2025 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 2026-2030, 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 2030 (assuming the player is under contract or team control for those seasons). Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2024 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 reach 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. There’s one exception here: the second- and third-ranked guys absolutely belong at the top of their tier. 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.

Acuña starts a tier of three players I’m calling Top Producers. These guys are racking up runs in great heaping piles in the major leagues right now. If you’re making up a list of potential MVP candidates for 2026, these three guys should probably all be near the top of your list (there are others, too, but don’t worry, there’s still some list left).

One big change I’ve made to my Trade Value process over the years is devaluing defensive contributions. Teams have gotten really good at finding defensive gems in the minors. Defense also peaks early, so it tends to peak with low, team-controlled salaries. Unless you’re the Brewers, you can’t field a team of nine center fielders, but “just be like the Brewers” is impossible — they’re the best at what they do. The Red Sox are playing Ceddanne Rafaela, who I think is one of the five best outfield defenders on the planet, at second base! Clearly, you can’t treat one win’s worth of defense the same way you treat one win’s worth of offense.

Ronald Acuña Jr. can rack up value from anywhere, on any team. His defense isn’t the draw, preposterous throwing arm notwithstanding. He’s just one of the best hitters around, and he’s doing it again this year. He has a pristine sense of when to swing, with top-tier chase rates but above-average aggression in the zone. He has S-tier bat speed and makes the most of it by getting the ball in the air. He’s 27, with a career 144 wRC+ and a history of improving as he goes. How many hitters would you expect to put up better batting numbers in 2026? Not a ton! Since the start of 2020, the only five guys ahead of him are Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, Yordan Alvarez, Shohei Ohtani, and Mike Trout. The only guys with better rest-of-season projections are Judge, Soto, and Ohtani (Alvarez is one point of wRC+ behind Acuña).

And have I mentioned that you can have Acuña for cheap? His early-career extension with the Braves is nearing its end, but he’s still under contract for three years at $17 million per (the last two are team options with big buyouts, but c’mon, you’re picking those up). That’s peanuts. Even the White Sox, Pirates, A’s, and Marlins could afford it. The only bummer about the contract is that it only runs three more seasons; I’d sign up for another decade or more at that rate if I could.

The other consideration with Acuña is injury, of course. He’s torn both ACLs, and he missed significant time recovering each time. The first time, he came back and simply wasn’t himself for a year. He seems more adept at adjusting this time; he’s stealing less often this year but is still maintaining good baserunning value, and he seems as explosive as ever – that .281 ISO doesn’t lie. But he’s only hit the 600-PA mark twice in his eight-year career, so clearly some adjustment is necessary.

In the end, that adjustment for me was pushing Acuña to the bottom of this tier. I couldn’t get him out of my personal top 10, though. He’s going to hit too much, for too low of a price, to be lower than this. I’d be happy with two seasons of peak Acuña and an injury season, and he’s both healthy and devastatingly locked in right now.

All that stuff I said about lowering catchers in my ranking process based on the difficulty of their position and volatility of their defensive numbers? That’s why Raleigh is ninth on this list instead of in the top five. He has everything else working for him. In the last calendar year, he went from incrementally improving his value to launching it into orbit. First, he finished 2024 strong with an excellent second half. Then he signed a team-friendly extension that will keep him around through 2030 (or even 2031) at a $20 million AAV. Then he turned into the catching version of Babe Ruth, won the Home Run Derby, and currently leads the majors in home runs. Pretty nice little year!

My crosscheckers, both internal and external, were all over the place here. Does he belong outside the top 10 because I won’t rank any catchers in the top 10? I don’t think that, but someone I talked to did. Could he be a top five player? It’s certainly plausible. He’s eighth among position players in WAR since his full-time debut in 2022. He’s cheap, and signed for a long time. He’s only 28. Sure, he’s outperforming his batted ball quality this year, but, well, duh. He has 39 homers in July! You could shade his production down a lot and still be amazed at his year.

