2025 Trade Value: Nos. 21-30

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. The biggest split so far in the rankings is between 20-29 and 31-50, the Ketel Marte pivot. I think that all the players I’m discussing today fall in a relatively narrow band, though with meaningfully different risks and upsides. 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 would not feel good selecting Kirk over yesterday’s barometer, Ketel Marte. I wouldn’t feel good about it at all – but I’d do it, hence me calling this the “Begrudgingly Ahead of Ketel Marte” tier. I wouldn’t blame you for landing differently here. I started with Kirk bunched in with the two catchers just behind Marte on the list. As I kept looking at the specifics of his situation and contract, though, I decided I had to make a change and split Kirk out higher.

The major reason is the contract extension he signed last offseason. The five-year, $58 million deal is the kind of cost certainty and team control that executives covet. Five years after this one? Less than $12 million a year in AAV? When I said before that catcher contracts have been coming in lower than expected, I still didn’t mean quite this low. Every team in baseball could afford this contract.

Meanwhile, Kirk has been one of the best catchers in baseball this season. Since he started playing full-time in 2022, he’s sixth in WAR, too; this isn’t some one-year fluke. He’s on course for his best season both offensively and defensively in 2025, and he might actually be the guy people mean when they say they like bat-control wizards like Luis Arraez and Jacob Wilson. I’m also confident about him having a high floor because we’ve already seen two bad-luck seasons — bad BABIP, and he underperformed his xwOBA — and he still put up an aggregate 94 wRC+ in those years. He rarely strikes out, takes plenty of walks, and has more raw power than is reasonable for a shorter guy making this much contact.

Kirk’s defense doesn’t give me pause at this point. He’s been elite for four straight years, regardless of which advanced metric you consult. He’s good across the board – good thrower, good blocker, good framer. He’s 26. He’s going to be around throughout his prime, on affordable salaries. If you’re looking for surplus value and certainty of both cost and control, Kirk is a turbo-charged version of the players behind him on the list. He’ll probably be better. He’ll almost certainly be cheaper. He’s batted 2,000 times in the majors and is a 110 wRC+ hitter with plus defense at the hardest position in the game. I expect this one to surprise people, but it really shouldn’t.

Likewise, Hunter Greene over Ketel Marte?! Didn’t I just leave a perfectly good tier of pitchers behind in the low 30s? But like Kirk, Greene checks a lot of boxes on multiple fronts. He’s making an average of $15 million a year over the next four years, the last of which is a team option. That’s both a ton of control and a reasonable salary for that control. You can plug Greene into your rotation for years to come even if you don’t want to spend a ton on payroll.

Cost certainty only matters if a player is good, of course, and if you haven’t been following the Reds, you might still associate Greene with his early-career form. That’s not the situation on the ground, though. Though he’s dealt with nagging injuries, most recently a groin strain, he’s been downright dominant of late. He has a 2.74 ERA over the past two seasons, with a 28% strikeout rate and 8% walk rate. He’s racked up 5.2 WAR (7.5 RA9-WAR) in his last 210 innings. You know how T-Mobile makes already-good pitching shine even more? Greene is fifth in ERA- over the past two years, behind the four best pitchers in the game over that span: Paul Skenes, Tarik Skubal, Chris Sale, and Zack Wheeler. Adjust for his launching pad environment, and he’s showing flashes of the world-beating form that many have expected from him since his prospect days.

You could even convince me there’s more left to unlock. Our pitch models love everything Greene throws, and also think he has solid command. He’s tied with Skubal in both models’ ERA estimators. He might not have put it all together yet, but if you don’t think the tools are there, you aren’t watching closely enough. If Hunter Greene ends up being the best pitcher in baseball over the next five years, I’d be surprised but not floored.

The issue? Those nagging injuries. Greene missed a month in 2024 with an elbow issue. He missed two weeks early this year with a groin injury, and he’s coming up on two months back on the IL dealing with a recurrence of the same injury. He’s missed a month or more in each of his four big league seasons. His career high in innings is 150.1, and he’s not topping that this year. He’s a big dude with the kind of frame I associate with innings-eaters, but it just hasn’t panned out like that so far.

If Greene were regularly putting up 200-inning seasons, he’d be higher on this list. But then again, if he weren’t showing elite form or signed to a great contract, he’d be lower. I weighed the whole package of pluses and minuses and placed him just ahead of Marte, but I wouldn’t begrudge you for having him higher or lower. The availability risk here is fiendishly hard to value.

The next eight players are split into two tiers, but they were incredibly close throughout my ranking process, and I swapped their order over and over again as I kept deliberating. Alvarez is the poster boy for Tier 8: Franchise Players With Question Marks. I thought about leaving him off the list entirely, in fact. I left out Spencer Schwellenbach, who would probably be in this range if I had no questions about his elbow. It’s not like anyone would actually trade for Alvarez right now, and it’s not like the Astros would trade him, so this is probably a moot point. I ranked him because he’s preparing to return already, and for hitters in that situation, I’ve historically included them and simply applied some risk discounting.

The pitch with Alvarez is that you get the hitting half of Shohei Ohtani. Since the start of 2022, Ohtani has a 168 wRC+. Alvarez clocks in at 167. They’re first and second, respectively, among lefty hitters. For his career, Alvarez’s stats closely mirror Juan Soto’s. He hits for massive power, takes walks, and rarely strikes out. There are maybe a handful of better hitters – when he’s healthy.

His health has always been a concern, though at times an overblown one; from 2021 through 2024, he was 50th in baseball in plate appearances, right around plenty of healthy regulars. The bigger issue is that he just seems like he’s prone to getting hurt; he’s enormous and muscular, with the kind of physicality that seems like it could knock joints out of whack. That doesn’t always seem to lead to injury – Soto is an iron man – but Alvarez dealt with knee issues both as a minor leaguer and in 2020, when he missed most of the abbreviated season. What if you trade for him and he’s never the same? Terrifying!

Should Alvarez return at full strength for 2026, you’re getting three years of a top five hitter, a guy who just turned 28 this month, for $26 million a year. That’s a really good deal; hitters like this don’t come on the market very often, and when they do, the Mets pay $750 million for them. But the risk! It’s absurd. One source I talked to just laughed and said “Come on, you can’t rank him.”

They might not be wrong. A safer course would have been to exclude Alvarez entirely, chuck him in the injury ward and see what he looks like when he returns. I just thought he was too good of a hitter, and too close to returning, to leave out. Your mileage may vary, but the point of this is that Alvarez is one of the very best hitters in the game and signed to a good deal – you just have to account for the current uncertainty his hand injury brings.

I spent longer evaluating Strider than anyone else on the list, because that evaluation involved watching all of his 2025 starts and trying to read the tea leaves. If Strider is a rough facsimile of his pre-surgery form, he’s one of the top pitchers in the game. He’s around for four more years after this one, an eternity in pitcher time, and the fourth year is a club option just to make things a little less scary on the team side. He’s making $22 million a year over that time frame, not chump change but far less than you’d pay for a top pitcher in free agency, much less a 27-year-old one. The entire question here is whether he’s still the same Spencer Strider.

The obvious problem with Strider’s 2025 season is his fastball. At his peak, it was one of the best heaters in baseball; nasty shape, nasty velo, great location. This year, the shape isn’t there; he’s getting more fade and less rise with less velo. His slider is down a few ticks, too, and while he’s not quite a two-pitch pitcher, he does throw those two more than 80% of the time combined. That doesn’t sound like someone who should be 27th on this list.

I think that’s a bad description of him, though. This guy was one of the best pitchers in baseball more or less from the time he hit the majors until his elbow blew out. He’s shown a clear ability to improve intra-year. He’s a great athlete. He might not create the same arm angles after elbow surgery – many pitchers take a while to find a new comfortable slot when they return – but he’s going to generate incredible torque and movement from wherever he ends up.

Lop off his first two starts of the season – each returns from injury, since he missed a month with an unrelated hamstring issue – and all of his ERA estimators are in the low 3.00s even with the diminished arsenal. His locations continue to improve. He’ll probably never be a 200-inning beast, but 180 innings of dominance feels within range. The low ZiPS projections are just playing time hedges; our Depth Chart projections have him down as the sixth-best starter in baseball for the rest of 2025.

