Top 100 MLB players ranked for 2021: Mike Trout and Mookie Betts at the top, but young stars not far behind

The 2021 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 yelling about 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 will provide the most value in 2021. While a player’s performance in 2020 is very relevant to these rankings, it’s not the sole consideration. This time around, the prior season is far less of a consideration than it usually is. That’s of course because the 2020 season was played in the middle of a pandemic and entailed a sample size of just 60 regular season games. We won’t ignore it entirely, but we’ll put much less emphasis on it than we would a standard season. Again, these are in essence predictions of which players will be the very best in the season to come, and there’s always 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 base-running. 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. Also, 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). We’re furthermore not concerned with how these players will fare in seasons beyond the upcoming one. This is all about anticipated value in 2021 alone. 

Above all, remember that this is Internet Street, and only righteous grievances live here. Let us commence. 

Outraged by that upon which you have just lain jaundiced eyes? As always, reach out to the author at his personal email address — hotmail@aol.jpg — with all your complaints.