2025 Trade Value: Nos. 41-50

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.

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 guy who would have been 58th if the list went that deep. 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 the 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 in the table at the end of the piece.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the first batch of players.

Let’s start on a good note with one of the hardest players to place on the entire list. Rafaela is the poster boy for Tier 16: High Volatility. (Yes, there are 16 tiers. I’m a maximalist.) He’s one of the few players with a credible claim on the title of best defensive player in the majors. He’s blazing fast and gets great jumps, which lets him make spectacular plays that most outfielders wouldn’t even attempt. Now that he’s been freed from playing shortstop (please don’t play him at second base too much, Red Sox), where he was below average, Rafaela would be an acceptable starter even if he hit like he did in 2024, when he posted an 80 wRC+.

This year, something has clicked offensively. His bat speed, barrel rate, hard-hit rate, squared-up rate, contact rate, and every outcome stat you can imagine have all ticked up together. Since the start of June, he’s been one of the best hitters in baseball, with a slugging percentage in the 600s. Even if you think it’s just a hot streak, it’s clear that he has the tools to be an above-average hitter. It’s basically pull-only power, but that’s just fine with me, even if you have to take him out of the context of Fenway Park for the purposes of this evaluation.

The risk? He’s a chaser. Rafaela’s chase rate is the fourth highest in the majors, and even that is a big improvement over last year’s mark. Rafaela posts poor swinging strike rates despite reasonable bat-to-ball skills, because he swings at a ton of junk. This is one of my least favorite qualities in a hitter. It puts a ton of pressure on every other offensive tool; the worse the pitches you swing at, the harder it is to do damage. Even during his recent run, he’s chasing at a 40% clip. No one in recent memory has chased that often and sustained good offensive performance. If you’re betting on Rafaela turning into a long-term offensive threat, you’re betting on him changing his approach.

I don’t hate that bet. Rafaela is great at a ton of things, and players like that often figure out even more skills as they age. Overall, though, I’m lower on the chase-happy members of this list than most of the people I talked to. I think the consensus would have Rafaela around 10 spots higher, but I need to see a little more before I’m convinced. If he replicates this level of offensive output over the next year, he’ll place meaningfully higher in the next iteration of this exercise.

I mentioned how much trouble I had with catchers in the introduction to this series. Even tougher: rookie catchers. Baldwin was unexpectedly pressed into service when Sean Murphy started the season on the IL, and he’s done nothing but hit ever since. He doesn’t chase too much, he makes good contact when he does swing, and he has top-shelf bat speed. He hits too many grounders, but the overall package works because he hits the ball with a ton of authority; he’s running gaudy HR/FB numbers and probably always will.

I’m not sure whether his defense will hold up. He’s acceptable out there at the moment, but that was a weakness of his profile as a prospect, and he’ll get more DH reps as the year wears on now that Murphy is back and raking. If you’re trading for Baldwin, you have to bake some positional risk into your evaluation; it’s not the median case, but I could see him ending up at first base or in the corner outfield. That would put a ton more pressure on his bat, which is why I think the evaluation here is volatile.

That said, he’s going to be around for a long time, he doesn’t cost that much, and there’s at least a chance that he continues to improve offensively from a baseline that’s already high. I’d take an average-fielding catcher with Baldwin’s bat, and I’m not alone in that view. If you believe his recent defensive improvements – he’s gotten a lot smoother since being drafted – you can even round up a little bit there. But between the fact that his offensive track record is short and the risk around his long-term defensive value, I’m leaving him in the group of players with wide error bars and calling it a day. Still, it wouldn’t shock me if he were much higher on this list next year.

Wilson feels like a poor fit for the high volatility grouping. He’s a singles hitter. He plays acceptable defense. As a shortstop who doesn’t strike out much, his floor is high. But I have him in this group because I can’t shake concerns that his hit tool just isn’t enough to make up for his complete lack of power in the long run.

That’s basically the whole evaluation here. If Wilson is 30% above average offensively, he’s one of the most valuable players in the game as a cost-controlled middle infielder who would fit in every batting order. If he’s David Fletcher plus, he’s just a nice starter who doesn’t belong on this list.

If Wilson were ripping line drives to every part of the field, I’d have an easier time placing him. But he’s not exactly Luis Arraez; he also makes a ton of contact with a slow swing, but far more of his contact is smacked into the ground. The Arraez comp is an easy one, and it’s also instructive: When Arraez was at his offensive peak, he hit the ball a lot harder than Wilson’s 2025 body of work and banked line drive doubles as a result. I’m willing to believe that this style of hitting can pay off, but I’m not willing to believe that it can pay off for Wilson, in the long-term, without changes.

That said, there’s silver lining aplenty here. I think Wilson is a good enough defender to stick at shortstop if necessary, and he’d be good at second or third as well. Even if he’s just a league average hitter, he’ll contribute to your team for years to come, and he’ll do so for a reasonable salary. The volatility here isn’t about whether Wilson is a solid major leaguer; it’s about whether his offensive game is sustainable at this level. For what it’s worth, I got a mixture of views from team evaluators here, but most everyone agreed that he’s an intriguing profile who belonged either somewhere in the bottom third of the list or just off of it.

The first tier was a bunch of players who I have a tough time evaluating. This next group? Not so much. It’s Tier 15: Solid Infielders. They get to it different ways, but everyone in this group looks like a plus contributor, and none of them are hitting free agency particularly soon. The next MVP? Probably not. An All-Star with a salary in the low millions? That’s in range for everyone here.

Abrams is putting together the offensive skills he’s intermittently demonstrated throughout his professional career. He has great bat-to-ball skills and sneaky power; I can see 25-homer seasons with solid OBPs in his future. He’s swing-happy, but not in a disqualifying way, and he’s lowered his chase rate every year in the majors. His current 132 wRC+ looks overly flattering to me, but 15-20% better than average feels like a reasonable expectation for Abrams’ future, and he’s a spectacular baserunner, too.

The biggest question with Abrams is what position he should play. He’s below average at shortstop, and below average by enough that I think he’d move off the position if he weren’t on a team with no competition to speak of at the position. Center seems like an obvious alternative; he has the foot speed for it, at the very least. Second makes sense as well. He hasn’t played either position since 2022, but hopefully it wouldn’t take too long to get him up to speed. That risk bumps him to the bottom of this group, but even if you don’t know exactly where to play Abrams, he’s clearly a useful contributor.

Westburg would be a valuable cog on any team. Here’s what I wrote about him in this exercise last year: “He can play a few spots defensively, he’s a reasonable bat up and down the lineup, he runs the bases well — every team could use more Westburgs. He’s 25, he won’t be a free agent until after the 2029 season, he’s mashing in the majors right now, and he’s projected to keep doing so. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”

That does sound like a pretty good deal to me! What dropped Westburg from 29 to 46? First, as I’ll be discussing throughout the week, it’s a more competitive top 50 this year than the last few iterations. Second, Westburg has been injured: Dating back to last year’s All-Star break, he has only 269 plate appearances. That encompasses two separate injuries, a fractured hand and a strained hamstring. Neither suggests any particular long-term risk, but for players like Westburg, whose value proposition is more about being consistently good than being one of the elite few players in the league, availability matters a lot.

If you’re ripping off 6- and 7-WAR seasons, 150 plate appearances here or there is an acceptable cost to pay. But if you’re in the Westburg mold, a 3-4 WAR kind of guy, lopping off playing time starts to sting. If he’s going to play 500 PAs a year instead of 650, the whole package looks a lot less attractive. It’s obviously more complicated than that, but one simple way of looking at it is to compare his ZiPS numbers from last year to now: He’s a win lower across the board, and it’s largely about playing time.

This one was tough for me. Winn’s carrying tool is a ludicrous, 80-grade throwing arm, but that sells the rest of his defensive game short. Fast hands, quick feet, good range; he’s gotten much better at moving to his right, and now looks like an annual threat to win defensive hardware. Indeed, he won the Fielding Bible award in 2024 and looks like he’ll be right in that range again in 2025. We’re talking premium, All-Star-despite-a-bad-batting-line level defense.

