dollars in salary. I’m less excited about his offense, which balances the scales somewhat, but even I, the high man on Tatis, would take Rodríguez if I had to choose between them. Julio has been the face of the franchise since the moment he inked his contract extension; he’s beloved by fans in Seattle. Young stars are in short supply. Young stars you can keep for a decade are even rarer. That’s why they’re here, at the top of the list, even with big monetary outlays attached.

I’m not proud of it, but I read the comments. No offense to you all – you’re lovely, most of you – but the comments section is just a toxic place. Even so, the outright disdain that the majority of the commentariat had for De La Cruz’s placement last year far exceeded the normal amount of naysaying that goes on. To paraphrase Mitch Hedberg, you can’t please all the people all the time, and all those people were in last year’s comments to talk about Elly.

Anyway, De La Cruz is one of the best players in baseball. He’s up to 5.1 WAR on the year, driven by some (in my opinion) irresponsibly rosy defensive value estimates, but he’s slugging .500 and posting one of the great baserunning seasons of the 21st century. He was born in 2002, a fact that I can barely wrap my head around. He’s still a work in progress, obviously, but he’s one of the best players in baseball already. That’s the dream: To have your uber-talented young superstar already breaking out in the majors when most phenoms are getting their first taste of Triple-A.

Mike Petriello wrote a nice breakdown of De La Cruz’s defense, but to be honest with you, I think Statcast is a little high on him. Still, he’s making the kinds of errors that good defenders make when they’re young, and the range and arm give me confidence that he’s going to be a standout in the long run. He’s still a far better hitter lefty than righty, but he’s improving there too. Switch-hitters often take longer to develop; again, he’s only 22.

If you’re looking for someone who could be the best player in baseball in the next few years, you have a decent range of options. If you’re looking for someone who could be the best player in baseball and is also currently only making $750,000 a year, the list is three players long, and Elly’s one of them. The other two? Read on. De La Cruz is right on the cusp of not even qualifying for Super Two status (to be clear, I don’t think the Reds were playing games here; his rise through the minors was meteoric and they gave him every opportunity to advance). He might still be making around the league minimum in 2026!

Last year, I had De La Cruz absolutely stuffed on this list as a bet on talent. An unbiased accounting would have had him lower; I just thought I was right and the consensus was wrong. This year, he’s ranked where he is because he’s just that good.

I like to paraphrase my team sources instead of quoting them, but I had to put this one in here verbatim: “If you don’t put Paul Skenes number one, I’ll email Meg and tell her to fire you.” If I’m not writing here come Monday morning, I guess you’ll know what happened. I started this process with Skenes meaningfully lower, but a) he’s put up a 1.53 ERA with 44 strikeouts in 35 innings in the last month and b) a bunch of people I think are really smart told me, “Skenes is too low, you dummy.” So let’s investigate why I started low and finished high.

Pitching is volatile and breakable, as I mention over and over again every year. UCLs are fragile, and to add insult to injury, there are other parts of the arm that are prone to getting hurt too. It’s rough out there. Starters throw fewer innings than ever; overall pitching value is getting spread out over more and more guys. Counting on a single pitcher to churn out elite value for years on end is a sucker’s bet.

The odds have never been this good, though. Skenes is a rookie. He’s probably the best pitcher in baseball right now. He theoretically has six more years of team control after this one, though if he finishes in the top two in Rookie of the Year voting, you can lop that down to five (hence the asterisk in the table above). The point is, he costs roughly nothing, he’ll be around for forever, and there is no one better than him at what he does right now. It’s not like the thing he’s best at is niche, either. It’s literally PITCHING.

Models are going to be skeptical, though they’re changing fast; a third of Skenes’ professional innings pitched have occurred in the last month. But watch this guy, and you’ll figure it out pretty quickly. He’s dominant, and it’s immediately obvious to everyone on the field. His peripherals back it up. There are no red flags. If money and team control were no object and I had to pick one pitcher to win one game, I’d pick Skenes, and you probably would too.

That’s enough to vault him to dizzying trade value heights. The only reason it didn’t put him first on the list, potential firing notwithstanding, is because pitching is fundamentally less stable than hitting. I don’t know if Skenes will stay healthy, and if he does get hurt, I don’t how much longer he’ll pitch before something breaks. It’s impossible to know what he’d look like afterwards if that happened. Tell me a 22-year-old hitter posted a five-win season, and I expect his age-26 season to be similar. I’m far less certain about a pitcher in that spot.

Still, trade value is concentrated in the present, because everyone’s future is unknowable and contingent. Right now, Skenes is the best in the business. He’s getting paid the league minimum for it. Every team in baseball would try to acquire him if they could, and some of them would offer a truly eye-watering array of prospects and current contributors to bring him into the fold. I tiered him with Elly and the big-contract young guys, but to be clear, I think that the industry consensus would have him a hair higher than that, in a group by himself and just below the top two.

The top two players on this list were nearly indistinguishable to me, and I’m happy to say that both teams and FanGraphs personnel felt similarly. It’s not that half of them had one guy and half had the other; plenty of people told me explicitly that they were essentially tied for first. My model-driven ranking had them almost exactly tied, and as I dug in further, nothing changed that initial opinion.

It’s pretty easy to explain what everyone likes about Witt. He’s a great hitter who plays excellent defense at a premium position, and he’s 24. It took him a while to get acclimated to the majors, but starting last July, he’s been on a white-hot tear. He’s slugging .593 in one of the toughest parks in the majors for home runs, getting on base at a .390 clip, and oh yeah, he’s the fastest player in baseball to boot.

I think you should be skeptical of Witt continuing his current torrid pace — after all, he’s absolutely on a heater right now. But I expect him to post lines that are 30-50% better than average for years to come. It’s Mookie Betts-level offense, albeit in a different way, where he might spike some impressive seasons and the floor is also quite high. ZiPS projects Witt for the second-most WAR in baseball over the next five years, and the only guy ahead of him is number one on this list.

His contract isn’t quite as much of a tailwind as you’d expect given his age and the fact that it could theoretically extend through 2037. He has an opt out after each year from 2030 through 2033, and if he hits his median projections, he’d probably be able to make more money by doing so. That kind of contingent risk hurts a little. The future is wildly unknowable. The very best Witt outcomes probably mean this contract will end in 2030, though that’s still forever away and he could always sign a new deal with the Royals; he seems keen to stay in Kansas City. The worst result in him staying longer. I’d have Witt number one if he were on Rodríguez’s contract, but this one isn’t bad by any means. You’d love to have the guy who might be the best player in baseball for this long at these prices.

The only reason people aren’t more amazed by Henderson is that we’re spoiled for absolutely elite youngsters right now, but goodness gracious, this guy is good. He’s a plus shortstop, though not at Witt’s level, and he’s also a spectacularly complete hitter. He has a great approach at the plate. He makes bruising contact to all fields, with deadly bat speed and a level swing that doesn’t give pitchers anywhere to hide. He’s the third-best player in baseball when it comes to runs added per secondary pitch seen, so it’s not like you can just cheese him with sliders. He’s improved at absolutely everything in the last year, and he was already a five-win player.

Trying to project a ceiling for Henderson is a pointless exercise. It’s really high, and why should you care exactly where it is? If he never changes, he’s a perennial MVP candidate. A good-variance year for him might be absolutely mind-bending – 50 bombs and a Gold Glove at shortstop, or something along those lines. I’d take Ohtani ahead of him as the best player in the game, but the models wouldn’t, and either way, he’s clearly one of the top few.

This is a trade value series, not a name the top players list, so let’s talk about Henderson’s contract status. It’s great, and I don’t have much more to say than that. He’ll qualify for arbitration after next season, then play three more years on arb salaries before hitting free agency. That’s four (relatively) cheap years of the best production there is, and I’d throw in some bonus value for the chance to sign him to a contract extension that guarantees him nine figures while leaving some juice in it for the signing team.

This series is often an exercise in deciding what you can live without. Player A’s contract is bad, Player B is headed into age-related decline, Player C is having a down season, and Player D’s value comes largely from defense. Now sort them! You can never have everything. But in Henderson’s case, maybe you can. He checks every box, and most of them emphatically. This trade value list, my personal list, has some places where I disagreed with the various intelligent baseball people I consulted. It has some opinions that I’m sure would make them call me mean names if they weren’t so nice. But this wasn’t one of those places. Everyone loves Gunnar (and Bobby).