While a shortened season might make this year’s version of our Trade Value Series an unusual one, with the deadline looming, we are not about to break with tradition. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at those 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 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 2021-2025, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money, if any, the year through which the team has contractual control of the player, last year’s rank, and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2025, if the player is under contract or team control for those seasons. Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2019 post. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for creating the tables in these posts. At the bottom of the page, there will be an updated grid showing all the players who have been ranked up to this point.

With that out of the way, let’s continue with the rankings.

After 2020, Blake Snell is owed $39 million over the next three season before he heads to free agency. That might be a little bit more than what Luis Castillo and Lucas Giolito will earn in arbitration, but not significantly so. The 2018 Cy Young award winner had an unusual 2019 that has dimmed his trade value some. He got off to a great start, then dropped a piece of granite on his toe in April and struggled slightly after returning from the injured list, though his 3.56 FIP was still solid. He had loose bodies removed from his elbow in July and pitched in six games in September and October, totaling 10.1 quality innings. On the year, Snell’s FIP was a very good 3.32; given his .343 BABIP, his 4.29 ERA seems to be mostly the result of bad luck. Snell has slowly ramped up his innings as 2020 has gotten underway, and he’s pitched very well so far. While the elbow issues are concerning, his pitching the last few years has been very good and he’s off to a promising start. That keeps his value just ahead of similarly controlled pitchers like Giolito and Castillo, but it is a close call. Read the rest of this entry »

While a shortened season might make this year’s version of our Trade Value Series an unusual one, with the deadline looming, we are not about to break with tradition. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at those 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, along with the other installments in the Series.

For those 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 2021-2025, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money, if any, the year through which the team has contractual control of the player, last year’s rank, and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2025, if the player is under contract or team control for those seasons. Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2019 post. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for creating the tables in these posts. At the bottom of the page, there will be an updated grid showing all the players who have been ranked up to this point.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the next 10 spots on this year’s list.

After ranking 39th on this list last year, Jeff McNeil finished the 2019 season with the same hot bat he started it with on the way to a 4.6 WAR campaign. Given roughly a season and a half of big league plate appearances, McNeil has a stellar 139 wRC+, and his 7.3 wins pro-rate to roughly five wins per 600 plate appearances. Those results might urge for moving him up rather than down, but there likely wouldn’t be significant interest in McNeil’s skillset if he were offered in trade. He isn’t great anywhere defensively, though he is versatile and has experience at second base, third base, and both corner outfield spots. He has average to slightly above average power, but he does make a ton of mostly-medium hard contact. He also needs those hits to continue to fall, and might be more vulnerable to increased shifting. A player with that power profile who relies on solid contact to get on base and who is without a true position probably won’t inspire teams to trade away a bunch of their prospects to acquire him, but McNeil gets results.

Maybe he is undervalued by the industry as a whole. He’s making the minimum through next year, likely won’t earn big salaries in arbitration, and won’t be a free agent until after the 2024 season. Those arbitration years all come in McNeil’s 30s, limiting his upside. McNeil hits and plays multiple positions well enough to make him a desirable player, but continued questions about his future production have driven his trade value below some less-accomplished players.

Coming off a solid, 2.7 WAR 2018, the Twins and Max Kepler agreed to a contract extension that guarantees the outfielder $35 million for five years, with a $10 million team option on the 2024 season, just $9 million more than the $1 million buyout for that year would be. In 2019, Kepler had the breakout season many had been expecting for years, nearly doubling his home run total from 20 in 2018 to 36 in 2019. The increase in power saw his wRC+ go from average to 121, and his WAR totaled 4.4 on the year. Kepler is a good outfield defender. He draws walks and doesn’t strike out much. Even if his 2024 option is exercised, he will earn just under $32 million over the next four seasons.

Kepler had some support to be even higher on this list. The concerns that held him back were mostly age-related given his type of production. At 27 years old, it’s possible that his defense has already peaked, and since his fly ball swing produces a lot of outs, his low batting average will suppress some of the value of his good walk rate. His breakout produced a good batting line, but not a great one. The last year of his contract and the option season both occur in Kepler’s 30s. He’s a good player and a very good value, which is why he’s on this list, but Kepler’s skills are more solid than spectacular and the pandemic might have wiped out most of what would have been his best season. Read the rest of this entry »

While a shortened season might make this year’s version of our Trade Value Series an unusual one, with the deadline looming, we are not about to break with tradition. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at those 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 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 2021-2025, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money, if any, the year through which the team has contractual control of the player, last year’s rank, and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2025, if the player is under contract or team control for those seasons. Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2019 post. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for creating the tables in these posts. At the bottom of the page, there will be an updated grid showing all the players who have been ranked up to this point.

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

There isn’t a consensus around Dustin May, either on prospect lists or in baseball front offices. His high-end fastball has a ton of movement and sits in the upper-90s, but its sinking action is likely to prevent it from being a huge swing-and-miss pitch. Nobody is down on May, per se, but his prospect rankings ranged from the top 10 on some lists to the mid 20s on others, with our lead prospect analyst, Eric Longenhagen, slotting him 14th. He’s already seen some success in the majors, with his FIP and ERA in the low-threes in over 54.1 innings.

He’s made eight starts and while his strikeout rate was just 20% in those outings, he has limited walks and homers and put up a 3.18 FIP. He’s going to need to miss more bats to take the next step in his development, but the tools are there to make it happen. Although the opinions are somewhat wide-ranging when it comes to just how good he will be, enough teams see his future being bright to make this list. The Dodgers couldn’t get equivalent value from every team for May, but if he were available, they could extract a considerable return. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year for more than a decade, FanGraphs has released a Trade Value Series, ranking the top 50 players in baseball by their trade value. In that respect, this year is no different. For a lot of other reasons, though, this year’s exercise is very, very different. The COVID-19 pandemic still rages on in this country, preventing a normal start to the season; recent outbreaks on the Marlins and Cardinals — and a continued rise in the country’s case rate — have called the completion of even the scheduled 60-game season into question. While teams might soon have access to some data and video from the alternate training sites, per reports from Kiley McDaniel, there’s no minor league season to evaluate prospects, and any team making trades does so with considerable uncertainty surrounding not only this season, but also an offseason that could potentially see meaningful payroll cuts from teams that lost revenue during a shortened 2020 campaign staged without fans. Add in the murkiness of 2021 — we don’t yet have a vaccine, after all — and the end of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement after next season, and there are far more variables to contend with when gauging trade value than there usually are. One other difference is that with Kiley McDaniel no longer at FanGraphs and Dave Cameron still with the Padres, I have taken over the task of creating this list.

Generally speaking, the players who appear on this list don’t get traded at the deadline. In fact, they usually don’t even get traded within a year of appearing on this list. The players featured here are good and often on good rosters. Add in an under-market contract and there is very little incentive for teams to move these guys. And what is typically true for players on this list will likely be even more so this year as teams will be less inclined to trade away proven players who are good values for guys with less certain futures who they might not have seen in person since this spring or even last summer. While we would normally try to assess a player’s value right now, the complicated nature of this season means keeping an eye toward this winter for expected value in the next few months, too.

In attempting to determine value, my process likely didn’t differ greatly from my predecessors. Combining estimates of present and future talent with years of control and likely salaries helped create a rough estimate of potential surplus value for every player; input from contacts with clubs also helped inform my decisions. Every team has a different risk appetite when it comes to player production, and each is going to have financial considerations, as well as an understanding of their chances of contending now and in the future, that have a considerable impact on the type of player they are interested in acquiring. The Yankees and Dodgers aren’t operating on the same payroll plane as the A’s and Rays, and rebuilding teams like the Orioles and Giants aren’t looking for the same players as the win-now Reds and Brewers. Read the rest of this entry »

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Due to the COVID-19 outbreaks on both the Marlins and Cardinals over the past few weeks, 15 games have been postponed so far this season that have yet to be made up. The postponements principally affect those two clubs due to their positive tests, but also the Phillies, who played against the Marlins as the outbreak happened, and several of those teams’ other scheduled opponents, including the Brewers, Tigers, Blue Jays, Orioles, and Yankees. With the Phillies resuming play on Monday, the Marlins playing on Tuesday, and the Cardinals set to play tonight against the Cubs, the league sent out a revised schedule with plans to make up all of the missed games.

Unfortunately, that new schedule has already hit a snag, as earlier today, Mark Saxon reported (and MLB confirmed) that tonight’s Cardinals game against the Cubs will be postponed due to an additional positive COVID-19 test result. Jesse Rogers added that there was at least one positive new test. It’s possible the Cardinals schedule will require further tinkering, which would likely come in the form of more doubleheaders. With that said, the current new plan looks like this:

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Heading into 2019, opinions differed about how much of Luis Robert’s potential would manifest in games. Those opinions got considerably more uniform after a breakout season that saw Robert tap into his power. One of the top prospects heading into 2020 (he ranked seventh overall on our Top 100), Robert has helped a surging White Sox club filled with young talent get a good jump on the season. His .354/.415/.542 batting line has been good for a 177 wRC+, and he’s checking off every box on his scouting report for better or worse.

While defensive metrics don’t hold a lot of water this early in the year, the scouting reports on Robert are great. Eric Longenhagen has said Robert is a “plus-plus runner, and his instincts in center field are terrific.” Here’s a seemingly easy play Robert made early in the season:

The ball left the bat at more than 100 mph. Unless balls like that are hit right at a fielder, they’re usually a hit. Instead, Robert covered over 50 feet in under three seconds (the GIF above is 2.8 seconds long). Statcast tracks each batted ball’s hang time and the distance a player has to travel to get it. This is what Robert’s profile looks like:

The only balls Robert didn’t catch either hit the wall, or came with a 0% probability of making the play. Robert has been as advertised in the field. The same is true as a baserunner. Robert’s 29.4 feet per second sprint speed is near the top of the league, and he has four steals in five tries, finally getting caught last night. He also has three infield singles. Here’s one of those singles, where a slight hesitation on a routine ground ball allowed Robert to make it to first in under four seconds, essentially a Byron Buxton-level time:

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A year ago, Lance Lynn finished fifth in the American League Cy Young race. While his 6.8 WAR was third in the AL (second at Baseball-Reference), his case didn’t seem to resonate with voters. His strikeout totals weren’t as gaudy as other contenders’ and while his 3.13 FIP pitching in a hitter’s park was very good, his 3.67 ERA looked more good than great. The difference between his FIP and ERA can mostly be attributed to bad luck or poor defense on batted balls, and once his home park is adjusted for, Lynn put up one of the best seasons in the AL. So far this season, Lynn has picked up right where he left off, with a 38% strikeout rate in two scoreless starts.

For some context, here are the top 10 pitchers in baseball by WAR since the start of the 2019 season:

Jacob deGrom is great and Gerrit Cole probably deserved the Cy Young award last year, but just behind those two is Lynn with a healthy lead over Max Scherzer and Shane Bieber, who Ben Clemens profiled yesterday. Lynn’s 2019 season was marked by a change in pitch usage; he reduced the use of his sinker unless there were runners on base. It’s only two starts, but his sinker usage has dropped even further in 2020, much like it did last September:

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