The risk with Raleigh’s offensive game has always been that he wouldn’t make enough contact to keep his strikeout rate reasonable, but he’s made big strides there every year. In 2025, he’s chasing less than ever while still swinging more at strikes. That’s helped him post his highest contact rate and lowest swinging strike rate without reining in his tremendous power. Now that teams are pitching around him more frequently, he’s taking plenty of walks and striking out at a career-low rate. Realistically, you have to regress your projections for Cal by a lot because he posted a 112 wRC+ across 1,760 plate appearances before this season, but he’s clearly a different hitter now. The projection systems peg him for around a 135 mark the rest of the way, which sounds good to me, or maybe even a little low.

That’s a lower offensive level than the rest of the titans of the game you’ll find in the top 10, but Raleigh plays catcher! He plays catcher quite well, in fact; he won his first Gold Glove last year, and he’s been a plus receiver, plus thrower, and adequate blocker throughout his career. That defensive value is at a local low, but like I said, I discount catcher defensive value pretty heavily anyway. I don’t think he’s due for a defensive year quite as good as 2024 again, or an offensive year quite as good as 2025, but that’s just how career years work.

I ended up putting Raleigh in the middle of this group because I wouldn’t feel good having him at the top or bottom. He’s great right now. He’s around for a long time (and maybe even longer — he has a playing time-related vesting option in his deal and he plays a ton of games for his position) at a good rate. If he posted his same WAR in an outfield corner, to where it was all bat and no glove, I’d push him even higher. But in the end, this felt right. Particularly the part where he’s exactly one spot behind…

What Aaron Judge is doing right now is just silly. I can’t wrap my mind around the enormity of his excellence. To paraphrase Shelley: look on Judge’s Works, ye Pitchers, and despair. Over the last four years – more than 2,300 plate appearances – Judge is hitting .312/.437/.682, good for a 205 wRC+. I’d say this is storybook stuff, but even in my storybooks, none of the hitters were slugging almost .700.

Here’s another way of contextualizing how silly this is: Judge’s contract probably still has positive surplus value even if you count WAR linearly, and there’s clear evidence that teams value stars far more than that. Three years into what was a record-setting deal when he signed it as a 30-year old, Judge has already churned out a ludicrous amount of excess value for the Yankees. He’s so far ahead of the rest of the league offensively that it looks like a dad being cajoled into joining his kids’ tee-ball game. His size makes that comparison even work visually.

Not every team could trade for Judge (none can in reality, of course, because the Yankees will never trade him). But oh my goodness, how they’d all want to. Our puny mortal minds have a quantitative/qualitative problem: After we perceive that someone is a great hitter, our brain puts them into the same bucket as all the other great hitters. But during this four-year run, Judge has been about as far ahead of the second-best hitter, Ohtani, as Ohtani has been ahead of the 24th-best hitter, Willson Contreras. Judge isn’t just souped-up Bryce Harper – he’s as far ahead of Harper as Harper is ahead of Ke’Bryan Hayes. He’s not a great hitter, he’s the greatest hitter in baseball by a huge margin.

The end of this contract might hurt. Judge just looks like a guy who will get hurt a lot, à la Yordan Alvarez. He missed a chunk of time early in his career, and his 2023 was interrupted by a freak injury (it was a five-win season anyway, good lord). But I don’t care. I thought about putting him even higher on the list. How are we even supposed to know what the decline phase looks like for a demigod? This might have been my easiest player evaluation — he’s the best hitter, it’s not close — while still being a very difficult trade value decision. But in the end, it’s just too much production, too rare of a skill set, to have Judge lower than this. I even considered placing him second before chickening out and going with the normal array of cost-controlled young standouts. Speaking of which…

Last year’s top dog is having a blah 2025 so far. He missed the start of the season with an intercostal strain, returned rusty, and has a measly 122 wRC+ deep into July. His defensive metrics are down across the board. Here’s the good news, though: He’s probably going to post a five-ish win season in a down year, he’s back to his career offensive averages since the start of May, and I was never into Henderson for his elite defense. Think of him as a Corey Seager or (in the extreme upside case) Cal Ripken Jr. type; guys this large and strapping usually aren’t spectacular defenders, but they make up for it by hitting a ton. Just being able to handle shortstop, so that you can play them there instead of the usual assortment of noodle-batted defensive whizzes, is a big deal.

