2024 Trade Value: Nos. 31-40

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.

One note on the rankings: Particularly at the bottom of the list, there isn’t a lot of room between the players. The ordinal rankings clearly matter, and we put them there for a reason, but there isn’t much of a gap between, say, the 38th-ranked player and the 60th. The magnitude of the differences in this part of the list is quite small. Several of the folks I talked to might prefer a player in the honorable mentions section to one on the back end of the list, or vice versa. I think the broad strokes are correct, and this is my opinion of the best order, but with so many players carrying roughly equivalent value, disagreements abounded. 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 also 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.

This next group of three players all play plus defense at shortstop, which goes a long way towards having teams interested in you. That said, I have some fairly serious questions about one part or another of each of their profiles, which holds their value back for me. Neto is a good example of that. There’s a lot to like here: He’s young, he has five years of team control remaining, and he’s had shockingly few hiccups in his game despite tearing through the minors at a breakneck pace before establishing himself in the majors.

One thing that consistently came through when I talked to team sources is that they like Neto’s defense better than I do, which is something I tend to put more stock in when I hear it a few times. Statcast and DRS disagree here, with the former thinking he’s below average in the field and the latter thinking he’s spectacular. Baseball Prospectus agrees with DRS. Neto looks the part, though that’s obviously a fickle indicator. Let’s split the difference and call him a 60 defender at shortstop.

I’m not in love with Neto’s offensive game, but that’s not to say it’s bad. It’s just unexciting; he hits for enough power to get by, doesn’t strike out too much, and doesn’t hurt or help himself with his baserunning. If he’s batting ninth in your lineup, you probably have a great offense. If he’s batting fourth, you might have a problem.

This is one of the picks where I was most influenced by others; I didn’t have Neto in my top 50, but people I talked to made some compelling arguments on the defensive front. Teams value truly excellent up-the-middle defense that comes at a reasonable cost quite highly and so do I. I know that every year people look at these lists and think “Him?!” And I’m kind of with you! Zach Neto?! But a 3-4 WAR player making peanuts is attractive, and there’s the added bonus that despite being hard to measure, defensive ability is pretty stable. Your defense doesn’t really get “figured out” by an opposing hitter the way a dastardly slider might. The opposing team can’t pick on your weak point to neutralize your strengths. If you can pick it, you can pick it – and it looks like Neto can pick it.

Now here’s a guy who no one I talked to has any defensive questions about. Tovar is part ballerina and part sorcerer in the field, pairing precise footwork with prescient instincts. He’s one of the best defenders in baseball, period, and he’s only 22. You can pencil in years of highlight-worthy plays and sensational range here.

You can also pencil in an outrageous amount of team control at a reasonable rate. Tovar signed a seven-year, $63.5 million extension with a club option tacked on this past offseason, so he’ll be around through his age-29 season at rates that won’t break the bank. A league average hitter with transcendent defense like Tovar’s is roughly a four-win player annually.

Now, about that “league average hitter” part: I don’t see it yet. Coors Field always makes hitter evaluation difficult – Tovar already has 16 homers this year! – but I won’t mince words; his approach and batting eye just aren’t good enough. We’re talking about a guy who is theoretically a contact hitter and is running a 20% swinging strike rate. He’s been an average bat this year, and I really liked his potential as a prospect, but I look at his swing decisions and cringe.

The reason Tovar is on the list is that he could be a 90 wRC+ true talent hitter and still put up 3-4 WAR every year (look at those ZiPS forecasts, for example). Two team sources were meaningfully higher on him than I was, though I don’t think that’s a universal view. I was specifically asking for feedback on my rating of defense-first hitters, and he’s a good poster boy for that group, so I’m sure I got more Tovar comments than I would have otherwise. The point is, plenty of front offices covet this combination of skill set and team control, and I would too if I were in their shoes.

Volpe is a hugely divisive player to fans. His game is less contentious among talent evaluators; they consistently have him ranked higher than I do here. Volpe is a wonderful defender, with great reads, great range, and a quick release that offsets his below-average arm strength. The eye test and every statistical model agree that he’s an asset in the field. His style is less graceful than Tovar’s, but that doesn’t mean it counts less.

