Ranking the Top 50 Players by Trade Value in 2024: Nos. 41-50

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.

The first six players on the list belong in a tier together, and some of the Honorable Mention pitchers could credibly fit here as well. Call it “playoff starters with team control” if you’re looking for a label. Gore fits that bill. His talent has never been in question. Watch him for an inning, and you’ll come away impressed by his upper-90s fastball and wait-where-did-it-go curveball. He even throws a credible slider and changeup to support his two primary offerings. Gore’s strikeout and swinging strike rates have increased every year, and his walk rate has consistently declined. The further removed he gets from his disastrous 2021 control implosion, the more confident I get about his medium-term trajectory. The numbers are starting to back me up; Gore’s 3.14 FIP and 3.78 xFIP sound closer to his true talent level than his 4.20 ERA on the year (a .361 BABIP allowed isn’t helping there). At this point, I think Gore’s reasonable upside is excellent second banana in a playoff rotation. He’s not quite there yet; even though it’s better than before, his command still abandons him frequently enough that I’d be uncomfortable trying to get bulk innings out of him against dialed-in opponents. He’d be a great fit on a team with two inning-eating starters and a deep bullpen; when he’s on, he can be dominant, but he still has stretches where he can’t find the zone. There’s always injury risk with pitchers, but Gore is at least under team control for quite a while. He’ll reach free agency after the 2027 season, so a team that traded for him would get three years of production at arbitration salaries. That cushions the blow if he has to miss time; two salary-controlled years of Gore is still a nice prize. As you’ll see in a lot of today’s players, pitching is so unpredictable and yet so necessary that a live arm with three-plus years left under contract makes for a hot commodity.

Like Gore, Steele has three years of team control left after 2024. Unlike Gore, he’s peaking right now; he’s 29 and in the midst of the best stretch of his career. His cutter/slider approach has always felt fragile to me, but at this point that assessment strains credulity. He’s working on his third straight year of ERAs and ERA estimators in the low-to-mid-3.00s, with future projections in the same general vicinity. If he’s the third-best pitcher in your rotation, you’re ecstatic. If he’s the ace, you’re probably feeling a little bit undermanned. Steele tends to miss a few starts with injury every year, but he’s thus far avoided any major setbacks. I gave him the nod over Gore for that reason; Steele succeeds without a ton of velocity, which makes me marginally less worried about his elbow exploding. He’s starting from a higher salary thanks to his Super-2 status, but he’s still a bargain, and team control matters far more than the exact cost of that control at these levels of salary. No one is going to trade for Steele thinking that they’ll unlock another level of dominance. He’s already maxing out his talent level, and more power to him for it. I often find myself thinking “How did he manage that?” when I watch a Steele start. That puts a cap on his perceived value, but it’s hard to argue with the results. Every team needs more pitching, after all, and you don’t get extra points for looking nice in GIFs.

Get ready to hear a lot of variations on this statement: I like Greene more than Gore and Steele because he’ll be around for longer. Results-wise, there isn’t a lot of daylight between these three. They go about it differently, but a mid-3.00s ERA in a neutral park feels like a median expectation for each of them. Greene does it while touching 100 with his fastball, but he mostly uses that fastball as a setup pitch and goes to his slider when he needs to do heavy lifting. The “how” certainly matters, but what I’m focusing on for this ranking is the “how long.” Greene signed an early-career extension that pays him roughly $10 million a year through 2028. There’s even a team option for 2029, which will be his age-29 season. If he’s still healthy and effective, that’s a nice bonus, and if he’s not, hey, it was risk-free anyway. There’s very little separating Greene and the names above and below him, a fact you can clearly see in the ZiPS forecasts. A tiny bit of projectability here, a smidgen of injury risk there, a few extra strikeouts or grounders. When that’s the case, I go to my Sesame Street model to make distinctions. One of these things is not like the other, and it’s Greene’s years of team control remaining. Alternately, how many years of team control do I count? One, two, three, four, (option for) five, ah ha ha! Jim Henson would have been a great talent evaluator, is what I’m saying. Oh, and Hunter Greene is good.