Alvarez is the last member of the three-player Let’s Go Win the World Series tier, and like Aaron Judge and Yoshinobu Yamamoto before him, he’s in rarefied air as one of the very best in the game right now. He leads baseball with a 194 wRC+ this year, courtesy of a ludicrous .328/.433/.656 line and 34 home runs. He’s walking 14.8% of the time and only striking out at a 17% clip. He’s one of the hardest swingers in baseball, and yet he makes contact at an 80th-percentile rate. He’s been slowed by knee, oblique, and hand injuries over the years — he played just two games in 2020, 114 in 2023 and 48 last year — but he’s otherwise been doing this basically since his debut in 2019. He’s the real deal, not quite Judge at the plate but in a tier just below with Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto.

There’s some injury risk to account for here, but I don’t think that affects the value proposition all that much because he’s also under team control for a relatively short period of time. That’s the downside of trading for Alvarez. You’ll only have him for the rest of this year and then two more, relatively few bites at the apple when you consider that some of the guys in the top 10 have a decade of team control remaining.

In a strange way, I don’t mind it all that much. Alvarez is 29 right now, so you’re getting his age-30 and -31 seasons, and then probably seeing him leave in free agency in return for a draft pick. You’re getting those seasons at a very reasonable rate of $26 million per. I’d prefer that to some higher-AAV years at the end of the deal, because Alvarez is the kind of player you trade for when you place a ton of value on the present over the future. If you’re trying to win now, you want the value you trade for concentrated in the years when you need it. He has the right contract shape for that; compare it to Judge’s, where it’s likely that the last few years of his deal won’t give you all that much value, and you can see the difference.

If you’re looking for a trade comparison, the Padres traded for Soto at a similar time in his service time clock. I don’t think Alvarez would fetch the same return, for a few reasons. First, there was some Preller premium in that deal; the Padres have been the high bidders more often than not in recent blockbuster deals for key contributors. Second, Soto might be a similar hitter to Alvarez on a rate basis, but he was six years younger and had a better track record of health. Finally, there was at least a little bit of extension equity, or free agency market goodwill, baked into the Soto deal, which I don’t think makes sense here. But that’s a good ballpark for what teams will trade in return for getting one of the very best hitters in baseball for multiple cost-efficient years.

Turang is a great example of Tier 5: They Check Every Box, a collection of five hitters who give you a lot of everything. Let’s see how he fits the bill. First, there’s the offense, the most important part of any hitter’s profile. Turang’s evolution on that front has been much discussed, but to summarize: He started swinging a lot harder at the expense of some contact in 2025, and the results have been arrow-up ever since. He isn’t one of the top few hitters in baseball or anything, but we have a 1,000-plate appearance sample of him putting up double-digit walk rates, league-average strikeout rates, and contact quality that’s right in line with the 123 wRC+ he’s posted over that span.

Turang was a valuable player as a light-hitting middle infielder, but with the new thunder in his bat, he’s hit a new gear. His defense is still his calling card; as a Fielding Bible award voter, I spend a lot of time every year marveling at Turang’s clean actions, smooth movement, and range. If he’s not the best second base defender in the game, he’s not far off of it. An unending pipeline of shortstop prospects and his own success at the keystone mean that Turang isn’t likely to move to the other middle infield spot soon, but I have no doubt that he could play it at an above-average level if he switched.

That works out to a bat that would hover just outside the top 10 among first basemen, plus a glove that teams would play even if the guy was a poor hitter. Combine those two things and you get a down-ballot MVP candidate. I went looking for reasons not to believe that Turang could sustain his offensive output, but there’s just not much to see; the numbers all make sense together, and he isn’t maxing out on lifting and pulling, or even close to it, which means that there’s room for him to make adjustments to eke out more power to make up for any decline elsewhere.

Turang is 26 and will be around for three more seasons of arbitration after this one. That’s enough time to rack up a mountain of value, and on bargain salaries to boot. Sometimes I think that positional adjustments overstate the value of middle infielders. There are a lot of guys who can post an 80 wRC+ and show off some slick defense at second. But Turang does the hard thing — plus offense at second base — well, and he’s also elite in the field. The only nit to pick here is that I wish he were around for longer, which is why he isn’t even higher on the list.

My long-time Trade Value crush — he’s previously ranked sixth, fourth, and sixth — De La Cruz continues to be one of the most electric players in baseball. In many ways, he’s a similar hitter to when he came up, with tons of strikeouts, tons of power, and a good enough batting eye to pull it all together. He’s made a number of improvements around the edges, though, hitting better as a righty and placing a greater emphasis on patience, resulting in more barrels and more hard contact than ever before. You probably shouldn’t extrapolate much higher than this – I don’t think he can ride these improvements to another 20-point jump in wRC+ – but De La Cruz has matured into one of the best hitters at the shortstop position, behind Bobby Witt Jr. but right there in a group with the guys chasing him.

Defensively, the picture isn’t quite so clear. DRS and FRV disagree about his work at short, and I think a balanced read is that he’s roughly average but trending up. He has elite range and a huge throwing arm, and he’s finally reining in his throws more effectively; he made a throwing error every 100 defensive innings in the first three years of his career, against only two in 684 innings in 2026. Finally, he’s having a slow season on the basepaths, perhaps due to a hamstring injury that cost him three weeks in June, but he’s second in baserunning value since debuting, so uh, that’s pretty good.

Contract-wise, De La Cruz has three trips through arbitration ahead of him before reaching free agency, though based on how he’s played, those years likely won’t be cheap. The only downside here is that I wish he were around for longer, because this is a phenomenal deal. He’s one of the best-hitting shortstops in the league while also being one of the best baserunners, and he can clearly handle the toughest non-catcher defensive position. The decline in rank since last year is largely about him coming with one less year of team control, and very partially about lowering the odds of a truly outlier positive outcome, which I had accounted for in my previous rankings, because powerful, switch-hitting shortstops just aren’t something I have a mental model for. All of that is to say that De La Cruz is amazing, and the main thing holding back his ranking is that the players ahead of him will be around for longer.

Rodríguez has been a tough evaluation for me on the past few iterations of this list. He has a lot of the traits that look right at home at the top of the rankings. He has a million years of team control, albeit at confusing salaries thanks to a complicated contract. He’s a good hitter, somewhere in the 20-30% above league average band depending on your timeframes and what you think of his expected stats. He’s a plus center fielder, though I’m worried by the fact that 2026 is his worst year yet on that front. He’s only 25, and yet he’s working on his fifth straight season of All-Star-caliber play. Slice it how you like; Rodríguez has been one of the most valuable position players in baseball for any multi-year span you can imagine since his debut.

Why isn’t he in the top 10, then? It’s because of how he gets to those results. Even though his year-end xwOBA’s are metronomic – .342, .342, .348, .348, and .349 so far this year – he gets there in the most maddening way possible. He’s streaky like you wouldn’t believe, with a career 114 wRC+ in the first half and a 153 in the second half. His plate discipline will make you cover your eyes at times. Sure, he tends to end the year within shouting distance of 5 WAR, but you might tear your hair out on the journey.

I’m generally down on players who can’t lay off pitches in the dirt. It’s just a hard thing to improve on, and along with raw power (which he certainly has), it’s the most important hitting tool in my opinion. Rodríguez’s barrel rate has declined every year of his major league career, and his zone rate is at a career low; correlation doesn’t equal causation, but it’s not hard to imagine that swinging at worse pitches means crushing pitches less often. But I keep thinking that, and he keeps putting up five-win seasons.

ZiPS thinks that Rodríguez will be one of the best 10 players in baseball over the next five years (that’s how many years of projections I got from Dan). That’s phenomenal for a 25-year-old under contact for another decade or so. Even the $30 million annual salary he’ll earn in the club option portion of his deal doesn’t feel onerous to me; the inexorable rise in revenue and payrolls means that’s already a reasonable salary for a star, and it’ll likely only be more reasonable in the future. And hey, if you’re worried that the current CBA negotiations might upend what we think of as good and bad contracts, it’s a team option, so you have all the decision-making power if the economic landscape shifts enormously (the player option he gets if the Mariners don’t exercise their side is much less financially onerous).

That line of thinking makes me feel like I should have him higher. But I have more questions about Rodríguez than I do with the next two guys in this group, and the very top of this list is extremely good this year. A tricky case, but a great player.

Last year, I ranked Chourio meaningfully lower than the industry consensus, while this year, I think I’m pretty much right on the mark. That consensus has moved down at the same time that my opinion has moved up, so it’s a notable change worth discussing, but first, let’s talk about what Chourio brings to the table.

Still only 22 years old, Chourio is working on his third straight 20-homer season and is posting the best OBP of his career while doing so, this despite missing the first month of the season with a broken hand. He swings hard, runs fast, and has a strong throwing arm. Defensively, he’s capable at all three outfield spots, probably slightly below average in center and plus in the corners, though the Brewers prefer to play him in left because they’re awash in spectacular outfield defenders.

ZiPS thinks that the key part of Chourio’s appeal is his contract. He’s projected to be the 25th-best player in baseball over the next five years, which feels broadly right to me. But over those five years, he’s going to be making a relative pittance, $13 million a year, and the Brewers have two team options at $25 million a pop after that. That’s peanuts; good bats with defensive value run far more than that in free agency, and often more than that even in salary arbitration.

Okay, now for the disagreement in the evaluations. My perception is that the industry has cooled slightly on Chourio because he hasn’t built on the form he showed as a rookie. If he’s 20% above average as a hitter and can fake center, that’s a very nice player but not an MVP candidate. Some of his value in the past came from the chance that he’d make another leap, and while the odds haven’t reduced to zero, it’s hard to claim that they haven’t declined.

I, on the other hand, doubted Chourio’s ability to lay off tough pitches. I still doubt it somewhat, to be clear. But he’s chasing less and making more in-zone contact as a result, even though he’s attacking strikes less frequently. That’s the kind of adjustment I hoped he’d make, and it’s led to him walking more than ever before. I think that without this change, high-end offensive outcomes were vanishingly unlikely. So where before I was well below consensus on his breakout potential, I feel slightly better about it now. That said, I agree with the overall view that at this point, the most likely outcome is more of Chourio playing at roughly this level, that what you see today is what you’ll get for the next many years. And what you see is the 16th-best trade value in baseball.

Carroll is the last player in the They Check Every Box tier, and I don’t think that there’s any question that he’s the best of the bunch. He’s a plus defender in right and can play center in a pinch thanks to his blazing speed, though the Diamondbacks quite reasonably have given him a less-taxing defensive job to get his bat in the lineup more often. He takes huge swings at the plate and ropes the ball to all fields, while also walking at a double-digit clip. He’s the best baserunner in baseball, and though he’s stealing less than usual this year, he’s causing his normal base-to-base havoc and his speed numbers are as good as ever.

His contract has four years plus a club option remaining, and at bargain rates; if Arizona picks up the option, they’ll pay him an average of $22 million for the remainder of his deal. In that sense, he’s like Chourio: He’s a bargain even if he never goes fully supernova. Sure, it’s fewer years of team control, but on the flip side, Carroll’s last three seasons are each better from a WAR standpoint than Chourio’s career high. His offense looks to have a significantly higher floor. He’s a better fielder, at least per the defensive metrics, and a better baserunner. The one fly in the ointment is that Carroll has intermittently dealt with injury issues caused by the sheer ferocity with which he swings. It’s not a huge concern, because he’s turned in three straight 600-plate appearance seasons and is on course for a fourth, but it’s something I’d keep an eye on if I were considering trading for him.

I dabbled with moving Carroll higher, in fact. He was fourth on this list last year, and he’s been his usual very good self in the intervening season. He’s not higher for two reasons. First, a ton of elite players have debuted in the interim. Second, some of his value on last year’s list came from what I expected him to do in the immediate future. He’s done that! But that value is gone now, and there’s a natural pull to slide guys who are on escalating deals and performing at their presumed peak right now. I wouldn’t fault you for having Carroll higher on your own personal list. I just had to find a lot of space for new guys this year.

Schlittler kicks off a run of five pitchers in Tier 4: Dominant Starters With Team Control. I feel quite confident that these five are the best pitching values in baseball. I feel less confident about their exact order, or whether some of the top end of the previous tier of hitters should overlap with Schlittler and the next guy on the list, but here’s the key point to remember: Pitchers invariably have lower projections than you’d expect because of the risk of injury, but the best ones are still phenomenally valuable because punting the position isn’t an option. When you see that Schlittler’s highest projected WAR is 3.0, the natural response is to doubt both the ranking and the projections — he’s at 3.8 WAR already and it’s only July! But the truth is that while pitchers tend to break, teams covet them anyway.

Schlittler debuted last July and burst his way onto the national stage with two sterling October starts. He’s followed it up with a Cy Young-worthy sophomore effort, carving through lineups to the tune of a 2.20 ERA, a 2.72 FIP, and an alphabet’s worth of run estimators that peg his true talent ERA around 3.00. His best pitch is probably his hard mid-90s cutter. Or maybe it’s his four-seamer, which sits 97-98 and can touch 100, or the sinker he uses to stymie righties. Whatever variety of fastball you look at, Schlittler throws a really good one.

Out of the guys in this group, he’s the one who my team sources were lowest on, though I want to reiterate that I’m praising him with faint damnation there. Being worse than the next four guys is not so much about anything that Schlittler has done wrong. It’s just a matter of risk tolerance and projection uncertainty, at least for me. I tend to prefer pitchers with a little more variation, a little more arsenal diversity to keep hitters guessing, and Schlittler throws those three fastballs I mentioned a combined 93% of the time. I think I’m probably more optimistic that he has more tricks in his bag than the average person I talked to, though I didn’t discuss this specific issue very much. Mostly, folks just went “Yeah, he’s good” and moved on, after noting that they liked the other guys in this area more. The way I see it, hitters are the ones who need to make an adjustment against Schlittler for now. He’s blowing them away, so why would he change? If they figure out his current approach, maybe he’ll learn a changeup in the offseason or find a breaking ball to feature. But when you’re splitting hairs among such great players, it’s at least worth noting the potential drawbacks.

Other than that, there’s nothing to nitpick. Schlittler won’t reach free agency until 2032. He has elite stuff and plus command. He’s improving as he goes along. He’s only 25. It’s wild that there are four (and a half — hi, Shohei) pitchers still to come on this list. It’s a good time for elite young starters.

Yesterday, I mentioned which players in this year’s rankings might be considered “Ben’s Guys.” Well, Burns and someone I’ll discuss tomorrow were my sources’ guys. I thought I was high on Burns, but everyone I talked to, across the spectrum of teams and regardless of their preferred evaluation methods, wanted to rave about him. And if you watch him pitch, it doesn’t take long to see why.

The second pick in the 2024 draft, Burns blew through three levels of the minors in 2025 and made his big league debut last June. He hit innings limits and transitioned to the bullpen at year’s end, but he returned at full strength for 2026 and has done nothing but breathe fire since. He was the consensus best pitcher in his draft and the consensus best pitching prospect in baseball when he debuted. From pedigree to on-field value, he’s checked every single box more or less since the day he entered affiliated ball.

Like Schlittler, he gets a lot done with a small arsenal. He throws either a huge fastball or a hard slider 95% of the time. He flashed a plus curveball in college and in his brief stint in the minors, but he’s mothballed that for the moment, and only mixes in a changeup to keep people guessing. But man, that fastball is good. It’s a classic backspinning four-seamer, and he throws it so hard and with so much spin that it only falls 10 inches from its initial trajectory on its way home. The 90-mph slider he spins off of it seems to vanish by comparison, and it has utility against lefties thanks to its shape.

Burns is walking slightly more batters than league average, but his command looks perfectly fine to both my eyes and our pitch models. Command isn’t the draw here, though. Batters just can’t do anything with either pitch, so they’re hoping to stay alive long enough for him to leave four outside the strike zone. Burns is so athletic that I’m not alone in projecting continued improvement on the command front, and he barely even needs it.

Burns’ new contract – seven years and $105 million starting next year – is a mark in his favor, but I had him ranked around here even before he signed it; two extra years of team control is pretty great, but I’d be lining up to trade for Burns even if he were “merely” going to be around for the normal arbitration timeline. I personally like grouping Burns with Schlittler as elite performers who I think will have to diversify over time. It makes sense in my head. But the pedigree and athleticism were key differentiators for the team personnel I talked to in compiling this list, and I bet you that several of those folks think I still don’t have Burns high enough.

