2025 Trade Value Series Chat

Ben Clemens: Hey everyone, welcome to the chat.

Ben Clemens: I’m going to spend the next hour and change answering your questions about specific players who were on the list, specific players who weren’t on the list, general thought process, and anything else Trade Value Top 50 related you can think to ask me. I’m going to dive more deeply into each individual question, since many of them overlap, so I’ll answer fewer, but the goal is to get as much info out there as possible

Ben Clemens: Oh! And if you have non trade value questions, Eric Longenhagen is chatting in two hours. I’m gonna not answer stuff that is unrelated to this list. My regular chat is Monday at 2pm ET if you’d prefer to ask me then.

BP: Why do you think Ohtani didn’t get more when he signed? I agree his contract is a bargain but it seemed that at the time he signed it too

Sam: With all the hubbub about Ohtani being the top value, my main question is: Why was he only 7th last year? Sure, his projections have gone up slightly since then, but he was already in the middle of an MVP season. Is it just that the LA Times’ (wildly speculative) estimate of his value to the team that you cite came out last December?

The Prospector: I get that Ohtani deserves to be #1 on the list due to his unique off the field situation, but if you somehow took all of that out and just honed in on his performance and contract, where do you estimate he’d be on the list (if at all)?

Ben Clemens: Let’s start with a broad array of questions about Ohtani, which is a fun category. So, as to his signing, the way I see it is that a few things are going on here

Ben Clemens: one, he reportedly set his salary

Ben Clemens: there’s good reporting that at least the Giants and Dodgers offered the same deal, at the Ohtani camp’s behest

Ben Clemens: there’s some anchoring going on here too. like, the biggest previous deal was in the $400 million new money range and he asks for 700!

Ben Clemens: but with a weird deferral thing. also teams couldn’t be sure how it would work to market Ohtani in their big market platform until it actually happened. The reports that I’ve seen, difficult to gather, are that the Angels were making in the range of 10-20 million in endorsement stuff a year. I’d believe  higher, I probably wouldn’t believe lower, but anyway, different deal

Ben Clemens: Last year, I hadn’t quite wrapped my head around how well things would go with the Dodgers. Like, I used that LA Times link as representative of all the different estimates out there I’ve seen. You’ll see some that are meaningfully higher, some lower. And then I discounted it pretty heavily from there. He’d be the number one player even if it were only like 1/3 of the low end of the range of reported amounts

Ben Clemens: But if there were no off-field considerations whatsoever? Let’s see. In my raw model outputs (adjusted for the concentration of WAR stuff that I’m sure we’ll talk about more here today), I had Ohtani in a virtual tie with Judge

Thomas: How much did the public results from the trade value comparison tool agree/disagree with your list?

Ben Clemens: Oh buddy, are you in luck. You’ll be able to compare your own results to me or to the crowd, me to the crowd, whatever you want, when we release them on Monday

Toucan: Are you saying that Ohtanis value is predicated on being on the Dodgers? How does that make any sense for a trade value series?

Ben Clemens: I’m saying that it’s predicated on being on like one of five teams

Ben Clemens: but that those five teams would offer a lot

Ben Clemens: like, let’s be real, the Brewres aren’t winning a 29-team bidding war for Ohtani. So it doesn’t really matter to me whether or not they participate as long as multiple motivated buyers do

Ben Clemens: that’s just the reality of how trades work

Ben Clemens: if this was the average value of each player across all 30 teams, well, I hope you like pre-arb regulars

Syndergaardengnomes: If Ohtani gets credit for off-field value, how do you ignore off-field value for Juan Soto?  Mets attendance is up over 10K per home game this year.  If he gets credit for even half that, which is likely conservative, you’re offsetting a massive portion of his contract right there.

Ben Clemens: Well I think that accrues to the whole team a bit more, Mets attendance has been higher before, weird little lull last year, etc. but the point is, I mostly don’t ascribe attendance to players b/c that fluctuates a lot and has to do with the performance of the team as a whole. it also has to do with stadium amenities, lots of other stuff

Ben Clemens: you could argue, and I don’t even think it’d be a bad argument, that some of the ‘star bump’ that I have in my rankings, which is as a result of the trades for real-world stars, is measuring that

Ben Clemens: Like, why do teams pay more than the model says for big names? maybe it’s b/c they are themselves doing a little adjusting for revenue

Ben Clemens: but Ohtani is so different from the rest of the cases as to fit in a different category, at least in my opinion

Guest: Why weren’t the Cubs among the teams mentioned in Ohtani’s blurb? Chicago being less marketable than NY/LA or the Cubs’ reluctance to sign big contracts?

Ben Clemens: probably just b/c I got tired, to be honest. 25,000 words in a week means that even with Meg’s best efforts, I’m probably not at 100% strength the whole way through

J: Hi Ben, thanks for doing this series. Even when I disagree with you, I appreciate all the work that goes into it, and I think you do a terrific job.

Do you think you might be underestimating PCA’s floor? I get being skeptical of the projection due to the contact rate, but if you do the math, he’d be on a 4 WAR pace this season even if he were around a 95 wRC+ due to his defense and base running. It seems that you buy into his pulled fly ball rate being at all sticky, the upside is huge while the downside is still a first division starter.

Ben Clemens: Oh, definitely could be. PCA was one of the hardest players to rank

Ben Clemens: I think I don’t buy the ludicrous defense staying like this, for one thing. And I definitely value it less than hitting WAR, as I mentioned repeatedly. The upside is large, no doubt. Like I mentioned, he’ll probably hit 7 WAR this year.

Ben Clemens: I guess what I’m saying with my ranking is a few things

Ben Clemens: I don’t think he’s going to be consistently peeling off 5’s and 6’s. I really do think that a bat in the vicinity of league average makes sense here. And I think that, model notwithstanding, there are big bust risks. Like, I mentioned the raw model rankings before with Ohtani

Ben Clemens: PCA was #2 behind Julio in those, amazing, raw model clearly values defense

Ben Clemens: but Michael Harris was just outside the top 10

Ben Clemens: like, this month

Ben Clemens: gotta be pretty careful with ascribing too much certainty and value to those projections. Harris, too, had a 137 wRC+ his rookie year. Obviously that’s not a MEAN path for PA

Ben Clemens: PCA*

Ben Clemens: but the point is that the kind of value you’re talking about — really good OF defense with a maybe balky bat — the models love it more than the actual teams do

Ben Clemens: I think the reason to ignore this is because you specifically like the play with PCA’s bat, and I can totally see that

Ben Clemens: As I mentioned, I was not the low man on him out of everyone I talked to, I think that a lot of people would group all the hit tool risk players together in the 20s maybe. but just my attempt at keeping my own view the focus while also hearing what some smart people I trust had to say

Guest: If defense were as consistent, measurable, and followed the same aging curve as hitting, would you value it equally? Or do you see it as a less valuable part of the game even outside of those factors

Ben Clemens: I still wouldn’t. Well, I’m willing to let team behavior guide me, so if they start doing it a little differently I’d re-evaluate

Ben Clemens: but the truth is, defense just doesn’t cost as much. it just doesn’t. look at arb. look at free agent deals

Ben Clemens: it’s easier to acquire a 3 win guy who is an 85 wRC+ with a slick glove than one who’s 120 wRC+

Ben Clemens: so that guides my view. and I think it makes sense. it’s not that defense is less valuable on the field. it’s just that the cost of acquisition is lower

Ben Clemens: and it’s also not super accretive. You don’t get to keep adding +10 defenders

Logan: Whoa, Julio was #1 in the raw model? Surprising — what was driving that vs. Witt, Carroll, Elly?

Ben Clemens: combination of ZiPS really loving his forecasts (only Witt is ahead of him) and the shape of his contract option being a lot better than Witt’s

Ben Clemens: Witt, if he goes nova, he leaves after 2030. Julio, if he does, you get it

Ben Clemens: Don’t worry, Witt was third, neck and neck with PA

Ben Clemens: PA

Ben Clemens: PCA* sorry the C is sticking

Ben Clemens: anyway, that’s like, only very initial model, and I do a ton of tweaking from there. it’s mostly there to get the list in an initial order to even start making comparisons

Oaktown Blues: What makes Yordan Alvarez significantly more valuable than Brent Rooker? Rooker was basically just as good last year, has been better this year, and is signed for longer and cheaper. Yordan has a slightly higher peak, but shouldn’t the recent performance and contract situation outweigh that?

Ben Clemens: Ooh, I was looking to have a Yordan discussion actually, so great excuse

Ben Clemens: Okay so, the Yordan placement in the list was surely arbitrary

Ben Clemens: as I mentinoed in the writeup, the Astros don’t value him this low and no one else values him this high, there’s no deal to be done

Ben Clemens: but I noticed that a lot of the comments around Yordan focused on ‘well you could just get a different offensive player who’s also a good hitter, like Yordan’

Ben Clemens: I wrote about this a little today in the Judge section, but let’s take Rooker, sure

Ben Clemens: Rooker’s best season was last year. 164 wRC+. Huge, outlier season. 30 points of wRC+ ahead of his next-highest season, which is 2025, ahead of his established career level on the A’s, etc. I totally buy what the projection systems are selling that ROoker is a 130 wRC+ hitter going ahead, great hitter, that’s a good projection

Ben Clemens: Yordan’s career AVERAGE wRC+ is 162

Ben Clemens: his average season has been the Rooker fever dream season

Ben Clemens: Someone else wanted to compare Yordan to Matt Olson. Nice hitter, same deal. Olson’s career high wRC+ is a big outlier to the positive side and lower than Yordan’s career average

Ben Clemens: I’m not saying that you have to agree with the Yordan valuation. It’s very speculative, like I mentioned. If I hadn’t ranked Acuna a few times when he was out with a torn ACL, I probably wouldn’t have ranked Yordan this year

Ben Clemens: But…. no, the hitter on your team who you like is not projected to hit as well as Yordan Alvarez. And he shouldn’t be. Yordan is a really, really, really good hitter

LB: If Wood and Elly had the same team control situation, would their relative rankings stay the same, or would Elly pull ahead? (Recognize I’m tempting you with two of your faves)

Ben Clemens: Oof yeah. It’s a tough one

Ben Clemens: I’d have Wood ahead, and I’ll tell you why. I’m mostly looking for absolute off-the-top-of-the-scales high end outcomes with these guys

Ben Clemens: I actually had Elly a little lower to start this list. in the group with the CF’s around 10th. but I think I fell victim to the ‘oh his stats look similar to last year’s’ thing I wrote about in his blurb

Ben Clemens: He’s still improving, the chance for a monster career is obviously there

Ben Clemens: but you have to think it’s less likely, right? how could it not be? another year has passed without him being Shortstop Judge

Ben Clemens: meanwhile, Wood might be Lefty Judge

Ben Clemens: like, he’s probably not

Ben Clemens: but at these crazy heights of ‘which top 10 player do you want’ I’m picking the one with the trajectory that could really be wild

Dusty Rhodes: What’s the one player that was most divisive amongst your team/league sources?

Ben Clemens: Misiorowski, I think

Ben Clemens: That’s kind of cheating, though. How in the world are the people I talk to, most of whom have real jobs that aren’t “evaluate players who you can’t ever acquire on other teams”

Ben Clemens: have an opinion on this guy whose total body of work is changing massively as I have these conversations with them?

