Honorable Mentions
#50 to #46
#45 to #41
#40 to #36
#35 to #31
As we approach the middle of the list, we end up with a group of young players who are mostly more about future value than present production. These are some of the very best players in the game, and this is about as high as a player can rank without establishing himself as a big leaguer.
| 11:50 |
: It’s Trade Value week — and also, I guess there was an All-Star Game last night — so I’d imagine we’ll have a lot of questions about the list so far, and what’s still to come over the next few days. We’re also getting closer to the trade deadline, so we can deal with who is likely going where by the end of July as well.
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| 12:02 |
: Chat is starting shortly. Trying to figure out what to do with the puppy. Right now, she’s having fun with the world’s largest zucchini, but I’m pretty sure that won’t last long.
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| 12:05 |
Should the Rockies buy, sell, or hold? |
| 12:05 |
: I’d say hold. With Tulo back, a run at the division isn’t totally out of the realm of possibility, but they’re not quite at a spot where they should go for broke either.
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| 12:05 |
Is there a better defender in the league at any position than Machado? |
| 12:06 |
: Yeah, probably a lot of them. He’s good enough to play short, but he’s not Andrelton Simmons or Jose Iglesias or Didi Gregorius.
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Honorable Mentions
#50 to #46
#45 to #41
#40 to #36
As we get towards the middle of the pack, we start to find players who have been among baseball’s best performers in 2013. While the last section was littered with potential, this section is more about realized potential, at least in 2013. These guys are highly talented players having terrific seasons, and as usual, their contract status is also adding value.
Honorable Mentions
#50 to #46
#45 to #41
We move away from high salary, high risk players into a group of players on the opposite end of the spectrum. While the players below might not be seen as superstars yet, they all possess significant potential and have some very appealing contracts.
When Major League Baseball announced the 143 — or however many they ended up taking — players that had been picked to play in this summer’s All-Star Game last week, I noticed a few names that were missing. Not names that necessarily deserved to be there based on how they had performed so far this year, but names that you’d have expected to be easy picks before the season started. There are some pretty terrific players who weren’t selected to be part of this summer’s festivities.
The collection of names got me wondering whether it would be possible to build a roster of guys who didn’t get an invite to the All-Star Game that could compete with the AL and NL squads head to head. In other words, if I assembled a line-up from the leftovers after MLB was done selecting its All-Stars, could I field a team that was just as good?
So, I shot Dan Szymborski a note and asked if I assembled a line-up of players, would he use his rest-of-season ZIPS projections to simulate match-ups between my squad of outsiders and both All-Star squads. He said he would, so now I just had to figure out if there were enough pieces left to build a roster that could compete after MLB skimmed off the top.
We continue on with the 2013 Trade Value list, starting out with a pretty safe bet for short term value, then moving on to four high risk/high reward players who could either be franchise building blocks or reminders of the unpredictability of developing talent. At this part of the list, there are trade-offs to be made, and each of these players comes with some flaws, but enough value to demand a serious haul in order to even make their current teams consider parting ways with this kind of talent.
Read the rest of this entry »
We begin with the last five spots on the list. These guys are all excellent players, but they come with some concerns either about their contract, health, or future performance. Teams would love to have any of them, but there are reasons to think that some would hesitate or back away entirely even if these players were made available. They would have significant appeal to a few clubs, but not the broad appeal to start off a league wide bidding war. On to the list. Read the rest of this entry »
| 12:03 |
: Couple minutes late – was having issue with Cover it Live!
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| 12:03 |
: Kept hanging on the login.
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| 12:04 |
At least you showed up, we’re still waiting for Ike to do the same this year… |
| 12:04 |
: I’d feel better about having easily the closest projection to Ike’s line if it hadn’t still overrated him by about 250 points of OPS
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| 12:04 |
I’m in a 12-team dynasty league. Each team has six minor league spots. I’m toast for the year. My biggest trade chip is a one-year contract with Jose Bautista that I don’t see myself resigning long term and I want young, controllable talent. I’ve got a contender interested in him and he said anyone is on the table except Jose Fernandez, so that includes Jordan Zimmerman, Matt Moore, Patrick Corbinm Arenado, Jorge Soler, and Jackie Bradley. What do you think would be a reasonable asking price for Bautista using those guys? Sorry for the fantasy question. |
| 12:05 |
: I’d probably *try* to get Zimmerman + one of the prospects, but I might have to settle for less.
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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been preparing the 2013 version of my annual Trade Value list, a project I’ve been doing since 2005 after borrowing the idea from Bill Simmons. I moved the trade value list to FanGraphs in 2008, and it’s been an annual series here ever since. If you missed our retrospective on last year’s list, you can review the entire list, and the lessons we might be able to learn from those names, in this post from Friday.
Coming in a few hours, we’ll introduce the first five players — well, I guess, technically the last five, since we’re working in reverse order — and we’ll do ten players per day all week, culminating in the top five on Friday afternoon. However, before we get into the guys who made the list, I figured it would be worthwhile to do a post on the guys who just missed the cut. This was a tough list to crack, and there were a lot of high quality players who just ended up on the outside of the bubble for one reason or another.
Rather than turning all future posts into a discussion of guys who haven’t yet appeared, this post will hopefully answer some questions as to why a player won’t appear on in the rest of the series. And it isn’t because I hate your favorite team. I promise. In fact, a lot of the guys who just missed the cut are personal favorites of mine, and most of them made some previous iteration of the list before I finalized the order. But, with only 50 spots, someone had to just miss the cut. Here are the guys who didn’t quite make it.
Before yesterday’s game, Dusty Baker talked about his line-up choices, specifically his decision to stick with Zack Cozart in the #2 spot in the order despite his .261 on base percentage. From John Fay’s article: