As is tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the lead-up to the trade deadline to take stock of the top 50 players in baseball by trade value. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at the 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 of you 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 2025-2029, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money, if any, the year through which their team has contractual control of them, last year’s rank (if applicable), and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2029 (assuming the player is under contract or team control for those seasons). Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2023 post. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for his technical wizardry. At the bottom of the page, there is a grid showing all of the players who have been ranked up to this point.
One note on the rankings: Particularly at the bottom of the list, there isn’t a lot of room between the players. The ordinal rankings clearly matter, and we put them there for a reason, but there isn’t much of a gap between, say, the 38th-ranked player and the 60th. The magnitude of the differences in this part of the list is quite small. Several of the folks I talked to might prefer a player in the honorable mentions section to one on the back end of the list, or vice versa. I think the broad strokes are correct, and this is my opinion of the best order, but with so many players carrying roughly equivalent value, disagreements abounded. I’ll note places where I disagreed meaningfully with people I spoke with in calibrating this list, and I’ll also note players whose value was the subject of disagreement among my contacts. As I mentioned in the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, I’ll also indicate tier breaks between players where appropriate, both in their capsules and in the table at the end of the piece.
Would you trade me your sandwich for my bag of chips? What if I threw in a pudding cup? Should we swap backpacks? Baseball cards? The desire to work out exchanges – and to do the comparative analysis necessary to decide whether you’d make a trade – is universal. It’s only natural that sports accentuate that feeling: At their core, sports are mostly about deciding which of two things is better.
Welcome to the 2024 edition of our annual Trade Value series. Starting today and continuing all week, we’re releasing our list of the 50 most valuable players in baseball, taking player performance, age, and contract into account. Dave Cameron, Kiley McDaniel, Craig Edwards, and Kevin Goldstein have all headlined this column before; this is my third year doing iton my own.
I say “on my own,” but that only describes the first half of the process. To start, I gathered every possible input I could think of: age, contract status, measures of current production, estimates of future production, Statcast data, pitch-level modeling — the list goes on. I used all of those inputs to come up with an initial quantitatively defined ranking, then honed that ranking by diving into individual player comparisons in greater detail. With that done, I got feedback from the FanGraphs staff (special thanks to Dan Szymborski for his ZiPS assistance and to Meg Rowley for being a frequent sounding board) to refine my thinking further. Read the rest of this entry »
A more-consistent arm slot related to a move back to the third base side of the rubber has contributed to Cole Ragans’s success this season. The raw stuff was obviously already there. As Ben Clemens wrote back in March, the Kansas City Royals left-hander “looks like an absolute terror on the mound.” My colleague went on to say that if he “were designing a pitcher in a laboratory, he’d look a lot like Ragans.”
When I talked to the 2024 American League All-Star on the eve of the break, he told me that going into full attack mode following last year’s oft-reported velocity jump played a huge role in his emergence as a front-line starter. As he put it, “I kind of had to teach myself that I could get away with a little more of a miss compared to when I was throwing 90-91 [mph]. I have a good arsenal in my opinion, so I can just go after hitters.”
And then there’s the work he does in the laboratory.
“I use TrackMan in my bullpens, especially with the slider and the cutter, to kind of see where I’m at,” said Ragans, whose heater is now mid-to-high 90s. “The biggest thing for me is my release points, making sure that my pitches are in a tight cluster. I want everything coming out of the same tunnel. I don’t want to be throwing a fastball from this release height, and my slider from a lower release height.” Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the BBWAA’s new sports gambling regulations, then (11:22) discuss the stories they’re most interested in following for the rest of the MLB season (plus, the implications of a bearded Aaron Judge).
All-Star Week is the traditional midpoint of the baseball season — though not the mathematical one – and with the MLB Draft adding a bunch of new prospects to the minors, it’s a good time to look back at the ZiPS prospect list from this past winter. Some prospects have excelled in the majors and some, well, not so much, but that’s why we call them prospects and not certainties. Interpreting minor league statistics properly has always been a challenge, but it’s more so these days with an unusual divergence in offensive levels between the majors and high minors, especially the Triple-A leagues. An .850 OPS that may have been impressive in the International League a few years ago isn’t that mouth-watering these days, while an ERA around four is unusually promising. ZiPS, naturally, has to translate minor league performance as part of predicting how players will fare in the majors, and now that we have public Statcast data for the minors, there’s even more to dig into in 2024.
For each player in last winter’s ZiPS Top 100, I’m listing quick lines for their translated minor league performance (lower-case m), any major league performance, and lastly, a combination of the two to get one 2024 line (noted with a c).
As I’ve said before, Jackson Holliday might actually be underrated at this point. I got a lot of complaints about the “bearish” .255/.341/.381 projection for him coming into the season, but ZiPS (and I) shared the belief that people were coming too quickly on him. He’s still extremely likely to be a fantastic player, but considering he’s a 20-year-old who blasted through four levels of the minors, it’s not the weirdest thing ever that he’d see a consolidation season. That .336/.332 OBP/SLG isn’t really that far behind his projection, especially considering ZiPS expected the major league offensive environment to be better than it has been this season.