The place where I disagreed with my (wonderful, estimable, thanks so much for your help) sources is the bat. I’ll give it to you straight: Volpe hasn’t hit in the big leagues. I’m not convinced that he will. As a prospect, I was enamored with his ability to max out his power with a fly ball-oriented approach, but that’s all but disappeared in the majors, where he’s hitting a ton of grounders and leaning into his contact skill. The result is a hitter completely stuck in between; I watch Volpe and wonder how in the world this guy hit so well only two years ago.

Last year, I ranked Bobby Witt Jr. around this spot on the list (whoops!). To that point in his major league career, he was hitting .255/.296/.436, good for a 98 wRC+. Now he’s one of the best hitters in baseball. Talented prospects figure it out all the time (Witt was a better prospect than Volpe, but Volpe was no slouch on that front, a 60 FV here and similarly rated elsewhere). I think the main disconnect between me and the people I talked to is that I’m harsher on players who haven’t yet performed at the major league level (boy, get ready for that criticism to come back in the next group).

It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong in the same way about Volpe, but if I were a GM, I’d want him to prove that he’s going to be an impact bat before I valued him much differently than Tovar and Neto.

The next three players on the list are sure to elicit some strong opinions, so let me lay out my thinking here before getting into specifics. I think that all three, and the players who fit this archetype generally, have more abstract “expected value” than the players around them on the list. I also think that the nature of that expected value makes it unlikely that teams would offer full freight for them.

There are two reasons to engage in a trade: to make your team better right now in pursuit of a championship, or to accumulate good contracts to help you win one later. Both are valid, but they work pretty differently. If you’re trading for someone who can help you right now, you can give away some future value and have the whole thing still add up. A failed but useful example of this, from a trade value perspective, is the Padres/Nationals Juan Soto deal. Going the other direction, there was Chris Sale to Boston, a trade that worked out incredibly well for the Red Sox.

Imagine trading for Holliday that way. You can’t! The Orioles are trying to win a championship this year, and they don’t think Holliday fits in the major league puzzle just yet. Obviously they think he will before long, but the proof is in the pudding here. No one’s going to work up an enormous Godfather offer for a guy who hasn’t succeeded in the big leagues yet, a player who a championship contender playing Jorge Mateo at second base can’t find a spot for.

The teams that want Holliday are the asset accumulators. The problem with that is that those teams try to win trades, not just break even. How else do you accumulate? My feeling is that the bids for Holliday would all be trying to buy the dip, not offering the maximum amount they could stomach because of need. I’d do the same if I were a GM. That’s a recipe for lower trade value, even if I think that 100 games of solid major league performance would flip the script considerably.

Now, a few words about Holliday himself: He’s not as universally loved as most top prospects are because his offensive production is shaped weirdly. It’s very walk-and-strikeout heavy, with less power than you’d hope for. I expect that to come around, because his frame and swing suggest room for improvement, but his brief major league stint certainly didn’t quiet questions about his approach. For a top prospect, there’s a ton of risk here. I think ZiPS is right, of course, and he’ll be an All-Star at peak, but I would not be falling all over myself to trade for him right at this moment.

I had Langford behind Holliday before soliciting feedback, and I still don’t feel confident about the order here. Everyone loves Langford’s ridiculous, top-of-the-scale raw power, and he might be a plus corner outfielder instead of the DH/liability everyone expected. The problem is, he’s just not hitting. Now just over 300 plate appearances into his big league career, he’s running a 5.4% HR/FB and a below-average barrel rate, and you can’t blame all of that on a hamstring injury that cost him three weeks of playing time in May. Where’s the exit velo god we were promised?

I don’t have a great answer for you aside from “just let him play for a while and see.” He looks the part. Langford is hitting cleanup for the reigning World Series champs. You’d be crazy not to bet on him figuring it out. His brief minor league career was so scorching hot that discounting his early major league struggles is an eminently reasonable view. The projections are dragged down a bit by how bearish ZiPS is on his defense, but they’re still nice. I think that on the team side, a lot of orgs see him as significantly better than this.

