The 2026 Crowdsourced Trade Value Results

Last week, I helmed FanGraphs’ annual Trade Value Series, a list of the 50 most valuable players in baseball. As is customary, I built the list using my own insights as well as feedback from both the FanGraphs staff and a number of team personnel. But for the second straight year, mine wasn’t the only ranking in town. In addition to my rankings, our Crowdsourced Trade Value tool let any reader create their own list via a series of “which of these two players do you prefer” decisions.

Two weeks and 500,000 responses later, we turned those “this one or that one?” preferences into an aggregate list. You can see the crowd’s results here, as well as your own. If you’re interested in diving more deeply into the methodology we used to turn everyone’s individual votes into an aggregate ranking, last year’s version of this article has the specifics, but generally speaking, we take everyone’s individual player-versus-player results, combine them into one giant list, and sample them in a random order (a few times) to come up with a composite list of the preferences of all FanGraphs readers.

First, I wanted to highlight the crowd’s top 10, which looks a whole lot like my top 10:

That’s eight out of 10 players who overlap, and the two who were outside my top 10 — Paul Skenes and Jacob Misiorowski — ranked 11th and 12th on my list, respectively. In other words, we agree on who the best trade values in baseball are.

Still, much like my list, clear gaps in preference emerged, even among players as talented as those who appear in the top 10. There’s a helpful Graphs section on the results page that lets you see both your own personal rankings and the aggregate crowd rankings in tiered form. But since the crowdsourced trade value tool didn’t ask you to put players in tiers, we had to get creative. We did that by turning the Elo rankings that power the list into standard deviations and using those to define the tiers visually. The best way to use this is by navigating to the page and hovering over the names to see which players are in a given group. The Graph feature is a great way to add context to your personal rankings; plenty of your ranks will be virtual ties, and seeing players grouped together is a great way of understanding where you find players to be roughly equivalent and where you see clear gaps in value from one group to the next.

Overall, I’m really impressed by how the aggregate crowdsourced rankings. Shohei Ohtani and Bobby Witt Jr. are at the top on their own, with a sizable gap down to the next tier. The middle of the list is always more difficult to parse, because we have the algorithm that chooses which matchups you see tuned to give you choices between some of your own top players more frequently. This helps pin down the top of each person’s list, but it also means that we get fewer matchups of, say, player number 43 vs. player number 56. But when we asked you to choose between the players you liked best, you did a phenomenal job of separating the wheat from the chaff.

In my view, the top 20 or so players were a cut above the rest, and obviously deserved to populate the top part of this list. I’m pleased to say that the crowd had 19 of the players in my top 20 in its top 20. The only exception was Brice Turang, but even there, we were directionally aligned; he was 25th in the aggregate crowd rankings and 19th in mine, so we concur that he’s towards the bottom of the top group. In other words, we were in strong agreement about the part of the list that’s most important.

That said, the crowd and I weren’t aligned about everything. Here are the 10 players who I had ranked 10 or more spots higher than you all did:

I grouped these players into a few categories. First, Jackson Merrill and Ceddanne Rafaela appeared in a cluster of players that I called “Ben’s Guys” in my writeup. Yeah, I like those guys a lot! Obviously I think that I’m right about their placement, but I bet that if you polled everyone I talked to in constructing my list, they’d fall about halfway between where I ranked them and where our readers did. I’d throw JJ Wetherholt and Parker Messick into this general category too; I was slightly above consensus on both of them, and thus I’d expect them to show up in this list.

Another group also jumps out to me: players with big contracts having middling seasons in 2026. I’ll count Merrill as an honorary member of this group, but I’m talking about Cal Raleigh, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Ketel Marte here. All of those players appeared towards the bottom of my own list, and in each case, I was weighing long-term projections against short-term disappointment in my rankings. I don’t think these are easy choices, and I think it’s very helpful to see the crowd’s views here. I’ll toss in Hunter Brown in the same spirit. With him it’s injuries instead of a contract that are cause for concern, but the same general idea holds. Brown is great if he’s healthy, but it’s hard to pin down his health, and so I understand docking him meaningfully for that.

