Over the last few days, we’ve started off the Trade Value series with the introduction, the honorable mentions, and the first 10 names of the series. I strongly encourage you to read all of the linked articles for an explanation of the question we’re trying to answer, and some context for who we’ve already discussed.

As we move to the second group, you’ll note that this tier is heavy on prospects and guys without a substantial big-league track record. These guys are always controversial, as some people value history over potential, but there’s no question teams are becoming more and more protective of their top young minor leaguers, especially the ones who can come up and make an impact on the big-league team. That is mostly what sets this group of prospects apart from the ones who didn’t quite make the cut: these guys have present value, and could mostly play in the big leagues today. The ability to impact a team in the second half of the year, as well as turn into a franchise cornerstone with more development, is what makes them so valuable to major-league clubs.

Also, thanks to Sean Dolinar, we’ve significantly upgraded the way we’re presenting the information here. On the individual player tables, the Guaranteed Dollars and Team Control WAR — which are provided by Dan Szymborski’s ZIPS projections — rows give you an idea of what kind of production and costs a team could expect going forward, though to be clear, we’re not counting the rest of 2016 in those numbers; they’re just included for reference of what a player’s future status looks like. And as a reminder, we’re not ranking players based on those projections, as teams aren’t going to just make trades based on the ZIPS forecasts. That said, they’re a useful tool to provide some context about what a player might do for the next few years.

On to the second part of the series.

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Alright, now that we’ve gotten the introduction and the honorable mentions out of the way, let’s get to the actual list. I strongly encourage you to read both of the linked articles for an explanation of the question we’re trying to answer and a bunch of names who could easily have ended up in this post, but despite a crowded field, these 10 guys were able to nail down spots in the Trade Value series.

It’s a risk-filled group, with some serious upside and downside throughout, but these guys are all young enough to turn into franchise players, and most of them could help a team win right now as well.

Also, thanks to Sean Dolinar, we’ve significantly upgraded the way we’re presenting the information here. On the individual player tables, the Guaranteed Dollars and Team Control WAR — which are provided by Dan Szymborski’s ZIPS projections — rows give you an idea of what kind of production and costs a team could expect going forward, though to be clear, we’re not counting the rest of 2016 in those numbers; they’re just included for reference of what a player’s future status looks like. And as a reminder, we’re not ranking players based on those projections, as teams aren’t going to just make trades based on the ZIPS forecasts. That said, they’re a useful tool to provide some context about what a player might do for the next few years.

And with those logistics out of the way, let’s get to the list itself.

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Yesterday, we kicked off Trade Value Week with the introduction, which you should go read if you haven’t already. Along with a brief description of the concept and what we’re trying to accomplish — besides just having some fun during the All-Star break anyway — we also talked about the 20 players who failed to return from last year’s rankings.

Today, we’re going to kick off the list in earnest, with the 10 players who fill spots #41 to #50 coming in a few hours. But before we get to the guys who just made the cut, I want to dedicate some time talking about the guys who just missed, because in all honesty, there’s something like 75 to 100 guys in baseball that have a pretty strong case for a spot in the Top 50. With players this good, we really are splitting hairs, and which good player you prefer will depend heavily on your own preferences.

I know rankings always bring out division, and I am aware of the fact that there will be some people upset with the idea that Player X ranks #46 while Player Y didn’t make the Top 50, but I do want to emphasize that we’re dealing with very small margins here, and there are no objectively correct answers to the questions this exercise poses. I showed this list to a bunch of friends in the game, and their feedback was even more diverse than I expected.

Some thought there were too many pitchers; others thought there weren’t enough arms. It’s an impossible task to create a list that everyone will agree upon, and I expect many of you will make passionate cases for players who didn’t quite make the cut, but know that I probably won’t disagree with you much; there are a lot of very good players who teams would love to have, and the gaps between guys at the end of the list are quite small indeed.

So, below, we present the Honorable Mentions, the guys who just barely missed out on ending up on the list, and easily could fit on your personal Top 50. For the record, I’m not going to re-list the guys we covered that fell off last year’s list, since we already discussed them, but many of them were still close to making the list this year as well, so you can see that post and this one as a tandem of guys who were in the mix for one of the final few spots but just didn’t quite make it.

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For most of baseball, it’s All-Star Week, a time where we celebrate the best players in the game by letting them strike out against guys throwing 100 mph for 20 pitches at a time. At FanGraphs, though, All-Star Week means something else; it’s time for the annual Trade Value series.