The risk here? It’s meaningful. The reward? Same deal. If you were a GM swinging a deal for anyone in this tier, you’d probably throw up. It’s scary! But I think that makes this the correct place for these players, because if things pan out, they’re all among the best values and best players in the game.

Have you ever seen Eury Pérez pitch? If you haven’t, you’re doing yourself a disservice. With all due respect to The Miz, he might have the best stuff in baseball right now, and like Strider, he’s still working back to full strength. Watching Eury at his best is like watching the northern lights; it’s otherworldly and beautiful, and afterwards you can’t quite be sure that it was real.

Am I worried about volume? Oh, most definitely. Pérez is going to be on an innings limit through at least 2026. He’s never thrown more than 130 innings in a year. What good is the best pitcher in baseball if he can never pitch? A reasonable ranking of Pérez has to include some chance of cloud-scraping highs as well as the potential for extended absences. Pretending that either of these corner cases is unthinkable does no one any good.

The reason I have Pérez this high despite the real availability concerns is that he’s going to be around for a long time and for a very team-friendly salary. He isn’t even eligible for arbitration until 2027. It’s way too early to predict his salaries in arb, but if he’s only sometimes available, they’ll be quite low. If he’s pitching frequently, they’ll be higher but fall far short of how much value he brings you. The injury cases would still be disastrous, because you’d have to trade a lot to acquire Pérez, but they wouldn’t be monetarily disastrous.

In the end, I’m comfortable that Pérez is one of the best pitchers in baseball when he’s healthy, and that drives this ranking. You don’t have to agree, of course, but talent evaluators across the league are with me on this one. He’s 22. He’s putting up great numbers while recovering from a major injury, and it looks like he’s still improving while he does so. Dangerous arbitrary endpoints alert, but he’s running a 1.92 FIP (1.17 ERA) since the start of July, with a 7:1 strikeout to walk ratio. Sure, you might not get Pérez 100% of the time, but it’s like one of those pay-as-you-go cell phone plans: You only pay for what you get thanks to arbitration, he’ll be around for a long time, and when he’s on the mound, he’ll probably be dominant. The combination of outlandish upside and limited financial downside would have me clamoring to get Pérez, even if the risks are real.

Caminero and the next guy on the list started a bit higher up, but I dropped both into this group, and fortuitously enough, “Franchise Players With Question Marks” doesn’t only have to refer to injury. Caminero is clearly a capable big league hitter. He’s played roughly a full season in the majors, and is hitting well and improving. He’s 22 and already looks like an elite power hitter, tracking for a 35-homer season. He has massive raw power; this isn’t some short porch mirage. His plate discipline has improved meaningfully during his time in the majors. There’s a lot to like here.

When I say “question marks,” I only mean it in the context of being a franchise player. Caminero isn’t quite that for me yet because he’s too one-dimensional. He doesn’t take walks. He doesn’t have a minuscule strikeout rate, though he does an admirable job avoiding chase. He’s below average at third base and might be a first baseman before too long. He’s an indifferent baserunner. He hits a ton of home runs and avoids bad swings, so I can forgive a lot of other areas for improvement, but there are just a ton of nits to pick here.

Like I said, I had Caminero in the teens early on in this exercise. I just couldn’t talk myself into actually valuing him ahead of everyone higher than him at the end of the day. The team control is great. The fact that he won’t hit arbitration until 2028? Also great. But I think he’s an example of a type of player that is often overvalued by WAR: guys who are below average at positions that get positional bumps but aren’t the very hardest ones on the field. I don’t think he has more defensive value than, say, Bryce Harper, but he’s seven runs ahead of him per our DEF metric this year. I’m deducting some of that value back relative to projections in this ranking.