That said, how much are you giving up for Langford right this minute? If you’re rebuilding, the math doesn’t add up; he’s in the majors right now and in theory a lot of his value should come in the next 2.5 years. If you’re contending, well, he’s hitting worse than Volpe so far this year, and he isn’t a 65 shortstop defender. His bat is likely to be far better in the long run, which nudges him ahead of Volpe in my mind, but he’s just not someone a contender could plug into the top of their lineup today. Langford is getting squeezed by the way I’ve constructed this exercise, not because he’s bad. I just don’t see myself backing up the truck for him if I’m a GM, though some of the people I talked to said that they’d be comfortable doing so.

Same song, different verse here. Wood’s upside is almost incalculable. His performance in Triple-A this year was downright silly. He somehow walked almost as much as he struck out – at 21 – while slugging .600. His power makes seasoned talent evaluators giggle uncontrollably. My irresponsible cross-sport comparison du jour is peak Ben Wallace; just an absolutely massive and explosive athlete with a shocking amount of fine motor control for his size.

Wood’s major league track record is short enough that I wouldn’t feel comfortable slotting him into the middle of a contending team’s lineup just yet. He looks indecisive to me; he’s swinging less than I’d expect and missing a lot when he does. Honestly, I’m surprised it hasn’t been worse; the guy is shockingly young and riding a rocket ship through advanced levels of competition. His defense is a work in progress, too.

I think that Wood is likely to finish the year around replacement level. The thing is, I also think that he’s likely to finish several campaigns in the next five years with 5+ WAR. He’s my favorite prospect in baseball, and when he graduates, he’ll be one of my favorite young players. The Nats aren’t going to trade him because he’s a perfect fit for their competitive timeline, and I love that they put him in the majors as soon as it looked like he could hang. Like Holliday and Langford, I think Wood’s trade value is low right now relative to what it will be because the teams that would look to add him are probably playing for the future. I just want to note that he’s my favorite member of this trio by a good deal, almost (but not quite) enough that I put him in a separate tier.

I might just be bad at judging the catcher position, at least when it comes to trade value. It’s hard to overstate how much value a good catcher can add. WAR does a good job of it, but well, everyone tends to discount catcher WAR because it puts so much value on defense. If you look at the truly terrible hitters that smart teams are willing to play at catcher, it seems clear that they agree. On the other hand, catching has a brutal attrition rate; the guys who were good five years ago mostly aren’t anymore. It’s quite the pickle.

Anyway, let’s talk about Gabriel Moreno! He might be an excellent defensive catcher. He’s a good receiver. He’s one of the best in baseball at controlling the running game. He’s athletic and young. He’s almost certainly an above-average hitter, too; he has excellent bat control, a solid approach at the plate, and average power. It’s not quite the same, but Yasmani Grandal springs to mind as an overall value comp; plus-plus defense and plus offense, even if the offense is weirdly shaped at times.

Why didn’t I jam him even higher on the list, then? Moreno is the start of a tier that extends through the rest of today’s players and into tomorrow’s: solid players at up-the-middle positions who fall short of being gamebreaking at any one thing. Moreno will be around for a long time. He won’t cost you much. He’s a borderline All-Star. He’s just not a superstar, and I don’t think it’s likely that he’ll become one.

The players in this group are all the building blocks of great teams, and in ways that teams like: They’re young, cost-controlled, and occupy tough positions. Nearly every player ranked higher than the guys in this tier has contended for a major award in either 2023 or 2024. This general area is as high as I can go for this style of player without seeing a further breakout. In my mind, that’s a pretty big compliment.

I’m not completely sure what Alvarez’s carrying tool is. He socked 25 homers in 423 plate appearances last year, but his raw batted ball data isn’t nearly as flattering. He has a cannon arm and great pop times, but he hasn’t controlled the running game particularly well. He might be a great receiver, but he might be an equally awful blocker.

His career line – .230/.305/.446 with 30 homers in 600-ish PAs – is that of a slightly above-average hitter. I think the Mets would be ecstatic with that; it’s hard to get solid offensive production out of a plus defensive catcher. To give you an idea of how much that matters, consider the case of Logan O’Hoppe, someone who would have made my honorable mentions list if I expanded it a bit more. He has a similar number of defensive innings to Alvarez since the start of 2023, and we think he’s been 20 runs worse defensively. Twenty! That’s two wins and then some. O’Hoppe has a 120 wRC+ to Alvarez’s 108 over that time frame. That’s something like seven runs of difference, a third of the defensive gap. Defense is underrated.

I was lower than most of the people I polled on Alvarez, in fact, and I think it’s because I’m skeptical that he’ll continue to be this good defensively. If he’s as good of a defender as Moreno – he’s graded out better thus far – he should be 10 spots higher on this list. He’s 22 and will be around for four more years. I just think his defense will be slightly worse than he’s shown so far – his framing has already regressed towards the mean – and that he’ll end up being a good hitter rather than a great one. Be aware that I’m lower on him than industry consensus, though.

I mean, how in the world is Abrams under team control for four more years? I double- and triple-checked that in making this list. It feels like he’s been a big leaguer for forever because that’s just how Padres prospects got promoted a few years ago; he made his major league debut at the start of the 2022 season, but bounced back to the minors and didn’t end up with a full year of service time. He’s still only 23, and appears to finally be hitting the lofty offensive expectations that made him a top prospect.

Abrams is an outlier in this tier in that I can definitely name something he doesn’t do well: play defense. DRS is a big positive outlier in thinking that he’s an average shortstop; everyone else, from scouts to Statcast, considers him somewhere between subpar and disastrous defensively. I watched a lot of him in the field while working on this series, and I concur. He turns a lot of easy plays into hard ones despite prodigious raw talent.

Offensively, he used to have a similar profile – spectacular tools, limited production – but he’s putting everything together en route to a career-best season at the plate. Abrams has plus power that he gets to with shocking ease, and he’s aggressive in the zone in the general vein of Corey Seager. His swing will lull you to sleep, and then bam, it’s a yanked homer to the right field stands. I don’t know if he’ll ever be an all-fields crusher, but he might hit 25 homers a year as a dead pull type anyway. His swing-first approach and solid contact skills keep his strikeout rate in check, and he’s so dang fast that he runs a reasonable BABIP despite a fly ball approach.

I’d probably try Abrams at a different position if I traded for him. That said, it might just be something he grows into; he’s still only 23, and he definitely makes errors of commission rather than omission. The same is true on the basepaths, where Abrams has gotten thrown out (and picked off) at a prodigious rate this year. It feels like there’s still another level in there somewhere, whether it’s on defense or the bases. I started Abrams a bit lower in these rankings, but I consistently heard good arguments to move him up, so here he is.

I’m sure that a lot of people will say this is a homer pick, but you know what, I don’t watch a lot of Cardinals games these days, what with living on the west coast and covering baseball nationally, and I started Winn lower on the list before hearing people rave about his skills and potential with every email and call I got. He has blazing speed, one of the strongest infield arms in the game, and already looks like a defensive mainstay who’s going to be among the best defenders for years to come.

There was a category for players like this earlier on the list. Why isn’t Winn in that group? It comes down to his team control – five more years after this one, including two more pre-arb years – and his offensive potential. He’s probably not going to hit 20 homers a season, particularly in cavernous Busch Stadium, but he has spectacular bat-to-ball skills that have translated to the major leagues pretty smoothly. He’s in the 88th percentile for contact rate, doesn’t strike out very often, and gears his swing for line drives. His BABIP is due for some regression, but I’m not alone in thinking he’ll hit for enviable average. Combine that with his low strikeout rate and reasonable walk rate, and he’s going to get on base a ton. He’s like Neto’s offense (plus a little) combined with Volpe’s defense (plus a little) — how could he be in the same group as those guys given that?

Winn sits at an interesting intersection of the model-driven evaluators I’ve talked to and the more scouting-oriented ones. The model guys love him; my minor league hitting models have consistently singled him out, he’s a ZiPS darling, and computers love his defense. Scouts also love his defense, and they obviously love that at age 22, he’s putting up good offensive numbers in the majors with loud tools. But he’s a low-ceiling player for someone who is universally liked; if you think he’s going to hit for power, you have to project some kind of swing change, which I think is unlikely. That’s why Winn is in this group of well-rounded hitters with defensive value (a group that will continue through to tomorrow’s list) instead of higher up.