2025 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 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 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. Today, the rankings pivot around Tarik Skubal. The players listed ahead of Skubal belong in a different tier than the players behind him; I’m a lot less picky about how you’d order them within those groups. Additionally, Skubal himself has some flex room, as I’ll explain in the blurbs. This high on the list, though, everyone is great. There are no injury rebounds, no stars having awful years. Everyone here is playing well right now, and everyone except Skubal will be around for a while too. 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.

Greene kicks off a group of players that I’m calling “Great Players I’d Take Tarik Skubal Over.” Cristopher Sánchez from yesterday’s installment could be considered the bottom member of this tier as much as he was a part of the Controllable Aces; he straddled the two classifications and I rounded down. I’ve calibrated my thinking here on the win-now side of things. I’ll talk more about that specific decision in Skubal’s writeup, but everyone in this tier is awesome and is at least in the same stratosphere as Skubal. If you’re more interested in long-term value than short-term upside, you can slide Skubal down until you get to a spot in this group where you think he fits. I absolutely wouldn’t go any lower than this, though, and as you’ll read later on, there are good arguments for having him as high as where I slotted him in. Some team sources even thought he should have been higher.

For his part, Greene is in a relative sweet spot for production and team control, finishing up his last pre-arb year as we speak. That leaves him with three years of arbitration, and he’s heading into that salary discussion with an excellent platform: He’s posted a 135 wRC+ for two years running, and should end this season around 4 WAR for the second straight year. This season, he’s leaning into power over on-base by swinging early, but I see that as part of the never-ending cat-and-mouse game of reacting to pitcher incentives. His vicious swing is always going to come with strikeouts, but I’m with our projection systems in expecting his strikeout rates to tick back down going forward at the expense of a bit of power.

The pitch here is that you get a guy with proven, excellent offense and solid corner outfield defense, and you get him for three prime years at low salaries. I moved him down a bit throughout this exercise, though. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with what Greene offers. It’s just that the rest of his tier-mates do it a little better. The players with a similar amount of team control remaining are better than him right now. The other young players are signed for longer. The guys with higher salaries offer more game-breaking potential than Greene. He’s awesome – 20th in baseball is some pretty excellent trade value – but I like the rest of this group more.

For all the fawning I did over Ketel Marte, Ramírez is an even better version of the same consistent excellence. Look at his track record. The last time he wasn’t a three-win player was 2015, in a half-season. The last time he wasn’t a four-win player was 2020, and he put up 3.1 WAR in 58 games. The guy is a machine, posting 30-ish homers and nearly as many walks as strikeouts with great defense year after year.

Ramírez is around for three more years after this one. I would say that it’s a sweet spot number of years, the optimal number to get the tail end of his prime and avoid the downside, but that might undersell Ramírez. I understand aging curves, but on the other hand, Ramírez put up 6.4 WAR as a 28-year-old, followed by 6.0 WAR at age 29, 4.6 at age 30, and 6.5 at age 31, and he’s projected to finish with 6.5 at age 32. Oh, and you’re getting all that for an average of $23 million a year.

Someday, the music will stop. But why now? He’s putting up the same batting line he has over the last five years. He’s about as good of a defender as always. His sprint speed is faster this year than it was a decade ago. Maybe he’s found the fountain of youth. Regardless, Ramírez can be the best hitter on your championship team, he’ll be around for three more years after this one, and he won’t break the bank in doing so. If there’s one throughline of my rankings, it’s valuing demonstrated big league results, and there’s probably no better avatar for that.

I actually didn’t get much feedback on Ramírez. He’s clearly good, clearly in the back half of his career, and has one of those medium-length/medium-dollar contracts that doesn’t inspire people to bang the table for value or gag a little at the thought of paying free agent prices for good production. He’s just great, unfancily so. How could you not place him in this rough range? The closest I got to a nugget of team wisdom was when someone said “Haha, man, he’s good.” Indeed, anonymous source, indeed.

As I’ve mentioned repeatedly throughout this exercise, catchers are difficult to project. Smith’s career arc heading into 2025 felt easy to track: four straight years of declining offensive and defensive value, with his WAR dipping in each year. In 2025, he’s casually setting new highs in basically every offensive category en route to a resurgent season that might be one of his best. Now project out another eight (!) years of this. Good luck!