Yes, a 22-year-old star batter is great. No, I wouldn’t prefer Ketel Marte if my team could only trade for one. But I’m pumping the brakes a little on projecting Caminero as a top-tier option. He’s good, undoubtedly. You’re not going to take a big loss on this deal; even if Caminero never hits another gear, he’s useful and undercompensated right now. But for me, there’s enough chance that he ends up as merely a solid corner bat that I can’t fit him up into the highest tiers of value. The most bargain-oriented evaluators I talked to would have him higher. The guys I’d consider to be more scouting types might have had him a smidge lower. I think that means I have him in a pretty good place.

Chourio is the player who I am lowest on relative to industry consensus. If you take the median feedback I got from my cross-checkers, he belongs in the middle of a group you’ll see tomorrow: Young Superstars. This dude put up a 4-WAR season in the majors at age 20, and he’s signed through 2033. He’s toolsy and has performed at a high level against players much older than him throughout his professional career. I certainly understand why some of the people I talked to think he’s a top 10 trade value. I’m out on an island relative to a bunch of people I trust.

Why? Because he’s a chaser. I thought Chourio’s best skill was adaptation when he burst onto the scene last year. He seemed to improve at everything he did very quickly. That’s a trait that will take you places if you already have physical ability, and Chourio undoubtedly has that. But in year two, he’s backsliding at the plate, and in my least favorite way. His 36% O-Swing rate is one of the worst in the bigs. He ran chase rates around 30% in the minors and in his rookie year. His chase rate went up by more than his zone swing rate, a nearly unheard-of problem.

I might look foolish on this front in a year’s time. Chourio has gotten better as the year has worn on. July has been his best month, both for overall production and chase rate. Developmental dips are unavoidable. This ranking is unquestionably affected by the fact that I start my deliberations in June; try as I might, I’ll never completely remove the bias towards recent production (and trust me, I try pretty hard). But I dunno, man. He’s only walking 3% of the time in July. I’m not projecting him as a good OBP guy at maturity anymore. The Brewers have played him in center a decent amount this year, but it’s out of necessity rather than desire; they’ve made it clear they think his long-term position is in a corner, and his time in the middle pasture is more about injuries to the two guys they’d prefer in that spot. He looked great last year, but the metrics are mixed on him this year, and that’s not really the way I want my trendlines pointing.

Chourio’s deal is great. It’ll be especially great if he ends up as a do-everything hitter who’s a plus outfield defender. But I think there’s meaningful risk that he ends up as a power-over-OBP corner guy, and he would be a lot less interesting if that transpired. I think I’ve caveated this one enough. I do think that the most likely case is that I’m wrong. I just see enough risk here that I’d prefer the players above him on the list if you asked me today. Ask me again in two weeks, and you might get a different answer.

This next group, Controllable Aces, is an eye of the beholder situation. I had them behind everyone in the top 30 at various points, and “three years of good pitching” was actually of controversial value to a few people I talked to. I guess the argument is that it’s not so different from two years, and at that point, you should just take the better pitcher and not worry so much about that third year. I don’t really agree – and I especially don’t agree with thinking that and then also valuing the long team control windows of young hitters super highly – but I’m just putting it out there because I heard it from more than one person.

With that disclaimer out of the way, Kirby is the weakest link of this group. He’s having a down 2025, though to be honest with you, it looks like variance more than anything else to me. His process is pretty much the same. It’s a great process, one that made him a top 10 pitcher for the past three years. You can’t totally take the headline numbers at face value because of T-Mobile, but even after adjusting for park, he’s been tremendously valuable and in a way that feels sustainable, with solid stuff and best-in-baseball command of it. The other pitchers you’d call out as having good command are probably a standard deviation behind Kirby; he’s one of one when it comes to putting the ball where he wants.

Kirby is at the bottom of the group for three reasons. First, obviously, he’s having his worst season, complete with his first IL stint (shoulder inflammation). Second, he’s going to be more expensive than you’d think given his three remaining years of arbitration; they’ll be his second, third, and fourth trips to arb because he was a Super 2 player. Finally, I’m applying a small penalty to all Mariners pitchers and a small boost to all Mariners hitters because I think the park factors understate the difficulty of hitting there somewhat. All of that said, three-plus years of the best command pitcher in baseball at arbitration rates is hard to turn down.