While it’s almost always an academic pursuit, given that most of these guys are practically unavailable in trade, it’s still fun to work through the various pros and cons of the game’s most valuable players. We’re kicking off the series with the introduction post today, which includes a look back at guys who aren’t carrying over from last year’s list, and will have the honorable mentions and the last 10 guys in tomorrow. We’ll do 10 spots per day, culminating with the top 10 on Friday.

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The Josh Donaldson story is pretty amazing. The 48th pick in the 2007 draft, he was then traded a year later as one of four players going to Oakland for Rich Harden, as the Cubs were partially convinced to let him go due to his poor .217/.276/.349 line in A-ball that year. You generally don’t like it when college draftees put up a 78 wRC+ at any level, much less one they should be dominating. The A’s took a bet on a guy with contact skills and some power, though, and saw him hit much better upon promotion to the Cal League, but the league environment is pretty friendly there, and his slow start in Chicago raised questions about how good his bat would eventually become.

As a bat-first catcher, that’s a problem, so Baseball America ranked him as the A’s 13th best prospect following the 2008 season. That general ranking stuck for the next few years — he ranked as the A’s #14 prospect after 2009, #12 prospect after 2010, and #20 prospect after 2011 — as he kept performing like a good-not-great hitter, and one who mostly caught but also got some time at the corner infield positions, signaling that his future probably wasn’t behind the plate.

The A’s officially converted him to third base full time in 2012, as projected starter Scott Sizemore tore his ACL in spring training, and the A’s needed a replacement. But he flopped in that audition, hitting .153/.160/.235 in 100 plate appearances before getting shipped back to the minor leagues, losing his job to Brandon Inge, who signed with the team as a free agent in April after being released by the Tigers. At that point, Donaldson was a 26 year old with a big league wRC+ of 8. Yes, 8. Given his pedestrian minor league numbers, it was easy to look at Donaldson just like every other guy tweener, with a bat good enough to hang around the highest level of the minor leagues, but without enough value to stick as a big leaguer.

A couple of months later, though, Inge headed to the disabled list, and Donaldson was summoned back to replace him. And since August 14th of 2012, Donaldson has hit .287/.372/.519, good for a 146 wRC+, while turning himself into one of the very best players in baseball. And he just keeps getting better.

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A couple of months ago, we announced that we’d partnered with the Pitch Talks crew, and were going to be doing a series of events with them around the country this summer. Well, the first show of the summer is this Thursday, at The Wilbur in Boston, and the show is going to be great. Here’s the schedule for the show, in case you don’t believe me.

Paul Swydan and I will be representing the FanGraphs crew, hanging out with friends of the site Jonah Keri and Alex Speier, talking Red Sox and baseball from a nerdy perspective. A one-hour conversation with the Red Sox GM will follow — which is sure to be an interesting chat, given the Red Sox current position in the standings — and then the night will close out with a roundtable of some of the most notable beat writers in the area, plus a live recording of Jonah Keri’s podcast with Bill Lee, and then we’ll all hang out afterwards and have a good time.

Now, on its own, this is easily worth the $32 price of admission. But because we wanted to encourage those in the Boston area who overload on baseball conversations over the next month, we actually have a special offer for you to make this an absolute no-brainer.

If you attend the Pitch Talks show on Thursday night, you’ll be given access to a 24-hour promo code that will get you $32 offer the admission price to Saber Seminar, which is the best baseball conference of the year, and will be held on August 13th/14th on the campus of Boston University. A two-day collection of amazing speakers, presentations, research, and discussion, Saber Seminar is an absolute must-attend for anyone in the northeast interested in the game.

And, best of all, all of the money raised through ticket sales for the conference goes directly to cancer research and support; The Jimmy Fund and The Angioma Alliance will receive 100% of the proceeds raised through this great event. So you get to attend the best baseball conference of the year, and you get to support two great charities at the same time. It’s the biggest win-win in baseball.

But now, because of the support of the Pitch Talks crew, you now get to go to two great events for the price of one. Buy the $32 ticket to Pitch Talks on Thursday, then use the promo code to get a $32 discount on your ticket for Saber Seminar on Friday, and you’ll end up paying $140 for both Pitch Talks and Saber Seminar, while supporting two great charities at the same time.

If you’re going to be in the Boston area over the next five weeks, I highly encourage you to come to both events. Pitch Talks is going to be a lot of fun tomorrow night, and there is no better place to learn about baseball than Saber Seminar in August. I’ll be at both events, and would love to say hi to as many FanGraphs readers as possible.

So come hang out with me and a bunch of other great folks this Thursday at The Wilbur, and then come spend the weekend with even more awesome people at BU in August, all for just $140. Look forward to meeting plenty of you tomorrow night, and then catching up again next month, as we bond over baseball and our support of cancer research.

Buy your Tickets to Pitch Talks now, and we’ll see you on Thursday night!

After a promising start to the season, the Red Sox pitching staff is starting to again resemble the disaster that sank the 2015 season. Over the last two weeks, the starting rotation has put up a 6.89 ERA, as David Price‘s disappointing debut season in Boston has continued, Steven Wright’s knuckleball-magic has started to show signs of wearing off, and Clay Buchholz and Eduardo Rodriguez just took turns throwing batting practice. The Red Sox continue to hit well enough to stay in contention, but with the pitching staff imploding once again, even the team’s manager is admitting that it’s “obvious” that the pitching needs upgrading. Despite a thin supply of available arms, it seems pretty clear that Dave Dombrowski is going to be among the most active executives in scouring the market for a starting pitcher over the next month.

But as the team looks to load up for a playoff push, there’s a case to be made that the Red Sox biggest move this summer should be to add another bat to the line-up instead.

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Yesterday, I revealed how I would put together the AL All-Star team, if I was given full authority to pick all 34 players. Today, let’s tackle the NL, and for efficiency reasons, I’ll just copy and paste the intro I wrote yesterday. If you already read that piece, you can just skip right on down to the picks themselves.

The All-Star Game is just a couple of weeks away, so it’s time for the annual tradition of deciding which really good players get acknowledged and which really good players get left out. The fact that there’s no shortage of ways to define who should make the All-Star team doesn’t help; is it about just gathering as many big name players as possible every summer, about rewarding the players who have performed the best so far this year, or some combination of the two?

I tend to lean towards rewarding in-season performance, while using career track record as secondary variable to help make the decision when picking between multiple worthy players. Yes, some guys are going to have great half-seasons and end up on the team despite not truly being long-term stars, but I prefer that over jogging out the same 34 names every summer just because they’re the guys we’re used to recognizing as stars, regardless of what they’ve actually done that season. To me, the All-Star Game is a reward for the players who are playing at a high level, and what you’ve done this season is the most important variable in selecting the rosters.

For my selections, I’m adhering to the MLB rules, so we’re picking 22 position players and 12 pitchers, and every team has to have a representative. Yes, even the Twins. Because some positions are performing much better than others — I’m looking at you, sorry sack of 2016 AL catchers — I did take some liberties with how many players get carried as reserves at each spot, but overall, I tried to pick a team that would satisfy the requirements of how the game is managed and still rewards 34 guys who deserve to make the trip to San Diego this summer. And injured players aren’t eligible for my picks, as I’m just going with players who are healthy enough to play in the game in a couple of weeks.

On to the roster!

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The All-Star Game is just a couple of weeks away, so it’s time for the annual tradition of deciding which really good players get acknowledged and which really good players get left out. The fact that there’s no shortage of ways to define who should make the All-Star team doesn’t help; is it about just gathering as many big namem players as possible every summer, about rewarding the players who have performed the best so far this year, or some combination of the two?

I tend to lean towards rewarding in-season performance, while using career track record as secondary variable to help make the decision when picking between multiple worthy players. Yes, some guys are going to have great half-seasons and end up on the team despite not truly being long-term stars, but I prefer that over jogging out the same 34 names every summer just because they’re the guys we’re used to recognizing as stars, regardless of what they’ve actually done that season. To me, the All-Star Game is a reward for the players who are playing at a high level, and what you’ve done this season is the most important variable in selecting the rosters.

For my selections, I’m adhering to the MLB rules, so we’re picking 22 position players and 12 pitchers, and every team has to have a representative. Yes, even the Twins. Because some positions are performing much better than others — I’m looking at you, sorry sack of 2016 AL catchers — I did take some liberties with how many players get carried as reserves at each spot, but overall, I tried to pick a team that would satisfy the requirements of how the game is managed and still rewards 34 guys who deserve to make the trip to San Diego this summer. And injured players aren’t eligible for my picks, as I’m just going with players who are healthy enough to play in the game in a couple of weeks.

On to the roster!

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