Coby Mayo has had the better season but still wouldn’t come close to passing Holliday if I rerolled the full top prospects right now. James Wood actually has surpassed Holliday, though that will only last until he exceeds the rookie maximum and sheds his prospect status; he was legitimately excellent in the minors this year. The sheen has come off both Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter a little bit, while Jackson Chourio and Masyn Winn have performed about as advertised. As movers go, Adael Amador and Pete Crow-Armstrong look like the two who will take the biggest hit of this group before next year’s rankings (if PCA hasn’t graduated). There hasn’t been as much ink about Emmanuel Rodriguez as I would have expected this year, even before he injured his thumb last month. The Texas League, unlike the Triple-A leagues, is a pretty low offensive environment, with a league OPS of just .705, so his actual 1.100 OPS is pretty impressive.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shota Imanaga have both performed as well as ZiPS expected. While that’s hardly going out on a limb for Yamamoto, whom everyone liked, ZiPS was in on Imanaga very early. Paul Skenes, of course, has been fabulous, even more so than his top-notch translations from April and May. I’d only describe two of the pitchers on this list as unmitigated disappointments so far in 2024, at least from a projections standpoint: Both Ricky Tiedemann and Dylan Lesko will take pretty big hits in the next rankings. Andrew Painter will slide quite a bit as well, but it would be pretty churlish to call a pitcher a disappointment for being injured.
Among this tranche of prospects, Brooks Lee is having arguably the most impressive 2024, and he’s continued to hit since his call-up a couple of weeks ago. Between Lee and the Twins’ taking Kaelen Culpepper with their first-round pick on Sunday, Edouard Julien might get lost in the shuffle quickly in Minnesota; if I were a GM of a team in need of a second baseman, I’d give the Twins call to see if he can rule again on my club. Anyway, I actually expected ZiPS to come around quicker on Dylan Crews, but he’s not really torching minor league pitching as I thought he would. Davis Schneider has long been a ZiPS favorite, but he’s cooled off since a hot run right after he earned more playing time through the process of elimination in Toronto’s struggling lineup.
Jett Williams inevitably will drop considerably after a wrist injury ruined his 2024 season, and Kevin Alcantára was one of the big ZiPS droppers in terms of future WAR. While Samuel Basallo is not matching his breakout 2023 season, he’s still a 19-year-old catcher, so he won’t sag in the rankings too far.
Looking at this group’s long-term projections, it’s almost shocking how little movement there’s been in the long-term projections. Of these 21 pitchers, only three have had their five-year projected WAR move by more than two WAR. The first is Drew Thorpe, who was solid for Birmingham, and his poor K/BB ratios in the majors so far probably aren’t representative of his abilities. The other is a much less heralded prospect, Thomas Harrington of the Pirates, a rather Doug Fister-y prospect (is that a legal adjective), who relies on control and changeups. The high minors can be cruel for this type of pitcher, but he’s survived at least one of the jumps, to Double-A, which improves his long-term outlook. On the flip side, Mick Abel’s command has continued to deteriorate, with both a seven-walk and a six-walk outing in the last month. It would be a shock if he didn’t fall completely off the ZiPS Top 100 for 2025.
It hasn’t shown yet in the majors, but Kyle Manzardo’s minor league performance this year before his call-up wiped out the real “meh” feeling that ZiPS had about his 2023. Post-suspension Noelvi Marte has been pretty lousy, though we have enough data from players after drug suspensions to dismiss any histrionics that he’s struggled because of the lack of performance enhancement. Last year was largely the season that ZiPS came around on Colson Montgomery after being later than practically everyone/everything else, and the result has been a little how I feel after eating a hot dog from a gas station. Joey Ortiz is the big winner in this group, contending for the NL Rookie of the Year award, and Kyle Teel ought to see a bump in next year’s prospect rankings as well. Like Basallo, Ethan Salas’ bat has backslid a bit, but it’s not worth obsessing over how a teenage catching prospect is hitting. Andy Pages hasn’t matched his minor league start this year, but he’s been at least respectable.
Heston Kjerstad just missed the overall ZiPS gainers list, yet given Baltimore’s crowded offense, he’s still had trouble getting a full serving of plate appearances in the majors. If the O’s land Tarik Skubal or Garrett Crochet, Kjerstad has to be one of the names likely to be included, especially for the Tigers considering they are much more motivated to add major league-ready talent than the hopeless Sox. ZiPS was as big fan of Michael Busch, one of those low-ceiling, high-floor hitters without any real positional value, and he’s performed about as well for the Cubs as could have reasonably been expected.
ZiPS was hoping for more power from Matt Shaw, and he’ll probably drop from the top 100 unless his trajectory changes again. But he won’t drop as far as Luisangel Acuña, who has only a 73 wRC+ in Triple-A, though the Mets don’t actually seem disappointed with his performance. Even as offense is up across Triple-A, Angel Martínez was having a dynamite season before he was called up; you shouldn’t dismiss a 147 wRC+ at Triple-A without a pretty compelling reason. He’s also continued to hit in the majors, and I now feel kinda guilty that I didn’t give ZiPS some new RAM to reward it for being so high on him coming into the season.
Have you ever had a friend enthusiastically recommend that you watch a TV show and then say, “It takes a few episodes to get going, and the timeline gets weird at the end, and one or two of the main characters can be kind of annoying, but other than that it’s SO GOOD.” And initially you might be put off, thinking that a truly good show wouldn’t require that many qualifiers. Sometimes you’re right about that, but sometimes it turns out the show is Parks and Recreation and even though the first season is about as appealing as living in a pit, the rest of the show is an absolute treat.
Sometimes small components of a larger body of work do a poor job of representing the work as a whole. The oddities that occur in small samples are likely not a new concept to FanGraphs readers, nor will it shock anyone when I note that what constitutes a small sample depends on what exactly we want to measure. Recently, the fine folks at MLB Advanced Media gifted us with a handful of new metrics that make use of Statcast’s bat tracking technology. Every time we dig into a new metric, we must consider the appropriate serving size to satiate our hunger for knowledge, lest we find ourselves hangrily generating takes that we later regret.
For this article, we’ll attempt to determine appropriate sample thresholds for measuring a hitter’s average bat speed; so that players without bats don’t feel left out, we’ll do the same for sword rate from the pitcher’s perspective. For many metrics, the sample size is measured in pitches or plate appearences, but since both bat speed and sword rate are tied specifically to bat movement, their samples will be composed of swings. To determine reasonable sample sizes, I used the split-half correlation method. The idea is to randomly select two samples of size X from a player’s collection of swings, calculate the player’s average bat speed or sword rate for both samples, lather/rinse/repeat for a bunch of players, then take the full set of two-sample pairs for all players and see how well they correlate. We complete the experiment by repeating the process for progressively larger sample sizes. And just to be super thorough, we’ll re-run the experiment several times and average the correlation values. Read the rest of this entry »
At last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contenders. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.
At the other positions in this series, I have used about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, but for the designated hitters, I’ve limited the list to the teams below zero, both to keep the length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the third full season of the universal DH, exactly half the teams in the majors have actually gotten 0.0 WAR or less from their DHs thus far, four are in the middle ground between 0.0 and 1.0, eight are between 1.0 and 2.0, and three are above 2.0. DHs as a group have hit .245/.321/.421 for a 109 wRC+; that last figure is up three points from last year, and seven points from the last time I did this list, via a slash line that’s virtually identical (the majors’ slugging percentage as a whole has dropped 17 points from last season).
This year, we’re seeing a greater number of teams invest more playing time in a single DH. Whereas each of the past two seasons saw three players reach the 500 plate appearance threshold as DHs, this year we’re on pace for five; similarly, 11 player are on pace to reach 400 PA as DHs, compared to eight last year. That said, many of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances.
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) this week. This is a strange week for the column. The All-Star break cut into the number of games available to watch; mathematically speaking, fewer games means fewer chances for weird things to happen. I took a weekend trip and didn’t watch any MLB games on Friday or Saturday. I’m also hard at work on the upcoming trade value series, which comes out between the All-Star game and the deadline every year – check back Monday for that annual exercise’s kickoff. In any case, that means this is a hodgepodge list: some stuff from this week, sure, but also plays and series that got left out last week, and some low-level baseball to boot. Thanks, as always, to ESPN’s Zach Lowe for the format idea. And two quick programming notes: I won’t be doing my regular Monday chat or Five Things next week; instead, I’ll be doing a jumbo-sized chat Friday morning.
1. The New Derby Format
The modern swing-happy Home Run Derby has been a great success, at least as far as I’m concerned. It’s more fun to see sluggers launch as many home runs as they possibly can than it is to see them agonize over every single swing. The format wasn’t perfect, though. I’m not trying to be a grump about it – is it even possible to be a grump about the Home Run Derby? – but there was one downside to the timed-round format: not enough drama. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
It’s amusing that we consider this morning the start of the second half of the Major League Baseball season, considering 1,449 games have been played, with only 981 left on the schedule. Yet, of course, we know why that’s the case: The All-Star break offers players and coaches a little breather and provides an easy dividing point in the action. Besides, “first uninterrupted segment of the season” is quite the mouthful.
So, anyway, now that the lopsided first half is over, I figured this would be a good time to take a high-level view of where things stand as we begin the second section of the season. Let’s run things down division by division, first covering the National League from East to West before doing the same for the American League. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the highlights of the All-Star Game, a hypothetical Evan Longoria unretirement scenario, the newly announced 2025 regular-season schedule (featuring Tokyo contests and a “Rivalry Weekend”), a baseball movie-mention conspiracy theory, players possessed by Gameday 3D, the timing of Martín Maldonado’s DFA, and the potential effect of moving the foul lines. Then (36:54) they bring on FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen to break down the standout trends, teams, and players of the amateur draft, the demographics of amateur baseball, trading draft picks, and more.
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