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 bolded in the table at the end of the piece.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the next batch of players. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the first batch of players. Read the rest of this entry »

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 it on 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 »

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 »

Imagine an auction that takes place between three bidders. The item in question? An envelope filled with money. All three bidders employ teams of analysts that attempt to ascertain how much money is in the envelope, based on a variety of evidence that isn’t important for this analogy. Each bidder thus arrives at an estimate of the fair value of the envelope. Then they place a single sealed bid. The highest bidder out of the three gets the envelope.

What bidding strategy would you employ? Here’s a bad one: Just bid what your team of analysts calculates as the expected value of what’s in the envelope. The reason this is bad is known as the winner’s curse. If each bidder comes up with an estimate of fair value and bids that number, the winner will be the one with the highest estimate of fair value. In other words, you’ll only win if your estimation of the envelope’s value is higher than everyone else’s, and since you’re always paying exactly what you’re hoping to gain, you’ll tend to lose in the long run.

Allowing for a lot of approximation, this situation describes free agency in major league baseball. Every free agent has an unknowable amount of expected future production. Teams employ armies of analysts who attempt to estimate that production. Then, armed with that knowledge, they make contract offers to that free agent, in competition with other teams.

As I said, there’s a ton of approximation and simplification going on here. Players aren’t envelopes filled with money. Team context matters. Players don’t have to accept the highest bid. Tax regimes aren’t equal, and non-monetary incentives matter, too. Contracts are complex, and there’s no requirement that they be the same number of years, have the same number of options, no trade clauses, or anything of the sort. There’s no agreed-upon universal value system; different players present different value to different teams.

But that doesn’t mean the abstracted case has no use. As we approach the trade deadline, I think there’s one clear one: dispelling the myth that teams refuse to give up much to trade for a player who just signed a big free agent deal — after all, if they valued them enough for a blockbuster, they would have just offered a bigger contract, right? That’s a great soundbite, so you hear it all the time, but it doesn’t jive with established economic theory. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the trade deadline. It’s a time to dream about the huge moves your club could make. It could go get a big bopper, the kind of hitter who could put the team on his back down the stretch and carry it to October. Maybe you’re more interested in a CC Sabathia-style workhorse, a starter who could anchor your pitching staff and throw as many innings as you need, regardless of what that number is. Perhaps an electrifying defender is on the table, or a game-breaking speedster who could transform your lineup. But let’s be realistic: None of that’s going to happen. Instead, your team is going to trade for a reliever.

Relievers are the common currency of the trade deadline. Every team needs more of them. I don’t see a single bullpen in baseball that couldn’t benefit from adding an arm or two. Meanwhile, most of the acquisitions fans dream about simply aren’t on the table, because those players don’t exist. Sure, half a season of one of the best hitters in baseball is enticing, but you can’t get that at the trade deadline because no team has one to spare, at least not for a reasonable cost. But relievers? Oh, there will be relievers on offer.

Today’s article is something of a real world shopping guide. Obviously, a huge move would be more fun. Maybe Luis Robert Jr. or Garrett Crochet will get traded. Realistically, though, most of the prizes this deadline will be middle relievers. So let’s take stock of an assortment of the best options who might be on the market, as well as what past years suggest about their probable cost in prospects.

A few rules of engagement: I’m looking only at likely sellers, and going team by team. I didn’t use a hard-and-fast rule in terms of playoff chances when constructing my seller’s list, and I’m erring on the expansive side, so if I list your team in the article and you think they’re still in the race, my apologies. I’m using the last few years of trade returns as a guide, and I’m going to stick to naming prospect value tiers rather than individual names. Let’s get started.
Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. As MLB pauses for the All-Star break, I thought I’d pause for one of my own. Just like the league, I’d like to recognize the stars of my own personal baseball bubble. There’s a lot of overlap between the guys who populate Five Things most frequently and the best players in the game, but it’s not a complete overlap. You generally know what you’re getting with this column: some fun, fluky plays and players. Today, you’re just getting an aggregated version of that: the most fun I had in the first half of the year. And no, if you’re wondering, there are no Didn’t Likes this week, c’mon. As always, thanks to Zach Lowe for the idea for this format, which is just as exciting (to me) in baseball as it is in basketball.
Read the rest of this entry »

There are just too many players in baseball these days. I don’t mean that in a “contract the league” way – I think that there should be expansion, in fact. I’ll get back to that, for the record. The problem, instead, is with me. As teams have increasingly realized that the best way to get the most out of players is by giving them frequent rest, more people are playing relevant roles every year. Take the Giants, for example: The 2010 World Series team featured 19 pitchers, from Matt Cain’s 223 1/3 innings all the way down to Waldis Joaquin’s 4 2/3. This year’s Giants have already used 24 pitchers, and we haven’t even hit the All-Star break.

Back in those days, it was easy to know most of your team’s bullpen, as well as the regular starters. It was just fewer names to keep track of, fewer different styles and deliveries and permutations of facial hair. The present-day Giants have an honest-to-goodness pair of identical twins and a closer with his own light show. They have the tallest player in baseball. It’s a wildly eclectic bullpen. And I haven’t even mentioned their best pitcher yet, which is kind of my point. Ryan Walker is having a season for the ages, and he’s doing it in anonymity.

One “problem” with Walker – note: not actually a problem – is that he’s an archetype of pitchers we’ve seen before. He throws a sinker, and he throws a slider. He hides the ball well and throws hard. He misses bats, and always has: Starting in 2019, his first full season, he compiled a 28% strikeout rate in the minors. There’s nothing particularly novel or unprecedented about Walker’s game – it’s just effective.
Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »