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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.

Hit 53 homers as a rookie and you are going to move up the trade value rankings. There is some risk of an early decline with Pete Alonso’s old-man skillset. His strikeouts are already high, he’s not good in the field or on the bases, and if his power dips, his value will drop precipitously. That’s the bad. The good is that Alonso’s five-win rookie season wasn’t marked by a ton of batted ball luck. He earned those 53 homers, and his 143 wRC+ matched up with his Statcast figures.

The projections like Alonso as well. The table above shows Alonso’s five-year ZiPS for easy comparison with the rest of the players on this list, but his four-year ZiPS projection of 16.6 WAR ranks 19th among the players on this list. It’s hard to move Alonso much higher than this given the potential for decline, but the team control, the minimum salary through next season, and the power he’s already shown makes it difficult to slide him down past this slot. He will have higher arbitration salaries than most given his home run totals, but $40 million or so in salary for the next four years still provides excellent value. 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 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 »

Let’s do something completely different and have some fun! Over the course of the past year, I created an arcade game that can be played on a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) from 1985! The game might looks familiar, but it’s been adapted for baseball.

This is an actual NES game; it is a .nes ROM file that you can play on original hardware. I found a JavaScript emulator, so you can more easily play it online. You can download the ROM here and use it in your emulator, flash cart, or your retro gaming setup of choice.

Below you can click on the photo, which will take you to the online emulator. It works best on desktops running Chrome, Firefox, or the new Edge. Safari is playable but it gives a soft picture without sound. Gameplay suffers on mobile, especially smaller devices. It’s best to use your keyboard to control everything, but there is a virtual controller available, too.

(Click to open FanGraphs Arcade)

Game Play

I don’t want to give too much away about the game, because half of the fun of an arcade game is trying things out, failing, then trying again until you succeed, though I will answer questions in the comments or on Twitter if anyone has any. 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 »

Jim Gentile had 21 multiple-home-run games, the most historic one coming in 1961 when he hit grand slams in back-to-back innings. More obscure, but no less interesting, was a two-homer effort at Fenway Park three years later. Playing for the Kansas City A’s, the man known as ‘Diamond Jim’ triggered a skirmish in the Red Sox dugout with his dingers.

“A dear friend of mine, Dick Stuart, was playing first base for Boston,” the now-86-year-old Gentile told me recently. “They finished batting practice, and as I was walking up to the cage, he yelled at me, ‘Diamond, how ya hitting ‘em?’ Then he threw me his bat, and said I should try it. On my first swing, I hit the ball into the bullpen. I got out of the cage and went to throw it back to him, and he said, ‘No, keep it.’

Bill Monbouquette was on the mound for the Boston that day. A solidly-built right-hander, ‘Monbo’ not only had a no-hitter and a 20-win season on his resume, he was a self-described red-ass (a segment in this 2015 Sunday Notes column serves as evidence). If Gentile didn’t already know that, he would soon find out… albeit from a safe distance.

“Come game time, I’ve got my bat in my hands,” recalled Gentile. “I’ve also got Stuart’s bat in my hands. I figured, ‘Heck, I’m going to use his.’ I probably shouldn’t have. There’s kind of an unwritten rule that if someone gives you something like that, you wait until you get out of town. But I walked up there with his bat, and hit the ball in the bullpen. A couple innings later, I hit another one in the bullpen.”

As Gentile was rounding the bases, Red Sox catcher Bob Tillman picked up the bat and saw Stuart’s name on it. Moreover, he told Monboquette. Read the rest of this entry »

After more than two weeks on the sidelines due to the majors’ second large-scale coronavirus outbreak (the Marlins were first), and more than a week of quarantining and daily testing, the Cardinals are finally slated to return to play on Saturday. The plan is for them to drive to Chicago on Friday to play a pair of series against the White Sox and Cubs, during which they’ll begin making up for lost time by playing three doubleheaders in five days. Even so, the math has become daunting as far as fitting the 55 games they have remaining into the 44 days from Saturday until the end of the season.

While the other four teams in the NL Central are between 16 and 19 games into their schedules, the Cardinals have played just five. They began the shortened season by beating the Pirates twice at home, losing to them once, and then losing two to the Twins in Minnesota. Before the start of their three-game series in Milwaukee on the weekend of July 31, two players tested positive, leading to the series’ postponement. Further positive tests have brought the total number of positives to 18 – 10 players and eight staffers, including a coach whose positive result was reported on Thursday — and they’ve had additional postponements of series against the Tigers, Cubs and Pirates, as well as the marquee “Field of Dreams” game against the White Sox in Dyersville, Iowa.

While initial, widely-circulated rumors of the outbreak’s origin centered around players visiting a casino, the team has refuted that allegation, and MLB concurs with that conclusion according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Derrick Goold. Goold reported that the Potawatomi Hotel & Casino in Milwaukee went so far as to check the reservation and membership records it is keeping as part of their heath and safety protocols since reopening and found no record of any Cardinals player visiting. Attempts by the paper to trace any root of the casino report to Minneapolis or St. Louis have proved unsuccessful as well. The casino-based rumor may stem from a July 12 visit to an outdoor drive-in concert venue called the Hollywood Casino Amphitheater by Cardinals players, who were photographed wearing masks and socially distancing. Via Goold, manager Mike Shildt said that the Cardinals have “traced the genesis of the outbreak back to an outside individual who was asymptomatic when he had contact with a member of the club,” bringing the infection into the clubhouse.

According to MLB.com’s Anne Rogers, president of baseball operations John Mozeliak told reporters via Zoom on Thursday that the 18th positive test is a coach whose positive test “comes after several days of inconclusive results. He is asymptomatic and has been in isolation for the past week.” Read the rest of this entry »

Dylan Bundy’s first four starts last season were emblematic of a few different things. They told the story of the 2019 Orioles, a team that would set records for pitching futility. They told the story of last year’s juiced ball, which helped facilitate the highest league-wide home run rate in history. And they told the story, once again, of how far Bundy’s star had fallen. Once considered a generational pitching prospect, a Tommy John surgery combined with other injuries wedged three whole years between Bundy’s first season of big league action and his second. As time passed, dreams of him becoming a bona fide ace faded, as he instead turned into something closer to an average back-end starter — from 2017-18, his first two years as a full-time starter, he had an ERA- of 110 and a FIP- of 106, below-average marks that could usually be blamed on problems with the long ball. Through four starts in 2019, those issues persisted; he threw just 17.1 innings and allowed 15 runs on 18 hits, with a whopping seven homers allowed to go with nine walks and 22 strikeouts.

It is that backdrop that has made Bundy’s first four starts of this season almost entirely unrecognizable. He’s thrown 28.2 innings and allowed just five runs on 15 hits, three walks, and two homers. He has struck out 35 hitters. Pick a pitching category right now, and Bundy, 27, is probably either leading it or trailing only a handful of guys.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve begun publishing MLB’s Statcast data on FanGraphs!

At the moment, you can view Average Exit Velocity, Maximum Exit Velocity, Launch Angle, Barrels, Barrel%, HardHit balls, and HardHit%. For specific details about these measurements and metrics, please consult MLB’s Statcast Glossary. In addition to the stats listed above, we’re also reporting Events, which are calculated batted balls determined by PA – SO – BB – HBP for batters and TBF – SO – BB – HBP for pitchers. Statcast data is available from the 2015 season onward.

These metrics are currently available on our player pages and leaderboards, and in our game logs. In addition, Average Exit Velocity will display as a column on the players’ dashboard for both batters and pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »