Baseball researchers make lists.
We have a compulsive need to rank the best of the best, to establish a hierarchy of the game’s top talent.
As we wait for the 2021 season to arrive, I’ve compiled my list of the top ten players right now. These players, in my opinion, are the cream of the crop in Major League Baseball.
1.) Mike Trout
Trout is a victim of his own success: he’s been so routinely spectacular that anything less than perfection feels like a failure.
It’s safe to categorize Trout’s relatively low fifth-place MVP finish as yet another flukey result from 2020. Prior to the COVID-shortened campaign, Trout had either been the MVP winner or runner-up in seven of his eight full seasons.
As he enters his age-29 season, Trout is already the all-time home run leader for the Angels. He continues to surpass Hall of Famers in career bWAR — with another 9-WAR season (his average from 2012-2019), he’ll move past names like Brooks Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, Pete Rose, and Robin Yount on the all-time list.
2.) Jacob deGrom
Ignore the win totals, which are determined by factors outside the pitcher’s control. Aside from that misleading stat, no one can dispute deGrom’s claim to the top spot among starting pitchers.
In 2020, deGrom unveiled a new trick: a fastball that hit triple digits. Not content with just being the best pitcher in baseball, the Mets ace also became the sport’s hardest thrower. He hit 100 on the radar gun 33 times last season, 20 more than the next closest starter (Miami’s Sixto Sanchez).
Here’s something incredible about deGrom: he has a 2.10 ERA over 76 starts since 2018, with almost no help from his defense. In that span, the Mets rank next-to-last in the majors with -171 Defensive Runs Saved.
3.) Juan Soto
The most accurate career comp. for Soto is Ted Williams.
Seriously.
Through his age-21 season, Soto has slashed .295/.415/.557 with a 151 OPS+. Only five players had a higher OPS+ at that age, and all are legends: Ted Williams, Jimmie Foxx, Rogers Hornsby, Ty Cobb, and most recently, Mike Trout.
Soto has no true weaknesses at the dish; his patience is second to none, and he can produce hard contact no matter where the ball is thrown. The scariest part for NL pitchers is that Soto gets better and better with each passing year.
4.) Mookie Betts
Whether in Beantown or Hollywood, Betts is a necessary ingredient for a championship club. To no one’s surprise, Mookie immediately rewarded the Dodgers for their 12 year, $365M investment in 2020. He hit .439 with runners in scoring position, won a Gold Glove for his play in right field, and slugged two home runs in the World Series to earn his second ring in the last three years.
Since the start of 2015, Betts has accumulated more bWAR (43.1) than every position player except Mike Trout (47.0).
5.) Gerrit Cole
Cole wasn’t quite himself to start his Yankees career. He turned his season around after adopting fellow SoCal native Kyle Higashioka as his personal catcher, lowering his ERA from 3.91 at the start of September to 2.84 by season’s end.
Cole’s otherworldly strikeout numbers (MLB-leading 696 since 2018) are a testament to his raw stuff and competitiveness. If there is a major fault in his game, it’s that he is susceptible to the long ball — only Detroit’s Matthew Boyd and Pittsburgh’s Trevor Williams surrendered more home runs than Cole’s 14 in 2020.
6.) Freddie Freeman
As a Mets fan, I have every reason to hate Freddie Freeman. I should positively loathe him based on the damage he does to our pitching staff.
But truth be told, I have the utmost respect for Freeman.
You gain a greater appreciation for a player when you watch him beat your team time and time again. Such is the case with Freeman, the rare player who never gets overpowered in the batter’s box. In his 2020 MVP season, Freeman took his game up a notch, decreasing his swinging-strike rate by 3.1 percentage points and increasing his average exit velocity by nearly three percentage points.
High velocity is also no problem for Freeman — last year, he hit .478 (11-23 AB) against fastballs 95 MPH or faster.
7.) Fernando Tatís Jr.
If this list were of the most exciting players in the game rather than the most productive, Tatís would most certainly be on top.
Tatís hits the ball harder than anyone (he led MLB in average exit velo. and barrels per plate appearance in 2020), runs the bases like Usain Bolt, and makes defensive plays that were previously thought impossible.
The Padres shortstop finished fourth in 2020 NL MVP voting, and would have been even higher if not for a late-season slump (.208/.311/.403 slashline in September). Tatís has yet to play a full year in the majors, but his career stats hint at monster seasons to come: .301 AVG, 39 HR, 98 RBI, 27 SB, 8 3B, .956 OPS, 7.0 bWAR in 143 games.
8.) Christian Yelich
Yelich would be higher on this list if not for a dismal 2020 where he hit .205 with a .786 OPS. The inability to access the video room during games — a precaution necessitated by the pandemic — may be partly to blame.
If one views 2020 as an aberration, Yelich is still a top ten player in the sport. He was the 2018 NL MVP, finished second to Cody Bellinger in 2019, and won the batting title in each of those years. Despite the underwhelming final numbers, Yelich still ranked in the majors’ 99th percentile in exit velocity last year.
9.) Ronald Acuña Jr.
Give Acuña credit for being a former top prospect who has actually lived up to the hype. In 2019, he fell just three stolen bases shy of becoming the fifth member of baseball’s vaunted “40-40 club.”
Acuña combines effortless power with game-changing speed, and he’s been known to start the game off with a bang. It took him just 210 starts from the leadoff spot to pass Felipe Alou as the Braves’ all-time leader in leadoff dingers (Alou did it in 633 starts).
10.) Trevor Story
Story doesn’t get the credit he deserves because he plays his home games in Denver. But from an objective standpoint, he’s been the game’s top shortstop since 2018. In that span, he leads all shortstops in hits, extra-base hits, and bWAR. His defense has also been impeccable: in 2019, he ranked fourth among shortstops in Outs Above Average.
Just Missed
- Nolan Arenado
- D.J. LeMahieu
- Francisco Lindor
- Aaron Judge
- Cody Bellinger
Searle’s Final Say
There are so many gifted players in baseball right now that choosing the top ten is a challenge. The small sample size afforded by the 2020 season also made compiling the list more difficult than expected. With any luck, we’ll see these players strut their stuff for a full 162 games in 2021.
