2024 Trade Value: Nos. 11-20

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 caught up on what number a player is, because who they’re grouped with is a more important indicator. The gap between no. 20 and 19 is next to nothing; between 11 and 10, it’s much steeper. 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 next batch of players.

I shouldn’t have relegated Betts to the honorable mentions last year. It was a function of a few things converging at once: I was trying to rely a little more on projections, which were strangely down on him last year, for my initial level-setting. I also bunched him together with players on similar deals who just aren’t as good as he is, and then did a lot less manual re-ordering than normal after starting with a quantitative sort.

Regardless of why I did it, I was wrong, and this year’s ranking corrects that. Betts is part of a two-player tier comprised of truly elite talents in their 30s who are on large and lengthy deals. Those deals keep some teams out of the picture entirely. The remaining teams would love to add Betts, though. It’s a scarcity thing, particularly at the nosebleed heights of the best teams in baseball. If you have Betts, no one else does. He’s actually been better offensively in Los Angeles than he was in Boston, which is hard to wrap my head around. He’s one of the best hitters in the game, and he can also just play shortstop out of nowhere when you need him to. It would be no surprise for him to compile several more 6-7 WAR seasons. He’s currently on the IL after breaking his hand on an HBP, but he’s expected back soon, and the injury didn’t affect my valuation at all.

Honestly, I don’t have to convince you that Mookie Betts is good. He’s Mookie Betts! So instead, I’ll tell you how my various team sources felt about the placement here. I talked mostly to folks with teams that wouldn’t get involved if Betts came on the market. I talked to several people who thought Bryce Harper and crew shouldn’t be on this list at all because of monetary concerns. They saw Betts (and the next guy) here, and just said, “Yep, okay, that sounds about right.” I’m not saying their personal list would have Betts in the same spot, but even if you’re the kind of person who drives a Honda (like me — lifelong Civic and HR-V guy), you can appreciate the supercar you see at the grocery store.

I’m not done harping on this idea. But I am done with this blurb, because the next player on the list is going to provide plenty of opportunity for further discussion. Like Betts, he’s so good that wasting time explaining his talent seems silly. So without further ado…

Hey, look, the best hitter in baseball is a guy who teams would want to trade for! There’s exactly one Aaron Judge. He’s playing at an 8.5 WAR/600 PA pace over the past three seasons. He’s playing at a 7 WAR/600 PA pace for his entire career. Get out of here with your “Oh, I value low-price team control” nonsense. The teams that do value that still think Judge belongs around here. He’s simply irreplaceable.

Look, baseball teams have money to spend. Some players are going to earn it. If your big monetary commitments go to players like Betts and Judge, your team will probably be good. Take the Giants. They tried to go spend a bunch of money on Judge and then Shohei Ohtani, and when that didn’t work, their fallback was to re-allocate those resources to worse players, which hasn’t gone all that well.

Most of the time someone with a huge contract gets traded, it happens because something has gone wrong. They’re on the decline, they’re threatening to opt out, they’re not playing as much as they’d like to. Maybe the team around them has gone off the rails, meaningfully altering their club’s competitive calculus. In a world where Judge actually hits the trade block, he probably wouldn’t be hitting like he is now, and teams probably would fret about the monetary aspect. It truly is a lot of money. But if he went on the block today, as the clear best hitter in baseball at the peak of his powers? His $40 million salary is way less than Judge’s fair value in 2024. In fact, in my opinion, he has the highest present-day value of anyone in the sport. That matters for trades, no matter what kind of theoretical surplus value world you want to live in.

The next three players starting with Riley belong together, but I could see switching their order with Betts and Judge. They’re a best-of-both-worlds grouping. Riley is a good example of what I mean. A linear surplus value model that treats every win the same sees his contract as having meaningfully positive trade value. He’s also just really good; add our rest-of-season projections for 2024 to what he’s done so far this year, and he comes in at exactly 20 WAR over the past four seasons. Riley is 27, and his contract extends another eight years after this one, with a team option for a ninth, at around $22 million a year. In other words, so long as Riley keeps playing like a perennial All-Star, he’s going to keep racking up positive value.

At some point, he’ll have to switch over to first base, which will put a cap on his value, but that time won’t come as soon as talent evaluators thought when he first made the majors. He looks like a legitimate plus defender at third base right now, which is shocking given where he started. Even the most pessimistic defensive model thinks he’s average, and all the others think he’s comfortably above average. He definitely passes the eye test, too. He’s mastered the art of ranging into foul territory to make a snare and then throw on a pivot, something that used to give him fits.

Offensively, Riley is a power merchant whose slight underperformance this year doesn’t concern me or the projection systems. It didn’t concern many of my contacts, either. Sure, Riley strikes out a lot, but it’s part of his plan. He has a plus batting eye, chasing less frequently than average while still attacking good pitches. The strikeouts come because he’s taking violent hacks, and that tradeoff works just fine. He consistently runs gargantuan barrel rates and pops 30 bombs. Honestly, Riley might be Atlanta’s most unsung player. He doesn’t have a wildly team-friendly contract like Ozzie Albies or a crazy good MVP season under his belt like Ronald Acuña Jr., but he’s significantly outproduced those guys WAR-wise over the past four years, and that’s using Statcast defensive data, which is the lowest on him. He’s a great player, even if he’s kind of a boring one.

Oh, you want underrated third basemen? I’ll show you an underrated third baseman. Ramírez and Riley have a surprising amount in common despite body types that couldn’t be more different. Ramírez will average $22 million a year for the next four years, the same annual salary as Riley. He’s been a very similar hitter, at least in terms of wRC+. He’s better defensively and on the basepaths, too, which is why I gave him the edge despite a four-year age difference and less team control.

Ramírez’s offensive game has worked for so long that it doesn’t feel quite so strange anymore, but it’s fundamentally weird. He’s a little guy who hits big, only he somehow does it without striking out. He’s walked almost as often as he’s struck out in his career, and he’s also cracked nearly 250 homers. He makes contact and steals bases like a slap hitter, only he hits mostly fly balls and has a career .281 BABIP. He’s just a master when it comes to lifting and pulling, the idealized final form of Isaac Paredes.

Trying to extrapolate an aging curve for Ramírez feels like an impossible task. He collapsed in 2019 only to have probably his best season in 2020, followed by another spectacular year in 2021. Very few players in baseball history have accrued value in the precise way that he does, which means I’m unsure how and when his skills will erode. Level with me, though: Do you think he’s going to put up less than 8 WAR over the next two seasons? Probably not. He’s just too consistent, too smart, and too good at what he does.

Wait, Logan Webb? There was a delightful divergence among the people I talked to in making this list when it came to Webb. The visual evaluators of the group – scout-y people and the like – thought he should be lower. He doesn’t throw hard. He doesn’t miss a lot of bats. He doesn’t really look like he should be an ace. He’s a sinker-baller, a pitch-to-contact guy in a strikeouts and dingers world. He’s having a down year in 2024.

But the model-driven types, a group I’d mostly consider myself a part of? They’re into what Webb offers. It’s not like he’s some good-ERA/bad-FIP lucksack. His first good season was 2021, and he’s fifth in fWAR among all pitchers since then. He’s fifth in RA9-WAR, too. Among pitchers to throw at least 500 innings over that time frame, he’s tied with Gerrit Cole for the seventh-lowest ERA-. He’s fourth in FIP-. He’s an accumulator too – he’s third in the majors in innings pitched. You probably haven’t noticed it, but he’s a capital-A ace, one of the best pitchers in baseball — period. That down year? It still has him 14th in WAR, not a bad fail case.

Oh, but it gets ace-ier still. There are 73 pitchers who have pitched 100 or more innings this year. Webb is tied with Tarik Skubal for the 10th-highest PitchingBot stuff grade. He has the ninth-highest Stuff+ mark. He has elite control, almost unheard of for a sinker-dominant pitcher. He has the third-best BB%+ in the majors in that 2021-24 timeframe. There’s no one else like Webb.

Webb will be around for four years after this one, and his contract is eminently reasonable. I have a theory – unproven, and probably unprovable – that his ability to throw objectively nasty pitches (those stuff grades don’t lie) at low velocity insulates him from injury somewhat. He has a great record of health, and his low-walk, groundball style lets him pitch deep into games. He’s even a playoff stud, albeit in a tiny sample: He has a career 0.61 ERA (1.06 FIP) over 14.2 innings, all of which came against literally the Dodgers.

I hate ranking pitchers high in exercises like this — there’s only one of them in the top 15 spots on this list. But Webb is as bankable a commodity as there is, and at 27, he projects to keep doing it for a while. I put him at the head of this tier of excellent, team-leading stars making $20-ish million a year because he’s the one I’d want the most out of the bunch. There just aren’t many pitchers like this anymore.

Boy, I did not have fun ranking Carroll. I started with him higher than this, because from a projected wins and projected cost standpoint, he’s easily in the top 10. He’s going to be around for a long time, he’s only 23, and with a 5-WAR season already in the bank, the projected future is rosy. With every successive pass at the list, though, I kept sliding him lower, and it’s fairly easy to understand why. He ended up in a group of five outfielders with a question mark or two marring their otherwise spectacular profiles.

Carroll has been bad this year. There’s no way around it. His contact quality is way down. He’s hitting too many grounders and barreling the ball up less frequently. His defense, which scouts expected to be elite, has been lackluster, weighed down by his weak throwing arm. He looked uncomfortable when an injury to Alek Thomas forced him into center field, further depressing his defensive value. He’ll need a strong finish to the year just to crack the two-win plateau.

But the tools all still flash when you watch him. He’s blindingly fast, and he swings hard without a ton of whiffs. He’s not maximizing his fly ball contact this year, but you can see glimpses of his 2023 form peeking through. The smart money is on Carroll being a consistent All-Star in the upcoming decade.

Still, he’s not doing it right now. He has a pretty concerning injury history – he missed almost the entire 2021 season with a gruesome shoulder injury, and since a scare late last June, he’s hit just .240/.323/.385 with a 97 wRC+. All the power and speed he generates from a tiny frame just feels risky; the torque he’s generating to produce bat speeds comparable to Salvador Perez and Brent Rooker can’t be good for the joints. One of my cross-checkers put it to me very well: In the same way that I don’t think teams would likely offer full freight for the unproven prospects on the list, would they really go all out to get Carroll?

I expect him to be higher on this list next year. He’s an awesome player, and he’s going to be around for a long time at an attractive rate, which is enough to warrant this placement even in a down year. But to trade for him right now? I’d be trying to acquire him at a discount, because one feels merited at the moment. I don’t consider myself risk-averse relative to the observed behavior of major league GMs, but I’d make an exception in this case.

Full disclosure: I let the crowd guide me a bit here, because I’m not confident in my evaluation of Merrill. Time after time, I sent out a list with Merrill in the 20s or high teens and got scoffed at. Oh, it was all polite enough, but the message was clear: Teams perceive Merrill as a star already.

His hitting has never been much of a question. He’s been getting Michael Brantley comps for years, and that’s exactly what he looks like so far. His sweet swing produces line drives to all fields, and he has home run power when he elevates the ball. He’s more aggressive than Brantley, and I think he’s still searching for the perfect approach at the plate, but his bat-to-ball skills give him a ridiculously high floor. He’s going to fall out of bed and put up batting lines 20% better than league average.

What has people really over the moon, though, is how easily Merrill has taken to center field. He never looked like a long-term fit at shortstop, and if he ended up playing a corner defensive position, that would put a ton of pressure on his bat. Now that he looks passable in the middle pasture, though, the math works a lot better. His offense is head and shoulders above the bar in center. Now the downside scenarios – league-average bat held back by a lack of power – still result in above-average value, and the best outcomes come with top-five MVP finishes.

He’s also 21 and will be on the Padres for another five years after 2024. The gap between the minors and the majors is enormous these days, and with Merrill’s minor league track record, no one would have been shocked if he needed a year or two of adjustment – just look at his fellow rookie Jacksons to get an understanding of how hard it is to hit in your first taste of the big leagues. Instead, he’s comfortably above average, and that despite underperforming his contact quality. It’s vanishingly rare to be this good this fast, which is why teams of all stripes covet Merrill.

Greene should have been on the tail end of the list last year instead of just off of it. I didn’t quite buy the track record yet, even though I’d highlighted Greene as a player to watch and thought he was due some improvement. Clearly, that was the wrong move in retrospect. He and Merrill have moved in lockstep on this list as young, center field-capable outfielders who can really hit.

You’ve seen hitters like Greene before. He has excellent power and great patience, which lets him hunt fastballs early in the count and adjust late. Last year, he was still struggling to harness that power; he hit too many grounders, more or less. He’s already eclipsed last year’s home run total, and I like the shape of his production a lot more now. I’m getting Brandon Nimmo with more power and fewer walks vibes, and that’s a really nice player, particularly at this age and with this much team control remaining.

Broadly speaking, players like Greene are always going to be in huge demand. Corner outfielders with average bats? Eh, everyone has ‘em. Add either good defense or good offense to that profile, and things start to get exciting. Add both, and you’re really cooking with gas. There’s certainly risk in Greene’s profile. He isn’t a lock to stay in center – in fact, he’s mostly played left field this year (and been quite good). He strikes out enough that there’s some chance he settles in at a lower offensive level than his current numbers suggest. To that, I say: sure, okay, fine. If either of those two things happens, Greene will still be an excellent player. He won’t fall into the corner outfield sinkhole unless multiple things go wrong at once, and if the variance happens in the other direction, he might take home an MVP award.

Harris was a great litmus test for the team personnel I talked to while constructing this list. Everyone loves defense and team control – but how much do they love them when they’re the main features driving a player’s profile? If you’re an add-em-up-and-count-the-value kind of guy, Harris will float your boat. He’s 4 WAR in a can. Look at those projections! He’s played at a better pace than that in his career; even his down 2024 season doesn’t change the overall trajectory.

His contract is team-friendly almost to the point of absurdity. It goes for a billion years. It pays him like a decent reliever, or like he got stuck in his second year of arbitration instead of striking it big. If you’re a big market club, you can lock up center field for the next decade for essentially nothing, then use the savings to splurge elsewhere. If you’re pinching pennies, well, he’s an All-Star who doesn’t cost much money. He’s only 23. What more are you looking for?

That brings us to the other half of the litmus test. What more are you looking for? How about a guy with an on-base percentage above .300? Harris isn’t exactly a fearsome hitter, despite some promising numbers under the hood; swinging hard and making decent contact can only take you so far if you never figure out the strike zone, and Harris hasn’t done that yet. He’s so aggressive at the plate that teams just aren’t giving him fastballs to hit. He started slowly last year, got hot in the second half, and then has been quite bad this year. Plus, he’s currently on the IL with a hamstring injury.

It’s not quite a Luis Robert Jr. situation, where I had people (virtually) banging the table to support their opinions, but I do think that there’s a big divide in what players like this are worth in trade. It’s not exactly a pure referendum on defense – the guy has a career 115 wRC+ – but Harris has never felt like an impact hitter, and the ceiling just seems lower given his approach. He’s the highest-ranked player on this list who I don’t see as a frequent MVP candidate. That’s where I came down on balancing the two disparate views.

What a bummer. Acuña was outrageously good last year, fulfilling the potential everyone had seen since he was the top prospect in baseball before the 2018 season. He’s a do-it-all crusher on offense, with every tool in the book and plenty of evidence that he can put it all together at once. You probably don’t think of him this way, but Acuña has a spectacular batting eye. He swings far more often than average at pitches over the heart of the plate, and almost never chases. He combines that with top-of-the-scale power, sprays the ball to all fields, and oh yeah, he stole 73 bases last year.

No one disputes the talent here. The issue is injuries, obviously. He missed a ton of time after tearing his right ACL in 2021, and it took him a year to return to his prior explosive self. He tore his other ACL at the end of May on a fluke non-contact play, and we just don’t have a lot of data on what happens to players who suffer successive major injuries like that.

I’m not worried about Acuña’s slow start to the 2024 season, but I am worried about a potentially slow start to 2025. I’m worried that his defense, already worse than you’d expect for someone with his baserunning prowess, will decline even further. I’m worried that the effortless athleticism that makes him so spectacular will be toned down a bit with twice as many surgically replaced ligaments as he had at this time last year.

Acuña is obviously still hugely valuable. His contract is reasonable, and will keep him around through 2028 thanks to the club options. He’s already racked up 28.3 WAR, but because he got started very early, he’s somehow only 26. There’s no reason to expect an age-related decline anytime soon. When he’s healthy, I think he’s one of the best five or so hitters in baseball. But “when he’s healthy” is doing a ton of work in that sentence. I don’t have a strong sense of when Acuña will be back to 100%. I don’t have a strong sense of how long it will take him to shake the rust off. I can’t help but discount his value somewhat for that. I hope that this time next year, he’s mashing taters and making me look silly for doubting him. But despite being more talented than the rest of the outfielders in this tier, the monumental riskiness was too much for me to put him in the top 10.