That just leaves Zach Neto and Samuel Basallo. For three straight years, Neto is someone who I’ve heard positive feedback on when talking to team-side evaluators about my list. I also don’t think there’s much difference between the guy ranked 50th and the guy ranked 40th, so it’s not as though I’m disagreeing with your aggregate preferences that much. Basallo is likely a victim of the vagaries of our matching algorithm towards the middle of the list. I feel strongly that he’s a top 50 trade value. To be clear, the crowd ranking of 52 isn’t ridiculously low; I just think a ranking in the 30s makes much more sense than one in the 50s.

The other side of the list – players readers ranked higher than I did – isn’t quite as extreme. There were only nine players with even a five-spot disagreement:

Ben Rice is an interesting case. He’s a really tough evaluation, and not one that I’m confident I got right. If he’s 40% or so better than league average offensively – he has a 160 wRC+ this year and a 145 mark over the past two years – then my ranking is surely too low. On the other hand, if he’s more of a 120-130 wRC+ player, I might be too high on him. The projections are somewhere in between those two marks, and they reflect the uncertainty in projecting a player who debuted late and thus is in the position of remaining under team control into his 30s. I’m not confident in my rating here, and I assume that he was a tough evaluation for you as well.

I don’t see as much pattern with these as I did with the players who I ranked more highly than the crowd. Roman Anthony was a very hard player to place, and I think I would have been better served by ruling him ineligible due to injury, but I think it’s very defensible to look through his 2026 and leave his rank higher. Made is only 19, he’s the top prospect in baseball, and he’ll be a Brewer forever; the team control alone probably accounts for the difference in ranking here, though don’t think too hard about the relative positions of Made and Basallo or your head will hurt. I disagree with you all on the value of solid hitters approaching free agency, though; both Ronald Acuña Jr. and CJ Abrams would improve a lot of teams, but not for as long as most of the players ahead of them on the list. Other than that, these small differences just underscore that we’re in broad agreement. I think that having Misiorowski as the top pitcher is completely reasonable, and I’m hardly going to get upset about people liking Elly De La Cruz, a favorite of mine.

Last but not least, let’s dive into the messy middle of the rankings for a list of seven players who featured in your top 50 but didn’t make my list at all:

Juan Soto is an interesting one for me. If you’re a longtime reader of the Trade Value Series, you probably know one of the biggest differences between me and my predecessors: I value star players quite highly even if they’re on big contracts. That sounds like Soto, but I think that a logical fallacy is happening here. Soto’s a star on a big contract, so he fits the general category. But his contract is enormous. It’s not a close match for anyone else’s. His deal is nearly double the next-largest contract. I think Soto’s incredible, but I also think that he doesn’t belong on this list.

Jordan Walker, Leo De Vries, Otto Lopez, Sal Stewart, and George Kirby were all near misses for me. That just leaves José Ramírez, who I took off of my list in the early going. I don’t want to read too much into the aggregate preferences of a ton of readers making half a million votes, but there’s an interesting contrast between the group of players who the group disliked relative to me thanks to their middling performance in 2026 and their large contracts. Ramírez is categorically very similar to that group – Tatis, Marte, et al – but we went in opposite directions in ranking him. There probably isn’t any real meaning to that – it’s just interesting.

I also asked Sean Dolinar to find the closest matchups across the entire population of decisions. There were 10 ballots that fit my arbitrary criteria for the most exciting matchups: at least 100 direct comparisons and a winning percentage for the two players between 46% and 54%. In other words, these are ballots that we put to the crowd many times, and that the crowd truly couldn’t come to a consensus about:

Konnor Griffin: hard to rank! But mostly, this is a sign that the best players in the league are pretty clearly in a group of their own. There were no close matchups between one player who doesn’t seem like a top guy and one who does. This year had such a clear dividing line between the elite and the merely very solid trade values that it seems like both the crowd and I had an easy job sorting the wheat from a chaff, but a tougher job looking through the wheat and picking a favorite.

Thanks again for playing along with us. I hope you had as much fun playing the game as we did.