Smith’s deal is a weird one to think about. It’s a bargain-basement AAV, but it extends until his age-38 season, and he’s a catcher, so some of those years at the end are just luxury tax window dressing. It has deferrals. It already carried a huge signing bonus. In 2028, for example, the Dodgers will pay Smith only $4.5 million, with another $5 million in deferred salary earned but not paid for another decade. Even if you think Smith is going to trail off hard in the second half of his contract, as ZiPS does, it’s a bargain in terms of cost per production. And if you think he’s going to age better than that, or that a team acquiring him would care more about the rate of production and less about the number of games he plays, it’s even better.

The Dodgers seem to be making that exact tradeoff with Smith this year, spelling him more often than they have in recent years. At some point, likely after Freddie Freeman’s contract ends after the 2027 season, Smith will move down the defensive spectrum. In 2032, this deal isn’t going to feel great, though it won’t feel awful, either; it’s really just not that much money. But until then, you’re getting the offensive equivalent of a good corner outfielder playing catcher. That’s mostly not available behind the plate (except for one other guy who you’ll see tomorrow). Yes, he’s a 30-year-old catcher putting up poor defensive numbers and is signed until he’s nearly 40 – but everything else about Smith’s profile is deliriously good. The Dodgers are never going to make him available, but boy, their phones would be on fire if they did.

I got mixed feedback on Crochet’s place on the list, and I think that’s entirely reasonable. You could, if you wanted, see him as one of the best values on the board. Only two pitchers carry better projections for the next five years, and Crochet is signed for longer than either of them. Want to hug an ace for as long as possible? He’s your guy.

Crochet’s ascent has been notable not so much because he’s making opponents look foolish – his career run prevention numbers were already bonkers – but because he’s handling the biggest workload in baseball. The White Sox famously babied him last year in his transition to starting, and while they were probably being more cautious then was necessary with an eye towards trading him, I didn’t expect him to go out and lead the league in innings pitched. ZiPS had him down in the 130s before the season, while our more aggressive Depth Charts projections had him at 157; he’s tracking for over 200. The volume has been striking, and of course the 2.19 ERA and 2.41 FIP are amazing too.

The other side of the coin? You’re paying big kid prices to secure Crochet’s services. His deal ticks up to around $30 million a year in short order, and he even has an opt out to leave after 2030 (his contract runs through 2031 otherwise). It’s not quite Zack Wheeler money, but that’s a premium outlay for a pitcher with 53 major league starts under his belt. I feel good about Crochet’s future, but how could I not feel at least a little uncertain?

In the end, I think I’m more tolerant of this type of risk than the team sources I talked to. In aggregate, they’d probably have him down with Hunter Brown, though not everyone agreed with that. I want as many players like Crochet on my team as possible, and “paying the going rate for a star player” is fine with me when I’m getting one of the best five pitchers in baseball, not a lesser star. Two straight years of ultra-elite run prevention combined with two thirds of a year of workhorse volume is enough for me to crack open the vault and fork over the prospects to trade for Crochet and the money to pay him. Could he get hurt? Could this deal sting? Sure. But Crochet could also be the bedrock of your franchise for a half-decade to come.

My writeups of Webb for the Trade Value Series are starting to blur together. In the four years I’ve headed this exercise, he has ranked 25th, 16th, 16th, and now 16th again. He’s amassed between 4 and 5 WAR while throwing between 190 and 220 innings in every one of those years, though 2025 might throw a wrench in that beautiful consistency, because we’re projecting him to finish with 5.1 WAR. This year’s production looks a little different – more strikeouts, fewer grounders – but he’s still essentially an apex innings-eater, the kind of guy you expect to lead the league in innings pitched more often than not while putting up a gaudy ERA.

I think that Webb’s low-variance game prevents him from ever being the best pitcher at a given moment. But that consistency, oh that consistency! Over the past two years, he’s the sixth-best pitcher in baseball. Over the past three years, he’s the third best. He’s the third best over four years and second best over five years, trailing only Zack Wheeler. He’s done all that while never finishing as a top-five pitcher by WAR (wrap your head around that one). He just never falters, never misses a start, never has a bad season.

Would you want that guy on your team? Of course you would. Webb is one of the best pitchers in baseball every time he takes the mound, and he gives you volume that no one else in the league even approaches on a yearly basis. I don’t care a ton that he’s 28 instead of in his 30s, because pitchers seem to break more than they age, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. His contract is solid, too; he’s due salaries in the mid-$20 millions for the next three years. I’d love to have him around for longer, but three years of this kind of juice sounds good enough. ZiPS has him down as providing similar value to Crochet over that span, albeit in a very different way.

I’m rambling. This dude’s great. You might not have noticed, because his team hasn’t been for years. But man, the playoff teams that would come knocking if the Giants put Webb on the block. At this point, everyone I talked to is in lockstep on this: Webb is one of the safest bets there is, and he provides something that no one else can. How exactly you value that relative to the gaudy collection of stars and years of control on display today is up to you, but I feel comfortable slotting him in at no. 16, the same thing I do every year.

For lack of a better way to say it, Tatis has been one of my dudes since I started helming this exercise. He combines everything that I value most: proven major league performance, long years of team control for young hitters with top prospect pedigree, and less emphasis on AAV for guys who I’m sure will be stars. He’s signed for forever! Some of the years will be pricey! But he’s also cranking out All-Star seasons with comfortable frequency, and he’ll only be 35 at the end of the deal.

As Tatis gets further removed from his catastrophic wrist injury, he’s looking like a more complete hitter, but probably one whose realistic range is a 130-150 wRC+, not 160-180. He’s always had good pitch recognition, but I don’t think that can carry him further than where he is now; he looks to me like a very good hitter who has maxed out his skills. I like his odds of putting up a better batting line than he has so far in 2025 — Tatis is underperforming his batted ball quality, and all of our projection systems expect an improvement — but I don’t think he’s going to challenge Aaron Judge anytime soon.

Tatis is an absolutely elite baserunner and defender, which is easy to overlook. He might be the best right fielder in baseball; he picked up the position in 2023, already has a Gold (and Platinum) Glove, and is competing for another this year. And he’s a menace on the basepaths, and not just when it comes to steals. He’s on his way to a six-win season this year, and plenty of that value is going to come from what he does when he’s not hitting. Even with very good offense instead of the historically great form he showed at the start of his career, he’s one of the best players in baseball.

So why is he ranked 15th instead of somewhere higher? Basically, I used to think of Tatis as having a good shot at being a top three player in baseball for a decade. Now that his top end seems to be great instead of scale-defining, the length of the deal goes from an unvarnished good to tougher to parse. He dealt with repeated shoulder subluxations in 2021, missed the entire 2022 season (that wrist injury plus a PED suspension), 20 games the next season (the tail-end of that PED suspension), and 60 games last season (a stress reaction in his femur). But he’s healthy this year and still only 26. You’re going to get a ton of production out of Tatis for years to come. I think he’s a better bet to stay healthy than, say, Crochet. But the thing he offers isn’t quite as rare as Crochet – ace pitchers are harder to find than great corner outfielders. Split the difference between those two considerations, and they both end up in the same tier of Great Players I’d Take Tarik Skubal Over. So let’s get to the man himself, shall we?

I talk to the team personnel I use as crosscheckers for this list over a few-week span leading up to publication. During that time, my thinking is always changing – sometimes because of who I just talked to, sometimes because I added some new data or tweaked some variable, sometimes because I just feel differently on different days. The point is that I showed this list to my sources with Skubal all over the place, anywhere from no. 11 down into the mid-20s. I noticed that where I put Skubal didn’t have a lot to do with whether they thought he was too high or too low; it was way more about how aggressive I think they are in terms of wanting to win now, or at least how aggressive they are in projecting the league’s win-now tendencies.

Two different people I talked to said something to the effect of, “If Skubal were on the market today, he’d net a return in line with the first Juan Soto trade.” It’s a closer comparison than I first thought. There’s less team control with Skubal and less projected WAR, but he’s better relative to his peers than Soto was at the time; he’s the clear best pitcher in baseball, whereas Soto’s value partially came from being a top 10 player and partially from the fact that he was so dang young. Teams go bonkers for pitching, particularly at trade deadlines, and the best pitcher in baseball is the ultimate prize. That Soto swap returned multiple top 25 prospects; if Skubal’s value is in that ballpark, he’s too low here at 14.

I shaded down from that value meaningfully because I don’t think there’s an AJ Preller equivalent who would go that big to get Skubal (also, he’s not getting traded, obviously). But I did take my sources’ general point into account. This is a one of one skill set. Skubal is the best pitcher in baseball right now. He projects as the best pitcher in baseball the rest of the way this year. His ZiPS projection for 2026 is a win clear of every other starter. There are plenty of cost-controlled surplus value dudes you can plug in at shortstop or in left field or even at first base. There aren’t any other Tarik Skubals. Teams pay up for that in trade.

Ultimately, the way I thought about Skubal’s placement was to rank him as though I were running a big market club with fairly defined win-now tendencies. Maybe not Dombrowski-defined, but a team that wants to win World Series sooner rather than later because some of their stars are in their prime. Not that anyone this high on the list is getting traded, but if they were, that’s the kind of team that would be on the buying side. If you’d focus more on the long-term, if you care more about winning in 2028 than 2026, you can move him down incrementally, into the group of great players I’d take Tarik Skubal over. The right spot for him, in my mind, is somewhere between 10th and 21st depending on just how committed you are to hanging a banner quickly, but I feel most comfortable with him right here.

Right, a few words on Skubal himself: This dude is great. Do we really need to discuss it? He’s about to blow away his 2024 Cy Young campaign. The worst – worst! – of his advanced ERA estimators is 2.37. He gives you volume. He’s near the top of the league in strikeout rate and walks only 3.3% of opponents. No one’s questioning how good Skubal is; it’s all about what you’d trade for that excellence.

Great googly moogly, look at those projections. ZiPS has Crow-Armstrong just a hair ahead of Aaron Judge in terms of his five-year WAR forecast, the third-best projection in the major leagues. Still, I shaded him down more than any other player in my personal WAR forecasts (Jacob Wilson, Jackson Chourio, and the next guy on this list got the next-biggest adjustments). It’s really hard to figure out how good PCA will be, because we just don’t have a lot of seasons like this to use as precedent.

If you believe the models, this ranking is too low. I just… don’t. Like many of the players I’ve shaded down in this exercise, PCA is a chaser. He has the highest chase rate in the majors, in fact. He’s reining in his approach somewhat as the year wears on, but even though he’s hacking at a lot of strikes too, he just swings at so many bad pitches. There’s no way he’ll keep putting up this batting line without a massive approach overhaul. The projections have him down around a 115 wRC+ the rest of the year, which sounds even a hair high to me. They also have him down for a seven-win season, though, so clearly he’s pretty freaking good.

Is he going to be a 35-homer guy? It seems likely. PCA’s also going to do that while playing 80-grade defense in center. He’s either the best baserunner in baseball or just short of it. He’s 23. He has a career 108 wRC+ and is clearly improving. The upside here is certainly very high. Most of the players on this list are never going to put up a seven-win season. PCA might do it in his second year.

If you did a straight interpretation of ZiPS, PCA would belong in the top three. I think that teams pay less for defensive value, though, and I also just massively dislike this chase-heavy profile. I wasn’t even the low voice; at least part of the industry is concerned about the same things I am. But look, this guy is a 23-year-old who is having one of the best seasons of the 2020s. There’s a limit to how much you can shade down. PCA is the first of a three-player Young Superstars tier, and even if I’m less enthused than the computers, I’m pretty freaking enthused.

This was a tough one. I had Julio higher early on – like Tatis, his combination of long-term team control and elite early-career production appeals to me, and he’s not yet 25. I also had him as low as 20th as I kept finding blemishes to wonder about – he’s a chaser! Like I mentioned, I shaded his projections down in my own personal model. But as I tried to imagine whether I’d rather have, say, Rodríguez or Riley Greene, I came to my senses somewhat and posted him back here in the middle.

Rodríguez’s offensive track record is disappointing for a guy you’re thinking of as one of the best players in baseball, but it’s way ahead of the curve for a very good defensive center fielder. He’s not quite at PCA or Ceddanne Rafaela levels with the glove, but he’s in the next group down, and like so many of his defensive counterparts, he’s an excellent baserunner. He has a career 126 wRC+, and his xwOBA is quite consistent from year to year. He’s not doing anything fluky, just swinging hard and getting the ball in the air often enough to make it count.

As I mentioned over the past few days, I tend to discount Mariners pitchers slightly because of the favorable home environment. To be consistent, I do the opposite with Mariners hitters. It’s miserably hard to hit in T-Mobile, and you have to account for that both ways, by a little more than our park effects do. I’m also fine looking through current performance – hopefully both ways symmetrically – when it seems to be driven by short-term factors. Nothing in Rodríguez’s profile looks troubling to me long-term, particularly if you’re expecting him to post a wRC+ in the 120s or 130s instead of the 150s.

The contract is another sticking point, but I’m not all that afraid of it. It’s $20.2 million a year for the next four – for a guy averaging 4.5-ish WAR per season, that’s a steal. Then, you have to decide whether to give him a bag, either eight years and $240 million (if he never has any more top 10 MVP finishes), or as high as 10 years and $350 million if he goes nuclear. Turn that down, and Rodríguez gets the chance to exercise a player option (likely five years and $100 million, though possibly as low as five years and $90 million).

It’s wildly complicated, but think of it this way: If you think Rodríguez is an All-Star but not a generational talent, you can keep him until he’s 28, then probably watch him walk (he’s not taking five years and $100 million unless something catastrophic happens). If he turns out to be one of the best few players in baseball, sure, sign him for a decade to a huge deal; you’re basically getting the option to automatically win his free agency bidding if he ends up being worth it. I love having one of the best all-around center fielders in baseball for the next four years at $20 million or so a year. I love the option to add more only if I want it. I don’t fear his player option because it’s just not that much money.

This was a ton of words, but Rodríguez’s trade value is sure to be controversial. I talked to people who wanted him meaningfully higher, while others wanted him a good bit lower. His offensive volatility feels risky, but his floor is demonstrably very high – I’m talking about how disappointing his bat has been while he puts the finishing touches on his fourth straight four-win season. I don’t feel confident that I got Julio exactly right, but I do feel confident that he’s a comfortable inclusion towards the top of this list.

Merrill, the last of the Young Superstars, is an interesting contrast to the other two outfielders in the group. He’s following a rough Rodríguez trajectory, with a slower follow-up to a dynamic rookie year. He’s on a team-friendly contract that will see him make an average of $14.9 million a year for the next nine years, and there’s even a $21 million option tacked on. (It might be a team option. It might be a player option. Deals are weird these days!). It’ll be pricier than that by a bit; every remaining year’s salary ticks up by a million dollars every time he hits 500 plate appearances. (Again, weird!) The projections aren’t quite as good as they are for either of the other two. The sheer surplus value isn’t quite as good as PCA. But there’s one thing that makes Merrill right at home with those guys: He, too, is a chaser.

I know, I know, it surprised me too. This guy is supposed to be the next Michael Brantley! But that just hasn’t been the case. Brantley owned the strike zone, forcing pitchers to come into his office if they wanted to draw a swing. Merrill’s swing is similarly beautiful, but he unleashes it far too often. He swings with a lot more ferocity than Brantley did and similarly extracts a ton of juice out of his swings because he has elite bat control, but the days of projecting Merrill for outlier strikeout and walk rates are over. Sure, he’s underperforming his xwOBA this year, but I think he’s a riskier hitter than his billing entering the league.

That’s okay. He doesn’t need to be the next Brantley, because he’s going to hit for more power than that. I just wanted to point out that his profile isn’t the same as it was when he came into the league. I’m not worried about him finding his way to a 15-20% above average batting line. I’m willing to wager that he won’t turn into the perfect-zone-judgment perfect-bat-control monster I thought we might get, though.

If he keeps playing plus defense in center, he’ll have more wiggle room offensively. I think he probably will; I have him a level below Rodríguez but still comfortably above average. He’s never going to be PCA out there, but I think he’s going to hit better (sorry, ZiPS). He’s a bargain, a great player, and a difficult projection, just like everyone in this group. If you include Jackson Chourio, who was initially in this tier before I dropped him for reasons I wrote about yesterday, there are a ton of great young outfielders getting set to top leaderboards for years to come, and to do it while making reasonable salaries. No one disagreed with me that Merrill should be the head of this group, though; his deal and his skill set are both difference makers.