Do you want to enter every playoff series with a Justin Verlander clone on the mound breathing fire? Of course you do. And you can! All you have to do is trade for Hunter Brown and then make the playoffs. This guy is awesome. He bullies people with his fastball and complements it with a smörgåsbord of plus secondaries. Like his delivery-doppelgänger Verlander, he’s prone to homer-related blowups, but unlike Verlander, he mixes in a sinker to selectively minimize fly ball risk.

Our pitching models aren’t in love with Brown’s heater, but I think they’re missing something about his overall game. Both the four-seamer and the sinker have consistently gotten great results. Maybe it’s his over-the-top delivery. Maybe it’s the way he mixes them with his secondaries, a nasty curveball foremost among them. Regardless, he has a knack for strikeouts; he turns two-strike counts into strikeouts at an elite rate. His fastball revs up, he aims for the corners, and he generally saves his highest-octane juice for the times when it’s most effective. I expect that skill to continue making him look better than the models. Projection systems agree with me here; Brown’s five-year projection is higher than all but four pitchers, and all four of them are ahead of him on this list.

If you really, truly don’t value pitching, if you just want to reduce everything to a one-dimensional WAR analysis, I could see Brown and his tier-mates landing lower on your personal list. Almost no one trades for elite pitching. It’s too expensive! But I think it should be expensive because it’s one of the hardest things to create for yourself. Brown could be the number one starter for your playoff rotation today. He could still be in that role in 2028. He’ll be cheap, and it sure looks like he’ll be durable as pitchers go. There just aren’t many better options if you want elite, controllable pitching.

Wait, isn’t this category for aces?! Well, guess what: Sánchez might be an ace. For a third straight year, he’s improved across the board, from stuff-driven process metrics to run prevention outcomes. He’s throwing six innings a start, and he’s comfortably been a top 10 pitcher by results this year. He was also the sixth-best pitcher last year by fWAR and the 15th by RA9-WAR. Heck, he was pretty good in his half season in 2023 too.

It feels kind of weird. Sánchez wasn’t a top prospect. He’s never been the top-billed option in his own rotation; honestly, he’s rarely been one of the top three names you’d get if you asked people who Philly’s best starters are. His teammates are disguising his perpetual improvement. He also signed a phenomenally team-friendly contract in the middle of the 2024 season – he’s due an average of $6.5 million for the next three years, then has two $15 million-ish team options after that.

That’s five years for those of you counting at home. You can’t find good pitching that’ll be around for that long without paying top-shelf prices, unless you were lucky enough to draft Paul Skenes. It’s Sánchez or nobody. On this, the surplus value goofs and gimme-the-star ring counters can agree: Sánchez checks the boxes. You want someone cheap who will be around forever? Yeah, that’s him. You want someone who might be one of the best 25 players in baseball? Also him.

The reason Sánchez isn’t higher is twofold. First, the industry and I both do some amount of anchoring to prospect pedigree, and he had more or less none. It’s a small part of the evaluation (a small part of mine, at least), but it does matter. Second, I don’t think he has any chance of becoming the best pitcher in baseball, or even a top three guy. His game is very Logan Webb-esque, only with less chance he’s going to start churning out 200-inning seasons. Sinker-first pitchers just can’t seem to access the extreme run prevention levels that are necessary to be the literal best pitcher in baseball. Webb has gotten there with sheer innings volume, but it’s fair to wonder about Sánchez’s durability until he’s proven it for longer.

Let me put it this way, though: I know that one of the most controversial parts of my rankings is that I consistently push down prospects who haven’t yet proven it in the majors. I push them down relative to a fair-value surplus value accounting, and relative to where the team sources I talk to rank them. I’ve explained my thinking on that, and I’ve also explained that you’re free to think about these types of players differently. It would be entirely reasonable to have them higher. But if you’re taking them over Cristopher Sánchez, you’ve left reality. He’s under team control for just about as long. He’s already done it at the major league level for multiple years at a position that every team needs more of. He might end up costing less! If the Phillies made him available, the bidding would get outrageously high. That just sounds weird because he happens to pitch on the same team as a bunch of other good starters.