Ben Clemens: Leaving him aside, hm: Skubal is up there, Adley, Eury Perez

Ben Clemens: This is a good time for a quick aside, both reading the comments and spending a lot more time with my list after it’s out of my hands and can’t change it has me looking at two things and figuring out how to improve them for next year

Ben Clemens: The tiering system is, I think, really useful. It’s also a great narrative tool. But it leads to me dragging players a little higher or lower than they’d otherwise go. Like, George Kirby was #23 b/c he’s broadly similarly shaped to #22, Hunter Brown

Ben Clemens: but as I mentioned, I had 28-21 all mixed up at various points. and by list’s end, I probably would have preferred the ‘franchise players with question marks’ group to Kirby

Ben Clemens: but it’d break the tiers!

Ben Clemens: likewise, the Adley/Contreras double should have been a little bit lower. But I had them in a three-player tier with Alejandro Kirk (#29 right in front of Ketel Marte, but had been #30 behind Ketel b/c I had the two of them at almost exactly the same value)

Ben Clemens: so wanting to put Kirk next to Marte dragged up his tier-mates

Ben Clemens: I need to figure out a way to handle that next year, perhaps looser tiering. I don’t think it’s a huge dela, but that’s my first takeaway

Bal’mer: Colton Cowser close to an honorable mention?

Ben Clemens: Yeah

Ben Clemens: He was one of the last names left on the HM cutting room floor this year

Ben Clemens: I don’t think his value is tremendously different from some of the other defensive-ish, offensive-wishcasting guys

Guest: Was Jarren Duran close to an honorable mention?

Ben Clemens: haha he was one

Ben Clemens: I’m very curious to see what he or Abreu fetch in return if the Sox decide to do some kind of buy/sell mix

Ben Clemens: They’re a fascinating team. I was looking back at my preseason projections and I had Devers MVP (whoops!) and Anthony ROY (maybe!) and yet I didn’t realize enough what a logjam they’d have

Ben Clemens: still wild to me that they’re playing Rafaela at second base

Oaktown Blues: I’m sad you left Nick Kurtz off the list, not because I think it’s indefensible, but because it deprives us of seeing his 5 year ZiPS projections! Think of the children!

Ben Clemens: I was hoping you’d ask this question!

Ben Clemens: I have a Nick Kurtz anecdote all queued up

Ben Clemens: Okay, so I sat down on July 5 to start this process with fresh ZiPS, up-to-date career and recent stats, all my contract stuff, big old spreadsheet ready to go

Ben Clemens: and I worked off of that, incorporating new data, for the next call it two weeks

Ben Clemens: as of games of July 4, Nick Kurtz had a 116 wRC+ and Jacob Wilson had a 136 wrC+

Ben Clemens: Now today, on the other hand, Kurtz has a 163 wRC+ and Wilson is at 119

Ben Clemens: So it’s safe to say that the trajectory of their performances played a role in their relative rankings. I try to update my priors to account for new players but it’s a)not like I’m getting brand new 5y zips runs for the whole league every day b)not every day that a guy has a 314 wRC+ for a three week span

Ben Clemens: for the record, though, Kurtz was in Dan’s top 100 prospect movers article. 10.4 WAR over the next 5 years

Ben Clemens: he didn’t include a distribution, but you can probably imagine it

TKDC: Yamamoto is either a guy on a 4/$90m deal or else he’s an albatross or dead money, depending on his health. Did you heavily weigh him down for that and he still ended up where he is or do you not see his opt outs as a massive downward pressure on his value?

Ben Clemens: Yeah

Ben Clemens: I think he’d be meaningfully higher if not for that

Ben Clemens: I and the person I talked to most about his deal concur that the balance of probabilities is weighed pretty squarely towards an opt out right now

Ben Clemens: like 70/30 or better

Ben Clemens: in my subjective opinion

Ben Clemens: you obviously have to weigh both into account, though

TKDC: If none of the other 29 teams would value Yordan as the 28th best trade value asset, then doesn’t that squarely mean he is not the 28th best trade asset?

Ben Clemens: This is my list. I say that every year. People don’t seem to care. This is the list of who I think are the top 50 trade values in baseball, subject to the criteria that people who generally think like me ran front offices

Ben Clemens: I can’t actually tell you what all 29 teams think about Yordan

Ben Clemens: Sadly, I don’t get full brain access to the 30 top decision makers

Ben Clemens: Honestly, I didn’t even speak to one! I talk to guys who spend a lot of their time scouring waiver wires or trying to pick between which of four relievers to trade for, because that’s what almost everyone in baseball does. I don’t think people spend very much time on these grand questions

Ben Clemens: So yeah, this is my ranking of the players. I noted why I think the Yordan one is unique. If you want an unbiased exactly accurate assessment of what teams think with no editorial bent, I mean, that doesn’t exist, but also I’m not trying to offer it to you

Ben Clemens: I at least do a bunch of explaining where I think I’m way out of line. But yeah….I don’t see this list as getting to some objective truth. I am doing my best, using both a ton fo back-checking of my own work and a ton of anchoring it to real world trades, to get an idea of what these players ‘should’ be worth in trade value. Given that they don’t often trade, it’s kinda difficult. But I also add in my own views. I think that is what people want. Maybe it’s not

Sam: Since you’ve had your nose in them, what’s your favorite wacky contract? Is it Merrill’s, like you mention?

Ben Clemens: Merrill’s is pretty good, yeah. I love Julio’s. Raleigh’s has a vesting option that’s kind of fun

Ben Clemens: it vests with 4 100 G seasons at catcher

Ben Clemens: but if it does vest, I kind of think he’d wish it wouldn’t?

Ben Clemens: $20 million for 2031. If he’s hit 100G in 4 of the 6 seasons, I think that’s probably slightly negative EV for him

Oaktown Blues: Feels like every year there’s a bubble guy who goes nuclear right as you’re constructing the list, and Kurtz was that guy this year

Ben Clemens: Yeah, totally. I kept shading him up as I would redo the list b/c I’d be like ‘man I saw Nick Kurtz hit two doubles tonight, let’s round up’

Ben Clemens: Truth be told, leaving Wilson off the list was tempting, and I actually spent more time talking about Wilson than most of the guys in the 31-50 range

Ben Clemens: I got some feedback to the general tune of “god, could you imagine how mad the batting average crowd would get if you left Wilson off?’

Ben Clemens: it’s true! also I mean, ZiPS loves him

Ben Clemens: one thing that I need to figure out every year is how to devalue some of the position/defense/floor guys

Ben Clemens: there are always a few

Ben Clemens: one thing I’m fairly certain I did this year, as I look back, was anchor a little bit too much to the 2024 ZiPS for Westburg

Ben Clemens: like, I had to discount Westburg a lot from his ZiPS in 2024 just to get him to 29th or wherever I had him. 27th? model loved him, surplus value types I talked to did too

Ben Clemens: so he was carrying this big discount weight in my actual rankings relative to the raw projections

Ben Clemens: then this year, his projections are way down, but I don’t apply the discount weighting. why? I guess most likely b/c my head anchored too much on the 2024 ZiPS

Ben Clemens: to be clear I really like Westburg, but there’s no reason to have specifically him in the top 50 aside from the tier-anchoring (which I talked about earlier) and my own 2024 anchoring

Ben Clemens: I do think he’s a really good and underrated player though

Guest: I think it being *your* ranking is part of what makes it fun. I imagine every individual who works in/analyzes baseball has types of players they like more or less than consensus, and it’s interesting to hear your personal thought processes. A more “objective” version even if possible would be less appealing to me.

Ben Clemens: I mean, everyone wants different things

Ben Clemens: But thank you!

Ben Clemens: I’d basically say that I want to be right more than anything else, and so I think that makes me a good person to try to do these rankings. But yeah, they’re definitely my opinion, and while I’m trying to make that opinion better every year, I’m surely quite fallible

Ben Clemens: boy, look at where I’ve ranked Michael Harris before

Ben Clemens: Ke’Bryan Hayes too

Jeff: Any feedback you’ve gotten after publishing that has you really second guessing yourself?

Ben Clemens: Yeah, my wife said “why do you write so much in one week? you look tired”

Ben Clemens: Um, no, I’ll sit down and do more evaluating later

Ben Clemens: it’s pretty hard to do a robust read-through of feedback while you’re also writing

Ben Clemens: i do a little self-evaluation but I won’t get down to really crunching on how to improve until probably the offseason when I’m bored

Ben Clemens: you commenters are just too good. there are like 200 comments every day

Ben Clemens: and most of my feedback from my industry contacts comes before the list comes out, so that was already incorporated

Guest: Aren’t there only about three or four teams that would be willing to take on that Ohtani deal? And doesn’t that hurt his trade value? I think basically 80% of the league would happily acquire Judge on his contract, the bidding would be super competitive, while Ohtani might be in an A-Rod situation where there just aren’t enough teams who want to commit that much $$$ to one guy

Ben Clemens: Oh yeah. Definitely could be. I’ve decided, philosophically, to only treat that kind of analysis as a deal-breaker if it’s going to result in less than, say, 3 bidders

Ben Clemens: for generally Vickrey Auction kind of logic, that winning prices are often the second-highest-bidder’s valuation

Ben Clemens: i don’t exactly know how trades work, but I assume there’s enough leaking and semi-comparing of offers that it roughly approximates Vickrey

Ben Clemens: in other words, if 15 teams value Ohtani at 1 dollar, 1 values him at 15, and one values him at 30, and he has to get traded, he’ll probably fetch 15

Ben Clemens: on the other hand, if 10 teams valued him at 10 dollars, 4 at 12, 2 at 15, and 1 at 30…. he’d probably fetch 15-ish

Oddball Herrera: Have we ever had a guy on the trade values list actually get traded that deadline?

Ben Clemens: Juan Soto

Ben Clemens: he got traded the year he was #6 on trade value

Ben Clemens: and the return was pretty good! James Wood, CJ Abrams, MacKenzie Gore, Robert Hassell II, Jarlin Susana

Ben Clemens: i think that’s at least borderline top 10 trade value

Ben Clemens: to be fair, that was for Josh Bell too. so maybe lop off Hassell (who was a top 100 guy at the time) for a 1b rental

Bob: Kyle Tucker is not in the top 50?

Ben Clemens: nah, I HM’ed him, I think teams are not going to pay these kinds of prices for rental hitters

Ben Clemens: rental pitcher MAYBE? if they were Tucker-level as a pitcher

Ben Clemens: but as someone astutely pointed out in the comments yesterday, pitchers get big postseason leverage. the % of innings handled by your aces goes up meaningfully in October

Ben Clemens: hitters don’t really. so if you’re grabbing someone based on a few playoff runs, it’ll probably be a pitcher. hitters rack up their value over time more so

J: I saw some people suggesting in the comments that this should look at estimated surplus value of players, but that gets at the wrong thing because teams care about far more of the value distribution than the mean outcome right? I would assume teams would rather pay a player with a 50% chance of being a 8 WAR guy and a 50% chance of being a 0 WAR guy rather than a slam dunk 4 WAR player (to take an extreme example)?

Ben Clemens: yeah look, we published the ZiPS. you want to do a model-based surplus value evaluation, go nuts. the contracts are public

Ben Clemens: (not you personally obviously)

Ben Clemens: what I’d say is that baseball GM’ing obviously has more dimensions than merely managing surplus value

Ben Clemens: it’s not just like ‘well we did more surplus value so we win’

Ben Clemens: it’s a really complicated equation with a ton of conditions to satisfy and things to optimize for. broadly speaking, you’re just making constraint tradeoffs when you pick one type of player over another

Ben Clemens: like, if you think of it in terms of a Pareto frontier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front), but maybe in 3d, there’s a lot of nonsense that goes into this

Ben Clemens: maybe it’s like distribution of wins, concentration of wins, surplus value

Ben Clemens: all of those matter

Ben Clemens: but no one builds the whole team out of surplus value. the idea of getting the surplus value is that you then have extra money to spend on the stars to fill out your team

Ben Clemens: and they’re scarce too, and having Ketel Marte instead of Trevor Story (sorry Trevor, just a totally random guy, I wanted someone with an aav in the 20s)

Ben Clemens: like…. that’s a big game

Ben Clemens: so anyway, I think that teams both value distributional stuff (like your extreme example) and concentration stuff in addition to surplus value stuff

Ben Clemens: and that’s a reason why Cris Sanchez is so valuable and Ezequiel Tovar less so

Ben Clemens: Tovar’s projected ZiPS surplus value clears Sanchez’s for sure. but he doesn’t have the war concentration or star value levers

Jewish Pache: Thanks man. My favorite articles every year

Ben Clemens: Thank you very much! Honestly if I sound like I’m frustrated, it’s just b/c I’m tired. I love writing these, and I love getting feedback on them

Ben Clemens: It’s a fun challenge trying to communicate my views every year. And it’s also fun b/c there’s probably no way to get a list that people won’t disagree with, just b/c of the nature of preferences

Ben Clemens: Like, just listening to you guys, Zack Wheeler probably had a 30-slot range from off the list to 20s

Ben Clemens: so obviously you can’t take any one piece of feedback too hard. by the nature of the exercise, some of the stuff is going to be controversial

Ben Clemens: I will say this. I spend a lot of time thinking about this. I’m a pretty smart guy. I definitely don’t get every ranking right but I think I do a good job both trying to line up my views of baseball with how the economics of the game work in a broad sense, and writing about those things

sadtrombone: the list is out but it has been probably 2 or 3 weeks since you settled on the final order. Would you change anything? Move anyone up or down?

Ben Clemens: believe it or not, the last edit was Sunday

Ben Clemens: it’s pretty hard to do it far in advance because the draft is only a week before release now, and I’m not going to get a lot of team eyeballs on this silly side project they do as a favor to their chatty convention friend when they’re on the clock

Ben Clemens: That said, to reiterate what I said above a little bit, the spots where I see the most anchoring are over-grouping tiers (Kirby, catchers) and Nick Kurtz’s rise/Jacob Wilson’s fall

Ben Clemens: I started the machinery for the list in June. I started seriously ranking people July 5. I got it down to like 60 candidates probably July…. 12?

Ben Clemens: the biggest thing is that if you just keep looking at it, turn the brain crank a few more times, I feel like the incremental improvements never really stop

CFH: If surplus value were a GM’s primary consideration, by definition no GM would ever sign a free agent, as they sign for market value. A team wins by maximizing value, and maximizing surplus value can help with that if you’re on a budget, but you still have to get the very good players to win

Ben Clemens: right, yeah, I think that this is possible to overstate

Ben Clemens: because surplus value is clearly very important

Ben Clemens: but the point of the game is to win

Ben Clemens: this is a thing that happened a lot in finance, I thought, and that is why I’ve brought such an emphasis on this here

Ben Clemens: people pick a success metric, and it’s arbitrary, it’s a transformed estimator of the actual goal

Ben Clemens: surplus value is a great example. it’s very correlated to winning orgs, surely

Ben Clemens: but it’s not actually the real goal. it’s an estimator

Ben Clemens: so when you have this easy-to-measure estimator, then you just start optimizing for the estimator

Ben Clemens: That’s not the goal, though. And every place where that estimator and the goal misalign you are now turbo-charging

Ben Clemens: I try to balance a lot of different stuff in my evaluations of players. I’m not sure I do a perfect job of it. I THINK that I do a fairly good job. And I have a bunch of advantages that most people don’t, like all the time in the world to back-check (Ketel Marte should have been a top 10 trade value twice in a row a few years ago, for example, if we’re looking at ex-post results)

Ben Clemens: but I think that surely, we can all agree that the right way to think about a GM’s job is that it’s to put the best team on the field, and that there are a million factors that go into that

Ben Clemens: free agent signings show that surplus value can’t be the only thing that matters. like you said, otherwise, it’d never happen, and on one would ever be hapy when they signed a free agent

Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Ben Clemens: yeah, I don’t think it’s QUITE that, but it’s similar

Ben Clemens: i still think it’s a good measure. I just don’t think it’s a sufficient or complete measure

Phil: Can we talk about Anthony? I generally agree with you more than a lot of people who comment, but not that one. My logic was, would Breslow trade RA straight up for Logan Gilbert? No, he’d guffaw at that were he anatomically capable. Etc.

Ben Clemens: yeah, look, I don’t feel super confident about this

Ben Clemens: I just know that if I were a GM mustering up resources to trade for either Roman Anthony or Logan Gilbert

Ben Clemens: and my team were trying to win baseball games right now

Ben Clemens: like, this year and next, maybe the year after that

Ben Clemens: I think I could probably talk myself into offering more for Gilbert

Ben Clemens: think of it this way: to make a trade work, to have the big huge shiny value, you need a mismatch

Ben Clemens: you need the Padres wanting Soto’s now and not caring about Wood’s later, or you need the Cubs wanting to break the curse, whatever

Ben Clemens: how are you creating that mismatch when you’re trading prospects for Roman Anthony?

Ben Clemens: I think you could make the argument that Anthony is just so valuable

Ben Clemens: that the fact that teams won’t lean into a mismatch, won’t offer a bunch of future value that is larger in magnitude than the present value

Ben Clemens: just isn’t enough to offset how valuable he is

Ben Clemens: that doesn’t seem crazy to me at all! I think you could believe that and still have Anthony higher than I do

Ben Clemens: but I think you surely have to discount him, because we’ve seen, from experience, that guys do best relative to their ‘raw model surplus value’ when there’s a mismatch

Bk: Did any of your contacts you spoke to about this series consider Barger a top 50 guy?

Ben Clemens: Yeah, although maybe not specifically, I can’t remember. Definitely in a ‘and guys like Barger, x, y, z’ kind of tiering, if that makes sense?

sadtrombone: Defend Jackson Chourio being behind Riley Greene when Chourio is under team control forever at bargain basement levels and not that far off of him as a performer today. Ready set go!

Ben Clemens: oh, sure

Ben Clemens: I mean, for one thing how am I supposed to make it clear to peopel that my own personal evaluation of Jackson Chourio is low if I don’t go out of my way to signal it?

Ben Clemens: for another thing, uh, sure. I think it’s interesting that ZiPS is 3 wins higher on Greene than Chourio over the next 5 yeras even though I generally think that I’d pay more per Greene win than Chourio win b/c the Chourio wins index heavier on baserunning and defense that the Brewers have showed us is pretty easy to make for cheap

Ben Clemens: like I said, I’m the low guy on Chourio for sure

Ben Clemens: but it just feels a little bit like the thing you’re getting, when you actually say it out loud, is less exciting than it sounds in the abstract

Ben Clemens: Like, if Chourio is a 110-120 wRC+ corner dude with good not great defense and baesrunnign?

Ben Clemens: that’s, uh, not great. you’d be so mad at me for having that guy on the list

Ben Clemens: for what it’s worth, his ZiPS forecasts are a dead ringer for Michael Harris. 18.2 WAR over the next 5 for Harris, 18.16 for Chourio, counting the rest of 2025 + 26-30

Ben Clemens: not to rag on Harris, just to say that the range of outcomes we’re talking about with Chourio is not like ‘greatest player ever’ even on the model basis

Ben Clemens: mabye I should be betting more on upside. Certainly i’m open to the fact. I’m the low guy on him by a decent amount

CFH: As long as I’m ragging on surplus value, the whole concept assumes there’s a market value, which assumes a competitive market and alternatives. What is the market value of an Ohtani? You can’t get a store-brand Ohtani if you think the branded one is overpriced

Ben Clemens: It’s easy to get TOO down on surplus value

Ben Clemens: It’s a big input to my model!

Ben Clemens: but yes, the reason that it can’t be your only model is that we’re not living in a world of fungible commodities

Ben Clemens: you can’t just play 67 Isaac Collinses

Ben Clemens: love Isaac Collins. GOod teams need Isaac Collinses

Phil: Thanks for the explanation about Anthony–very clear and helpful. Does it also amount to an explanation of why guys like that don’t get traded–that there’s just no way another team is going to value RA enough more than Boston does to make a trade make sense?

Ben Clemens: Yeah, for sure. I think that’s actually why very few guys on this list move, and philosophically, maybe you could just ignore the ‘mismatch value’ and put Anthony higher

Ben Clemens: I don’t want to. So I choose not to. I could be convinced, though, to alter my methods at least a little

Ben Clemens: like, at the end of the day, this is what I’d do as a GM, not some attempt to find what the real trade market would do perfectly (since that’s impossible)

Ben Clemens: and I don’t mind slamming big grades on James Wood or Elly on the hope that they’ll become a generational player

Ben Clemens: I dunno, Anthony doesn’t fall into that tier for me. maybe that’s wild

Ben Clemens: i do think he’s getting a little ‘oh he’s the top guy in baseball’ juice, to where, like, Chourio was the #5 prospect it looks like on his last top 100

Ben Clemens: but, per our scouting grades, a better prospect than Anthony

Ben Clemens: “number one” is a relative post, not fixed

Ben Clemens: I could definitely be wrong on Anthony. But I shaded to the ‘just very good prospect’ side instead of like, this guy breaks the game

Ben Clemens: that said: get ready for some Konnor Griffin uncomfortably high ranks if he is a 70 FV dude next year

Marks: How big is the value gap between Skubal and Skenes, the two highest ranked pitchers?

Ben Clemens: it is so large

Ben Clemens: so so large

Ben Clemens: I mean, Skubal isn’t getting traded. But you could imagine a guy like Skubal getting traded, right?

Ben Clemens: There isn’t enough value for someone to acquire Skenes. it couldn’t happen I don’t think

Ben Clemens: and if that trade did happen, just b/c of the constraints of what has happened in previous real life, the team acquiring skenes would end up getting a steal

Ben Clemens: like if you give them a ‘soto package’

Ben Clemens: that’s still an underpay

Guest: Sorry, I asked about Max Fried, but I was really curious about how well a FA needs to perform right after signing a contract to then make that contract valuable, in your mind. Like clearly some guys are capable of it to a big degree (Wheeler), but the sort of pseudo assumption is that as soon as they sign they are not very valuable on a list like this

Ben Clemens: oh sure, I just missed that one earlier

Ben Clemens: Fried was an HM!

Ben Clemens: like, i’m not super into it, but Meg talked me into putting him on there, and I can see the arugment

Ben Clemens: I’m happy putting guys on there if I feel like they fit the criteria

Ben Clemens: what every team was willing to pay in December is definitely a useful guide, but not the only one

Ben Clemens: I think I’m down on Fried relative to the industry

Ben Clemens: for example I heard a non-Yankees broadcaster put him in ‘the tier just below Skenes and Skubal’

Ben Clemens: and like…… nah, no thanks

Ben Clemens: if you think he’s in that tier, by all means, bordering on top 50

Ben Clemens: i just don’t

HappyFunBall: I’m curious about some of the choices that went into the Trade Value Toy. I suppose I understand why Vlad Jr was in there, despite being on a deal with so many terrifying outcomes. But why someone like Shane McClanahan who hasn’t thrown a pitch in MLB in almost two calendar years now?

Ben Clemens: Oh, I think it was…. my list of top 50 + plausible names + people I knew I had to HM?

Ben Clemens: plus hyeseong kim b/c I dunno, he was on some list and had enough projection to meet some cutoff?

Ben Clemens: Vlad’s in there b/c coudl you imagine a toy like this not having vlad guerrero?

Ben Clemens: c’mon now

OW: Thanks for the list, Ben, it’s always a banger. Justice for Oneil Cruz! I have to believe at least one team would value the physical tools enough to value him over someone like Westburg or Wilson

Ben Clemens: Hey, thanks!

Ben Clemens: one sec, grabbing coffee

Ben Clemens: yeah, I mean, he’s certainly in that range

Ben Clemens: my personal evaluation is lower at this point. i don’t think it’s crazy. he’s definitely in the same stratosphere as those guys

Ben Clemens: i mean we do a top 50 but the differences in value get very slim at the bottom

Ben Clemens: kind of a normal distribution thing. there are a lot of players of roughly similar value like that. I could see someone shoving Cruz higher just b/c of the outlier tools if they wanted

Ben Clemens: but like, okay, Luis Robert has kinda been that guy in previous years sometimes

Ben Clemens: and I think I’m generally on the ‘let me see it’ side

Ben Clemens: at this point in my life

Ari: If Juan Soto was fully hitting at the level he was last year, would he have been an HM or on the list?

I guess my thought is if, for whatever reason, the Mets blew up and shopped him, the Yankees or Dodgers (or Giants?) would probably put together a decent package to take that contract

Ben Clemens: I don’t think so, honestly

Ben Clemens: it’s just TOO big of a contract

Ben Clemens: i guess it depends on exactly what ‘the level he was last year’ means

Ben Clemens: maybe I could see it? but it’s just SO much, so much more than the next closest too

Ben Clemens: I’m one of the nerdy analysts who is most bullish on good players on big contracts, I’d say, but man, that is a BIG contract

Guest: 5 of the top 10 guys are what I’d describe as “Huge, Athletic freaks.” Do you think that’s a trend in baseball to value that type of standout athletic type more or a blip ?

Ben Clemens: Well, to some extent, it’s my top 10 and I like those guys so it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy

Ben Clemens: but also, yes

Ben Clemens: I think it’s a trend

Ben Clemens: those guys are doing a lot of the standing out these days

Ben Clemens: like even the guys that aren’t huge athletic freaks – I guess that’s Raleigh, Acuna, Carroll, Gunnar, WItt? — are still kinda outliers

Ben Clemens: Raleigh has massive bat speed, Carroll and Witt might not be HUGE but they’re both off the charts on athletic stuff

Ben Clemens: Acuna, I mean, he’s ronald acuna

Ben Clemens: it’s my general feel that teams and players are getting better at actualizing the big big tools into great players

Ben Clemens: not like, perfect. but better

Phil: So, great athletes are good at sports, basically.

Ben Clemens: Yeah! And ‘many athletic technological and methodological advances are democratized, so having the standout unteachable physical skills becomes more of a differentiator’

Ben Clemens: i mean, to be fair, the unteachable mental skills too. those are just harder to see until i’ve seen a lot of data

Ben Schneider: Can you please expand on why you left Joe Ryan out? He’s a Cy Young candidate with the most valuable pitch in the sport

Ben Clemens: yeah, sure. Ryan and Gore could have been on there. ‘most valuable pitch in the sport’ I mean, that didn’t enter into my calculations

Ben Clemens: i think they’re super nice players, bet either will fetch a huge return at the deadline, I could have squeezed them in if I wanted and there are always gonna be guys like that

Ben Clemens: let’s see what Ryan gets if the Twins deal him. I’m very curious!

Ben Clemens: there’s absolutely gonna be some model trepidation, b/c if I model his strikeouts based on his pitches and even his swinging strike/first pitch striek rates, I’d have them a little lower

Ben Clemens: but…. look, I”m not super confident in that evaluation

Ben Clemens: the lower on the list, the less confident I am in differentiating people. If Ryan is truly #39 or #61, who knows

Ben Clemens: just my best guess

Wireless Joe Jackson: Hi Ben, I think this is your best list yet!  Very little to quibble with, and no one seems to want to quibble about the same guys.

Ben Clemens: Thank you!

Ben Clemens: I think it’s my best list yet, but then again, I would not be doing this exercise still if I didn’t

Ben Clemens: if I thought I was not getting better and being challenged by it, I’d definitely not submit to this amoutn of work, haha

HappyFunBall: But great athletes aren’t always good at sports.  I mean they are, but not every physical freak turns into a good baseball player. Sometimes they’re Elijah Green. GM’s clearly value the potential of a physical freak to become a top-10 baseball property, but it’s only the ones that DO fully actualize those physical attributes that become one.

Ben Clemens: Yeah, I agree with this for sure

Ben Clemens: I just think that it’s getting a lot easier to get the kind of evidence-based coaching necessary to get the best outcomes out of people than it used to be

Ben Clemens: not that it’s 100% effective and didn’t work before or anything

Ben Clemens: but I think it’s inarguable that the game has changed. and the easier it gets to actualize people’s skills, even if it doesn’t become a lock, the more important it is to have other stuff

Ben Clemens: that other stuff can be Mookie Betts super-fast cognitive processing, you know

Ben Clemens: like, he’s a freak athlete, mayhbe more so than these other guys

Ben Clemens: but I definitely think that, perhaps across all sports, training has gotten a ton better

Ben Clemens: and I think that absolutely has to play into how you think about the relative merits of various skillsets

Logan: How long do you think guys need to “prove it” for teams to be sold on their value? e.g. PCA who’s been doing this for less than a full season, or Wilson, Kurtz, Anthony etc., vs. say a Gunnar or Carroll.

Ben Clemens: Great question. I honestly don’t have a good feel for this. I can try to cuff how my various industry contacts feel about it but I have no strong reason to think that their views should mirror the league in aggregate

Ben Clemens: What I would say from talking to people is that the WAY the production comes matters a lot

Ben Clemens: like I had no problem getting people bought in on James Wood last year (he was #35 on the list and ahead of Langford and Holliday, who were both getting more hype)

Ben Clemens: and people took notice of Kurtz, for example. I talked about Kurtz a few times from the same ‘man this very large man is hitting a lot of large man homers’ point of view

Ben Clemens: but Jacob Wilson? I dunno, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

Ben Clemens: you want to tell me someone can succeed by just swatting a bunch of bombs int eh same way that good players always have? cool, I’m in, I’ll regress it but I’m in

Ben Clemens: you want to tell me that a guy is going to lead the league in chase rate, do off-the-charts damage on his lunges way out of the stirke zone, and play defense that recalibrates the scale?

Ben Clemens: i mean….. let’s maybe get some more observations there

Ben Clemens: so for me, the PCA’s and Wilson’s of the world who deliver the goods in a non-traditional shape get more heavily discounted until they’ve done it for a while

Ben Clemens: while the Kurtzes and Anthonys of the world get less regressed

Ben Clemens: if Anthony were posting a 170 wRC+ he’d be a lot higher on the list

Ben Clemens: and honestly, if we did this list in Sep instead of July I bet he’d be higher too

Ben Clemens: maybe that means I’m doing it wrong. I dunno.

Talfred: Would you agree that the wider the range of possible career outcomes (this applies especially yo young players), the less likely the player is to be traded?

Ben Clemens: Yes, for a given minimum outcome

Ben Clemens: like, guys who are either out of baseball or useful utility infielders have huge variance too

Ben Clemens: but no one cares

Ben Clemens: but I think that the ones who have huuuuuuuge ceilings are less likely to be traded

Guest: Where would you put Ohtani if he were on Soto’s contract?

Ben Clemens: same place haha. I really think the economic thing is just too big

Ben Clemens: and I really do think that it’s completely unlike other players

Ben Clemens: I thikn that my general star accounting, based as it is at least partially on real-world returns in excess of surplus value for good players, probably already takes into account attendance bumps, marginal marketing bumps, etc.

Ben Clemens: I just think Ohtani is operating on a different scale

Ben Clemens: let me put it this way. I did trackers based on a Monte Carlo simulation for the likeliest days for Judge to hit his 62nd and for Pujols to hit his 700th

Ben Clemens: popular articles, fun tools

Ben Clemens: I did one for when Ohtani might hit 50/50, and a Japenese TV station put two people on a plane, flew them to SF, did an hour and a half interview with me in my apartment, and put it on the air

Ben Clemens: we’re talking about a huge group of baseball fans, very united in their fandom of the best player in baseball, and as a whole a super rich country

Michael Jones: Maybe I’m the weird one, but I feel like Acuna is the only player in the league who is on the right side of 30, has put up an MVP season, and is on a deal that literally every single team could afford.  If he were put on the market there would be no one who would be automatically excluded because of his contract.  He’s come off the second ACL tear hitting at essentially his MVP level.

Ben Clemens: yeah, I could see it

Ben Clemens: I think that if he were around for five years still, I could maybe talk myself into it?

Ben Clemens: I will say, ‘no one would be excluded’ just doesn’t convince me that much

Ben Clemens: like, great, fine, the marlins aren’t excluded

Ben Clemens: they’re not winning anyway

Ben Clemens: get out of here

Ben Clemens: as long as the teams who are perpetually competing for WS titles are all involved, meh

Ben Clemens: like, as I said, Soto’s deal? I don’t see it

Ben Clemens: that would truly exclude too much of the league. But Bobby Witt’s deal? Garrett Crochet’s deal? The teams who are actually movers and shakers have that kind of salary flexibility and WANT to be paying elite players this kind of money

Ben Clemens: it’s different for, say, the surplus value all stars of the world. yes, if there’s a guy who is going to deliver you 2 WAR in each of the next 4 years and not cost much, you really do want every bid

Ben Clemens: I think it matters a little less when the thing you’re trading is a very scarce resource, though

Ben Clemens: could be wrong

Ben Clemens: totally unknowable

Ben Clemens: until we see a lot more trades of extremely top guys, which sadly we probably never will

Ben Clemens: alright, this has been two hours of chatting, and you guys have had so many great questions that I am pretty drained from the brain power to answer all of them

Ben Clemens: so I’m gonna go, and direct you to Eric Longenhagen’s wonderful prospect chat where you can hear from someone who’s higher than me on Roman Anthony

Ben Clemens: more questions? get at me on Monday

Ben Clemens: have a wonderful weekend and, again, thank you so much for chatting.