Who will be the best players in the upcoming season? Let’s rank the 100 best before Opening Day
• 22 min read
The 2024 regular season is nearly upon us, and it’s time for us — on pain of termination — to rank the top 100 players in baseball. The rankings you’ll soon be thundering about to the uncaring heavens above and double-birding are based upon reasonable expectations, using things like age, trajectory, scouting profile, and recent performance history to arrive at those expectations. In essence, we’re making educated guesses at which players would provide the most value in 2024.
While a player’s performance in 2023 is very relevant to these rankings, it’s not the sole consideration. Again, these are in essence predictions of which players will be the very best in the season to come, and there’s more to it than just eyeballing last year’s outputs.
As for what matters, with position players it’s a mix of batting, defense, and baserunning. On offense, we’re not concerned with things like RBI. Getting on base and hitting for power matter above all, as do playing time, context of the player’s home ballpark, and production relative to positional peers (e.g., the offensive bar is lower for shortstops and catchers than it is for first basemen and DHs). For pitchers, run prevention and workload will be the drivers, but we’ll also give some consideration to underlying fundamental indicators like strikeouts and walks. We’re ranking players based on actual baseball considerations as opposed to anything having anything to do with fantasy (although there’s obviously some overlap).
Winter and spring injuries have a major bearing here, and if a player because of health concerns figures to lose a major chunk of his season, then he’ll lose a spot he otherwise would’ve earned. Others suffering injuries not quite so serious will see their ranking drop based on those worries, but they’ll still make the cut.
Before we begin, a necessary reminder for the potentially outraged page-viewer from former Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “You are not compelled to form any opinion about this matter before you, nor to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you.”
100-91
90-81
80-71
70-61
60-51
50-41
40-31
30-21
20-11
10-1
Outraged by that upon which you have just lain jaundiced eyes? As always, reach out to the author at his personal email address — hotmail@hotmail.jpg — with all your complaints.