Henderson falls short in the team control area relative to the rest of his tier, Best of the Best. He’s around for three more seasons after this one, and 2026 will be his first bite at the arbitration apple. Oh no! Just three years of a 24-year-old with an 8-WAR season in the rear view mirror? The horror! Seriously, though, the top of this list is stacked, and the years matter. I’d much rather have three years of Henderson than five years of a guy I’m hoping will break out – but look at the guys above him and I think you’ll come to the same conclusions I did.

This used to be the natural progression of top trade values. They’d hit that mark at the sweet spot of production and team control, then decay down the list as they convert that sweet, sweet team control into even sweeter on-field value. As you’ll see later today, that era is over, but Henderson is an example of what I’d consider the way things used to be. I’ve had a different no. 1 player in each year I’ve done the exercise. One year of performance or contract certainty is often the difference between being the best or just very nearly the best. You can’t knock Henderson for continuing to put up good numbers as he approaches a life-changing payday – unless you’re compiling a trade value list, that is.

One residual concern I haven’t had time to bring up until now: Should you treat the Orioles as serially correlated? Every one of their blonde-locked band of elite young hitters has seen their performance and perceived value decline over the past year. Could this be a team thing? Could it all snap back in unison in 2026? My conclusion, after spending far too much time thinking about it, is that I have to treat player forecasts as independent and independently distributed. I can’t tell you with absolute certainty that this is right. Anyone who would tell you with absolute certainty is just lying, of course: It’s unknowable. This thought exercise didn’t affect my valuation of Henderson. I’m just letting you know in the interest of full transparency into my thought process.

It’s at least possible that Elly De La Cruz is already better than Gunnar Henderson and will never be worse than him again. The WAR column on his FanGraphs page is hiding some spectacular changes to his game. His strikeout rate? Down seven percentage points. His walk rate? Up. He’s getting on base a ton, slugging a ton, displaying good strike zone judgment, and running the bases like he’s the best athlete in baseball (he might be). His batted ball quality is unchanged from last year even before considering the massively improved non-contact results. He turned 23 in January. A 5-WAR followup to his 6.5-WAR 2024 campaign seems all but certain.

Ah, yes, that 6.5-WAR season. Here’s the thing: It was powered by an outlier defensive metric result. Statcast’s OAA had De La Cruz 11 runs above average defensively, and it has him three runs below average this year. Other defensive systems liked him less than OAA last year, and they mostly like him more this year than they did last year. Advanced defensive metrics are noisy – even if you like them, they move around a ton and the best guess at someone’s true value is probably some kind of weighted average across multiple years. Smooth those out, and we’re talking about a 5.5-WAR season last year and him being on track for 6-6.5 WAR this year.

Likewise, De La Cruz’s total offensive production hasn’t improved a ton, but my certainty that he has the capability to continue to improve has gone way up. His plate discipline changes are all excellent. His xwOBA is a lot higher than it was last year. He’s still scalding the ball. I think last year’s top-line numbers flattered his skill, while this year’s underestimate it. I love betting on guys who are both spectacular athletes and spectacularly capable of improving; De La Cruz’s track record fits that criteria to a tee.

ZiPS is picking up on the same things I am; it has him down for the fourth-most WAR over the next five years. He won’t hit arbitration until 2027, or possibly 2026; he’s right on the cusp of earning a bonus year of arbitration via Super 2. He won’t be a free agent until after the 2029 season. Maybe there’s even a little bit of contract extension equity here, though you don’t need to count on it to get to this valuation. The only reason I have De La Cruz lower in the rankings than last year is that some of the supernova outcomes in his distribution are gone – he’s not putting up a 160 wRC+ this year, for example. But that was never particularly likely, and I’ve loved what I’ve seen in 2025. Come join the Elly Bandwagon; we’re picking up steam.

My other freak-athlete-playing-baseball crush has gone Super Saiyan in the last year. Just like Elly De La Cruz, James Wood has a body type shared by almost no one else in baseball. He’s 6-foot-7 and gigantic, almost like a lefty Aaron Judge. Long-levered undersells it; he looks like a 3-and-D wing who got lost on the way to Capital One Arena and figured he’d try baseball for a day. He turns that size into 80-grade power, hitting home runs to corners of the ballpark that were heretofore unreachable.

None of that is new; Wood tore through the minors after joining the Nats in the Juan Soto trade and was comfortably above water – a 120 wRC+ over 336 PA – in his rookie year. But he’s hit another gear in 2025. He has an approach I love: wait for strikes, try not to swing too much, and try to absolutely demolish the ball when you do swing. He hits too many grounders, and might for a long time, but he’s improved on that front already. By spitting on balls in the dirt, he forces pitchers to come to him, and even though he’s always going to have some swing-and-miss in his game, that’s a bad deal for them. When Wood hits the ball, it just goes. Another way of putting this is that he has a 145 wRC+, with peripherals that suggest he’s getting a little bit unlucky, as a 22-year-old. He’s even improving on defense, and he might be great in the field at maturity; he’s huge and sneaky fast.

Believe it or not, I might be down on Wood relative to industry consensus. I don’t quite know how that happened – I’ve been so in on Wood from the jump that he’s been on this list for three seasons now, meaningfully longer than he’s been a major leaguer. But this combination of skill and youth – he won’t hit free agency until 2031 – makes people go appropriately starry-eyed. Maybe I should have been even higher here. I do love to bet on the guys who might put up 8-WAR seasons, the ones with the chance to break baseball for a season or two. Wood is obviously that.

The reason Wood isn’t higher is that he doesn’t actually have much, if any, team control edge on the rest of the top five. Yes, he’s cheap, but all of these guys are wild bargains. He’s not even that much younger than the rest of the group. There are just some great baseball players these days. I love James Wood, and I think he could end up being even better than I have him ranked here – but man, I love the last four guys even more.

This time last year, Carroll was having a junior slump. After a shoulder injury scare in July of 2023, he started 2024 slow and had a 79 wRC+ at the All-Star Break. Ew! Then he hit .258/.351/.568 in the second half, turning in a 4.3-WAR season in a down year, and he’s hitting the cover off the ball again so far in 2025 while also turning in his customary best-in-baseball baserunning and great corner outfield defense. He’s been surprisingly durable for someone who always appears to be swinging so hard that his arms might pinwheel off of his body like a Looney Tunes cartoon. He has a faster average swing speed than Elly De La Cruz, for crying out loud.

Thanks to an early-career extension, you can get Carroll for the next five years at less than $20 million per season on average, with an option for a sixth. His salary doesn’t even crest $20 million until 2029; every team would be happy to slot him in and figure out the future when we get there. I like that most of his value comes from what he does on offense; the Diamondbacks could probably juice Carroll’s WAR even further by putting him in center, but I think that true top-end value is driven by offense, as I keep mentioning, and Carroll is a premium hitter. Would I expect him to out-hit James Wood? Ehhhhh… it’s close. But I have a lot more certainty that he’ll be an All-Star bat, and seriously, he’s that good as a baserunner. He’s already racked up more than three wins of baserunning value in his first three seasons.