Offensively, I can’t see Winn being much better than an average hitter, and projection systems agree. The thing is, an average-hit shortstop with Winn’s glove is a 4-WAR player. He’s on pace for that range this year despite an early-season IL stint, and he checked in at 3.6 WAR in 2024. I don’t think this is a case where a positional adjustment overstates shortstop value. Maybe not every guy who can stand between second and third is a defensive asset, but Winn is a lot better than the field at a tough and important defensive spot; that’s undeniably useful.

Can Winn keep up this level of offense? Probably. He’ll never be a power hitter, but his good sense of the zone and good bat-to-ball skills mean his floor is quite high. I’d be happy with that if I had Winn on my team; he’s so good defensively that the big risk to his profile is that his offense collapses, and his approach minimizes that risk in my opinion. But of course, the standard caveat about everyone in this tier applies: the likely ceiling is not tremendously high. I think Winn is more likely to break out than the two guys immediately behind him on this list, because he doesn’t need to hit all that well to do it; if he started hitting like Westburg or Abrams, he’d get down-ballot MVP votes. But without any real likelihood of an offensive explosion, I can’t in good conscience put Winn ahead of the tier ahead of him – and I even ended up moving him behind the next guy on the list at the very end of my revisions.

This year’s list is stacked. I can’t believe I have Langford this low. I even had him off the list a few times, though my cross-checkers consistently told me I was too low on him when I did so. Langford starts a three-player group, Tier 14: Industry Darlings. Langford has been a worse hitter but better fielder than expected. In his second year in the majors, he’s just above average offensively, in line with his rookie season. That feels light given his spectacular amateur and minor league performance, particularly when you take his titanic batted ball quality into account. But when will that translate into juicy big league numbers? The waiting game continues.

Batters take a while to hit their stride all the time, and the process here looks good to me. Langford has a solid sense of the zone and doesn’t struggle with any particular pitch type. He runs low swinging strike rates for someone with his power. It just hasn’t all clicked yet. I think it will. Guys with this combination of skills tend to work out. The super high-end outcomes probably aren’t there anymore – he didn’t come out and light the league on fire in his first 900 plate appearances, so he’s probably not one of the best hitters of all time, and he’s up to three big league IL stints already – but if you don’t think Langford is going to be a good major league hitter, you should probably not be in the business of evaluating major league hitters.

The only question is what you’d give up for Langford, and I’m shading low on young players who have shown a little but not a lot yet. I’ll get into this discussion more in the next blurb, but if I were making decisions for a big league team, I would be trying to get guys like Langford at a discount rather than backing up the truck for them. That’s true of pretty much everyone on today’s list, in fact, which is why it’s the bottom 10 names of the top 50. I don’t doubt that Langford will end up as a good middle-of-the-order bat in the next few years, and I’m absolutely not confident that 44 is the perfect spot for him, but that’s how I’m squaring the excellent pedigree and not-yet-overwhelming production: by splitting the difference.

For the third year in a row, Neto was more popular with the team personnel I talked to than I expected. I like him plenty, but I differed in two places. First, I have his defense as average at shortstop, and several people I talked to think he’s better than that. Second, everyone likes him more at the plate than I do. I don’t think it’s one skill in particular that I’m low on, but at least a few of my sources think of him as a top-level, difference-making bat at shortstop, whereas I think it’s more like 5-10% better than average.

If they’re closer to the mark than I am, this ranking is too low. There’s a big gap between “average shortstop defender with a solid bat” and “slugger who can play short,” and the latter group is the most coveted set of players in baseball these days. Neto is on track for 25 homers, and his batted ball quality implies that there’s even more in the tank. He might strike out a lot, and he might not walk much, but his approach is designed to catch the ball out in front and drive it to the pull side, kind of a store brand Justin Turner approach. I keep thinking that pitchers will figure Neto out, but I keep being wrong about that. He might just be good enough to keep doing that while building on his strikeout and walk numbers; he’s improved every year of his major league career.

I started Neto higher in my rankings, and I don’t feel great about having him this far down. Every evaluator I talked to had Neto higher than I do. But I asked one of them whether a hypothetical team they ran would try to trade for him at “full price,” and they equivocated before saying probably not. That’s basically it for me – a nice player, but one I’d prefer to try to develop on my own rather than trade for. Maybe that’s wrong, but that holds Neto and the rest of the players in his tier back in my rankings.

Anthony is probably going to be a star. He’s 21 and has vaporized minor league competition at every stop, and the early returns on his major league career have been solid. If he had 300 PA of major league experience instead of 137 and was hitting at least this well, he’d be higher up the list. But that’s not where things are, and so it’s time for another discussion of trade value.

Anthony’s value is heavily predicated on the fact that he’s going to be around for a very long time at a very cheap rate; it’s less about what he’s doing at this exact moment than almost anyone else on this list. That’s fine! Cheap young outfielders who will probably turn into All-Stars are awesome. But if I were going to trade for one, it’d be a surplus value game. Count up the expected contributions, count up the expected costs, compare the two, and then weigh what you’d have to give up to acquire him. And if you’re doing that kind of thinking, why would you acquire Anthony at cost? You’d try to get him at a discount. After all, you’re in the business of counting up costs and benefits and comparing the two; presumably your mind doesn’t like the idea of spending $100 for a $100 value.

There are two reasons to make a trade: to get better right now, or to get better down the road. Anthony fits better into the second bucket than the first. I don’t think a team trying to make a playoff push right now would trade for Anthony. It would be a very inefficient way of adding to your current squad; most of his value is tied up in the future, certainly more than for anyone else in this similar stratosphere of trade value. That means his suitors are mostly the kinds of teams that would try to “win the trade” while acquiring him, and his value has to take that into account.

Plenty of team personnel said I had Anthony too low. The projections are good. The cost is right. I just think he’s more valuable when he’s already on your team than as someone you’d trade for. If you disagree with the conceit that the composition of the trade market for young players naturally suppresses their value in trade, you could slide these three up a few tiers, perhaps to the mid-30s. I just don’t think it would fit with the way trades work in practice.

Welcome to Tier 13: Superstars on Fair Deals. This group will continue into tomorrow, but I think Buxton is a great introduction to the group. He has a more favorable contract than the rest of his tier-mates, but a murkier playing time projection. Buxton has been elite when healthy, and he’s on course for one of his most available seasons yet – his career high in plate appearances is 511, and we have him projected for 555 this year.

That’s the downside with Buxton: He’s one of the best in the game when he plays, but he doesn’t play much. Coming into this year, he’d averaged less than 300 PA per season over a 10-year career. He went from elite center fielder to DH-only in 2023 before returning to the field with no ill effects in 2024. Since the start of 2020, he has a 136 wRC+ and is a good defender at a premium position – and he’s 39th in WAR because he just hasn’t played enough.

If you trade for Buxton, you’re betting on his health continuing, but you’re getting good odds for doing so. His deal has a shockingly low base salary for someone with his rate statistics: only $15 million a year, and there are three years left after 2025, a sweet spot for a 31-year-old veteran. It carries incentives of up to $10.5 million for winning MVP while playing a full season, but who cares? If Byron Buxton wins MVP and plays a full season, you’re getting far more than your money’s worth. If Buxton had a less checkered injury history, his talent plus this contract would put him much higher on the list.

It’s a fear/greed tradeoff, in other words. Buxton could be one of the best bargains in baseball, a 31-year-old MVP candidate who you can have for the immediate future with no ugly years at the end of his contract. That’s drool-worthy. He could also put up 600 plate appearances in the next three years. The Twins have consistently built their roster around spare center fielders to accommodate Buxton; a team trading for him would have to do that too. That’s the fear side of the equation. I’m a greedy guy, so I’d take the risk – but I wouldn’t fault anyone who looks at the same equation and sees a different answer.