If you’ll allow me a brief victory lap, I ranked Misiorowski aggressively last year only five starts into his big league career because I felt that the odds of him breaking the game in one way or another were too great to ignore. I didn’t think he’d do this, though. He’s added 1.5 mph to his average fastball velocity, and he was already one of the hardest throwers of all time last season. He’s hit 105.5 on the gun this year. He’s thrown his cutter – his cutter! – at 99.6 mph. He’s thrown five distinct pitches in 2026, and the slowest is his 88 mph curveball, which, coincidentally, is the fastest curveball in the league by three ticks. If I wrote him into a screenplay, it would be rejected for not being realistic enough.

The scouting report for hitters facing The Miz just reads “good luck.” His secondaries are faster than most people’s fastballs, and they move like demons. His fastball isn’t merely high velocity, either; his loping delivery means he throws with huge extension and from a low release point, giving it great bat-missing shape, and he’s an outlier athlete to boot. He’s cut his walk rate in half since debuting in the majors, and he repeats his delivery better than anyone so big and throwing so hard should be able to.

If I had to win a game tomorrow, I wouldn’t want anyone but Misiorowski starting it for me. His numbers are beyond outrageous this year. Hitters facing the Brewers look alternately dejected and resigned when they step in against him. He’s allowing fewer barrels per batted ball than almost everyone else in baseball – and he’s also striking out almost 40% of his opponents. It’s unfair, is what it is.

I toyed with having him ranked higher than any other pitcher. In the end, I held off because now that he’s this good, the uncertainty begins to cut the other way. When he was an unknown quantity, the volatility of his profile – so big, throws so hard, etc. – was all upside. I wanted to be surprised by what Misiorowski developed into. I chased that volatility, in fact. But now that what he’s turned into is a video game cheat code, I wish he were lower variance. More to the point, I wish I had a better understanding of whether the load management techniques the Brewers are employing are going to keep him healthy.

As a final note, I think that team views roughly mirror mine here. At the very least, no one I talked to pushed back on Misiorowski’s inclusion in a cluster of the very best pitchers in the game, and when I brought his name up, everyone agreed that he might be the best pitcher in baseball right now. And that’s without even giving him bonus points for his sweet Pokémon gloves.

We’re into territory that’s completely theoretical at this point. You couldn’t trade for Paul Skenes. It’s not on the table. The Pirates built their team and competitive window around him, and there just isn’t any discussion to be had about sending enough value their way to pry him free. But that’s almost always the case for the top of these lists, so I still have to order the guys, and shockingly enough, I feel pretty comfortable about both taking Skenes out of the top 10 and out of the top spot for a pitcher.

Skenes has been worse than advertised this year, if only because he was advertised as the best pitcher in baseball (including by me, to be clear). He’s lost about a tick on his fastball while the rest of the league continues to inch faster and faster. Stuff+ actually thinks his raw stuff is below average, though it’s worth noting that that model has never been enamored with his fastball or his splinker, even as they’ve been two of his best pitches.

From my perspective, though, that’s mostly nitpicking. The appeal of Skenes was never just that he had a great fastball. He’s great at everything. He has top-shelf command. He mixes and blends his arsenal so effectively that all of his offerings play up. He’s actually inducing more bad swings this year than he did in 2025, and most of his advanced ERA estimators have him roughly as good this year as last year. I didn’t want to move Skenes out of the top 10, even in a “bad” year. In the same way that Misiorowski’s volatility is a downside given how good he looks in the present moment, Skenes’ lack of volatility at a high level is very valuable to me. I have some questions about Schlittler, Burns, and Misiorowski continuing to excel, just because they haven’t done it for as long. With Skenes, I’m not worried about that.

Why isn’t he higher? It comes down to a few things for me. First, he has less team control than anyone else in this tier. Second, I’ve lowered my subjective odds of him hitting another gear and turning in numbers like Misiorowski’s, only with better command, for the next half decade. Mostly, though, I just think the next guy (cliffhanger alert — you’ll have to wait until tomorrow) is a slightly better bet.

One morsel on team evaluations here: While no one I talked to falls cleanly into the “scouts vs. stats” divide, I do think of different people as being more analytically-inclined or more scouting-inclined. Those aren’t the exact right labels, because everyone is a blend of both, but as a first approximation, it’s helpful to split people that way. The more analytically-inclined guys tended to have Skenes lower, behind Burns for sure and maybe behind Schlittler. The more scouting-inclined guys had Skenes higher, top of this tier. I don’t know who’s right, and I’m somewhere in between, but I thought it was an interesting divergence.