There are exactly two blemishes in Carroll’s résumé for me. First, I don’t think he’s as likely to win an MVP as the rest of the people in this tier. It’s not that it would be impossible, it’s just that the guys I’m comparing him to are the very best players in baseball, and they’ve all had peak seasons that are a little higher than Carroll’s peak. Second, even though he hasn’t missed much time in the majors, you can’t ignore the injury risk. He missed almost the entire 2021 minor league season. His shoulder woes have clearly slowed him down at points of his big league career. ZiPS has baked some of that into its estimates, and I did as well. Would your team trade for Corbin Carroll? Of course they wouldn’t, because he’s not on the market. But if they could? Oh, they definitely would. The only downside is that they probably couldn’t afford him. This guy is one of the best of the best.

I don’t think Paul Skenes is the best pitcher in baseball right this instant, but it’s close. He and Tarik Skubal are my top two contenders for the title, and while I’d give Skubal the edge today, it wouldn’t be by a ton. Skenes does absolutely everything you can ask for. He misses bats. He has elite command. He throws 100. He’s durable. He has a career 1.94 ERA. Is that something you might be interested in?

Looking through Skenes’s statistics is delightful. The ones that would go on a baseball card are all ludicrous. They might not even be the best ones, though. The process stats are all hilariously good. He invents new pitches on the fly. He’s striking out fewer guys this year than last, but it looks like it might be on purpose, a ploy to pitch deeper into games. He’d threaten 200 innings this year if the Pirates didn’t limit him, which to be fair it sounds like they might do. He’s 23. Goodness gracious.

Skenes is going to be around for a long time, too. He won’t hit free agency until after the 2029 season. Also, I’m not saying he’d accept just any contract extension, but you have to bake in some “thank God I’m not on the Pirates anymore” equity. Offer him a bag to play on a competitive team, and maybe you can get a Garrett Crochet style of deal done (for more money, obviously).

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a pitcher this good this young. Picking nits almost seems pointless. The price for Skenes, and the rest of the top three, is beyond what anyone in baseball can muster up in return. It might take trading the farm — literally. Another way to think of this trio is that I have the best pitching trade value, the best hitting trade value, and then one guy who you can’t even do the math on because he transcends baseball. I put the pitcher third, because pitchers are inherently riskier than batters. I’m probably never going to change my thinking on that. It doesn’t matter much – all of these guys are so dang good and so dang valuable – but it’s worth pointing out. Skenes is an absolute monster. I couldn’t ask for anything more. He’s the no. 3 trade value in all of baseball.

You know a guy is good when we’re talking about a disappointing season while he tracks for a seven-win campaign. I think we’ve all just gotten spoiled by Witt’s 2024 season, when he ripped off 10.5 WAR. If he meets his Depth Charts projections the rest of the way, he’ll end up with 7.2 WAR. If he keeps playing at exactly his season-to-date pace, he’ll end up with 7.3 WAR. Either of those would be top-30 single season marks in the Statcast era, among the top shortstop performances of the 21st century. And this is a down year.

I’m going to mostly gloss over the performance part of Witt’s blurb. It’s pretty easy to see why he’s so good. He hits the snot out of the ball. He rarely strikes out. He has eye-popping bat speed and consistently puts it to good use by elevating the ball. He’s a menace on the basepaths. He’s becoming one of the best shortstop defenders in baseball. His two-way excellence reminds me of peak Francisco Lindor, though he gets there in a different way, with booming power instead of phenomenal bat control. He debuted in 2022 and has never so much as hit the IL. Want top-end performance? No one this side of Aaron Judge and Barry Bonds has had a better season in the 21st century. Want durability? Witt’s got it.

Want team control? Okay, here it gets a little complicated. What’s not up for debate is that Witt will be around through 2030 for an average of $27 million a year. Clearly smaller-market teams could afford that deal – take, for instance, the Royals. After that, he has opt outs before each of the next four seasons, when he’d be making $35 million per year. If he doesn’t opt out, then the team gets their own three-year, $89 million option at the end of the deal. That’s complex, but think of it this way: It’s five years and $138 million on the low end, and 12 years and $367 million on the high end, but more likely the former than the latter. No one knows how the economics of baseball will evolve, but it’s going to be awfully tempting to hit the free agent market if Witt makes it to 2030 playing even close to his current form.

Honestly, that’s so far out that I don’t care overly much about which path is most likely. If you got Witt right now and wanted to make the team control longer, I bet that you and he could come to an agreement. After all, he signed this deal, and what, he’s going to say no if you offer him even more money and years to change it up a little? The reason he’s this high on the list isn’t the vagaries of his contract, though. It’s the outrageous ceiling combined with the ridiculous floor. It’s the fact that he’s 25 and doing it all for a third straight year, with five more years to come for sure. I actually got everyone I talked to in alignment with my choice for no. 1, but Witt was by far the most popular pick for no. 2. He’s the total package, and even the payroll-constrained teams could get involved. It’s hard to say you can’t afford him when the Royals managed to give him this deal.

Who else? As with Bobby Witt Jr. and Paul Skenes, I’m mostly going to gloss over Ohtani’s on-field bona fides. You know them already. Aaron Judge might be the best player in baseball today, but Ohtani isn’t far behind, and he’s two years younger and also pitches. Calling him a unicorn doesn’t do him justice. If instead of trade value we just had a list of which player you’d most want on your team for the next five years, with on-field production the only consideration, I’d take Ohtani first overall.

Now, do you have to pay him $70 million ($46 million in NPV after deferrals) a year? You sure do. But here’s the good news – you’ll easily make way more than that back in advertising. The LA Times estimated the Dodgers’ annual marginal Ohtani-related revenue around $100 million. That’s not quite the same as Shohei Ohtani paying you $56 million a year to play baseball, but it’s not all that different. Forget him being a big contract; he’s actually the best bargain in baseball.

Could you rack up those same $100 million revenues in every market? Of course you couldn’t. I’m not going to pick on any team by naming names, but Ohtani’s hypothetical list of trade suitors would be short. The teams that are in a good position to cash in on him, though, would go bananas. He’s probably increased the value of the Dodgers franchise by hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars, and that’s net of the fact that they have to pay him.

Japan has the fourth-largest GDP in the world, and employing Ohtani cuts you into that market better than anything else you could ever dream of doing. Their economy is roughly the size of California. Imagine if employing Judge (a native of Linden, CA) meant that all of that state’s baseball enthusiasts became Yankees fans overnight, and that all of California’s biggest companies knocked each other over in a rush to sign gaudy marketing deals to be the official tire, the official search engine, the official submarine builder of the boys in pinstripes — heck, just to get their name on a billboard in left field. That’s not how the market works for any other player. But the Dodgers are monetizing Ohtani’s stardom more or less in that manner at the moment. You don’t think the Giants, Mets, Yankees, and even Mariners would get rich marketing to Japan with Ohtani on their team? Dream on.

Let’s be very conservative and say that Ohtani is playing for free net of the increased revenue. I think that undersells his off-field impact, but maybe the Los Angeles of it all is more central to his appeal than I think. If any of the best players in the league were available for no salary, they’d surely be the top trade value in baseball. Corey Seager’s production might decline – but who cares if you aren’t paying him? Like Garrett Crochet? You’d like him a lot more if he didn’t cost anything. You could get meaningfully worse in terms of expected production and still have best-in-baseball trade value.

But, uh, Ohtani is maybe the best player in baseball. He has the highest five-year ZiPS forecast. He’s a three-time MVP and the betting favorite for this year’s award. He hits and pitches! He just had a 50/50 season, the first in history. He threw the hardest fastball of his career this year. Ohtani is singular, a player unlike any other, both on and off the field. With a year of seeing the synergy between Ohtani and the Dodgers play out, I can’t imagine anyone else topping this list for a very long time. If you look at the whole picture and disagree, I don’t know what to tell you. This is as good as it gets.