On the Block: The 2014 Trade Chips

One of my favorite tools here at FanGraphs is our Custom Leaderboard section, as it allows anyone to create a page to keep track of the performance of any player or group of players, whether it’s just guys on your fantasy team, upcoming free agents, or some random collection of players that you happen to care about. It’s a super helpful resource, and I have a handful of saved reports that I reference all the time.

And for the next six weeks or so, I’ll be adding another one to the list, because now that we’re just a few days away from the start of July, MLB’s trade season is upon us, and I wanted an easy way to keep track of who might be available at each position. So, I made a 2014 Trade Chip custom leaderboard. That links goes directly to the list of position players, but you can just click pitching up at the top to see the available arms as well. And the positional tabs up top will let you view players at various spots around the field.

This list is, of course, speculative, since it isn’t a matter of public record who is and who is not available for trade. To create the pool of potentially available players, I went to our Playoff Odds page included players from 10 of the 11 teams with less than a 4% chance of reaching the postseason; I didn’t include players from the Twins as of yet, as they are hanging around .500 and are unlikely to blow up their roster just yet. As teams move out of the playoff picture, we’ll go ahead and add their trade chips to the list. For instance, the Red Sox probably aren’t active sellers right now, but if their slide continues, they might be in a few weeks, and players like Jake Peavy will get added when it becomes clear what their intentions are.

But keep in mind that this list is is just my list. You can go to that link and add or remove any players you’d like, and then just save it as your own Custom Report for the future. You’re not limited to my selections; this can be the base from which you build your own list if you prefer to make different assumptions, or want to compare players who aren’t listed here. This isn’t the definitive list; it’s just one person’s guesses as to who might be available.

We’ll list the players by position below, but again, if you want to view updated numbers on a regular basis, simply use this link. And then just save it as your own custom report and you won’t even have to come back and find this page again.

For those who prefer a snapshot, though, here are the numbers of each player on the list, by position; note that players who have played 25% of their games at multiple positions will appear in each category.

And now for the pitchers. For this breakdown, only innings thrown as a starter or a reliever are included in their respective total, so a pitcher’s overall line won’t match either if he’s split time between SP and RP.

From the custom leaderboard, you can expand the view to look at more than just 2014 performance, or evaluate them based on split-type, or any other number of fun ways to view the available players. Have fun!