The population, not a board

The Baseline

Every qualified major-league hitter — all 384 of them — ranked by EV95: line up every ball he has hit this year by how hard it left the bat, walk five per cent down from the top, and read the speed. That is his top-of-range contact, with the one freak swing trimmed off. It is a speed, not a rate, and not the same thing as the share of balls he hits at 95 mph.

Nothing here is selected. The breakout and fade boards are twenty and fifteen names cut out of this exact table, and this is what they were cut out of — so you can check the selection instead of taking it.

Two different arguments, and only one of them is the list

Scroll the ranking and you will mostly find the men you would have named. That is worth something — it says the number is measuring the thing you already believe in — but it is a recognition test, and recognition is not prediction. A leaderboard of loud bats cannot tell you whether the number comes back next year. Nothing that ranks one season can.

291 hitters qualified in both seasons · r = 0.895 on this year’s names. Run across every pair the engine has, the same test gives r = 0.88. That one is the study, frozen and published; this one is tonight’s, and it moves.

This is the prediction argument. Every dot is a hitter, placed by what he did last season across and what he is doing this season up. The dashed line is “exactly what he did last year.” The cloud sits on it.

That is the whole engine. Hard contact travels between seasons at r = 0.88; a hitter’s luck on contact travels at r = 0.27, which is close to not at all. We bet on the first and against the second, and the One Chart is that sentence in two pictures.

A season needs 100 balls in play at this level to appear in the 2025 column. A hitter with no qualified 2025 — a rookie, or a man who missed the year — shows a dash rather than a number built out of forty swings.

And whether he has been paid for it

Hitting it hard is half a story. The other half is what the box score gave him for it, so every row carries both: what his contact was worth against what he actually got, and the one-word read that falls out of the difference: OWED, SQUARE, PAID. OWED means his contact has outrun his line and the box score owes him. PAID means the reverse: he has been paid for balls that were not struck well enough to keep paying. The cut is ±0.030 of contact value, and it is a description of tonight, not a call. A call gets filed to the Ledger with a metric, a threshold and a window, and then it is judged in public whichever way it goes.

The ranking

384 hitters · 2026 · data through September 5, 2026

Click any heading to sort — by last season, by what he has gained since, by what he is owed. Filter with the chips, or search by name, club, division or league. The table opens on the top fifty and says so; the other 334 are one click away, and nothing is left out of it. Everyone here has cleared 100 balls in play this season; that is the qualifying bar, and it is the only thing standing between this table and the whole league.

The read

Against last season (±1.0 mph)

Age

				What the market sees		What the engine sees
#	Player	Team	Age	OPS	G	EV95	EV95 ’25	Hold	Deserved	Got	Read	BIP
1	Oneil Cruz	PIT	27	.835	80	112.6	114.0	-1.3	0.513	0.522	SQUARE	178
2	Junior Caminero	TB	23	.897	142	112.4	111.2	+1.2	0.430	0.435	SQUARE	416
3	Yordan Alvarez	HOU	29	1.031	141	112.2	112.0	+0.3	0.534	0.487	OWED	394
4	Jac Caglianone	KC	23	.825	131	112.2	111.4	+0.8	0.476	0.458	SQUARE	342
5	Jordan Walker	STL	24	.840	139	112.1	112.0	+0.2	0.441	0.459	PAID	395
6	Nick Kurtz	ATH	23	.879	99	112.0	111.1	+0.9	0.531	0.524	SQUARE	210
7	James Wood	WSH	23	.925	117	112.0	112.8	-0.8	0.579	0.507	OWED	293
8	Elly De La Cruz	CIN	24	.840	123	111.8	109.8	+2.1	0.465	0.462	SQUARE	326
9	Fernando Tatis Jr.	SD	27	.791	140	111.5	110.2	+1.3	0.441	0.387	OWED	442
10	Henry Bolte	ATH	23	.741	100	111.3	—	—	0.377	0.414	PAID	236
11	Shohei Ohtani	LAD	32	.906	133	111.2	111.0	+0.2	0.510	0.471	SQUARE	356
12	Coby Mayo	BAL	24	.730	114	111.1	107.6	+3.5	0.443	0.423	SQUARE	222
13	Willson Contreras	BOS	34	.900	125	111.0	110.2	+0.8	0.460	0.471	SQUARE	302
14	Aaron Judge	NYY	34	.908	59	110.9	112.7	-1.8	0.542	0.467	OWED	141
15	Bobby Witt Jr.	KC	26	.811	124	110.9	111.2	-0.3	0.449	0.390	OWED	384
16	Vladimir Guerrero Jr.	TOR	27	.689	128	110.7	112.1	-1.4	0.360	0.314	OWED	415
17	Garrett Mitchell	MIL	28	.761	127	110.7	—	—	0.467	0.449	SQUARE	256
18	Agustín Ramírez	MIA	24	.647	56	110.6	110.8	-0.2	0.316	0.324	SQUARE	132
19	Spencer Jones	NYY	25	.761	69	110.6	—	—	0.507	0.485	SQUARE	114
20	Luis Robert Jr.	BAL	29	.707	61	110.5	109.0	+1.5	0.388	0.354	SQUARE	148
21	Taylor Trammell	HOU	28	.653	85	110.4	—	—	0.371	0.371	SQUARE	142
22	Esmerlyn Valdez	PIT	22	.859	68	110.2	—	—	0.522	0.571	PAID	123
23	Kyle Schwarber	PHI	33	.876	136	110.1	111.6	-1.5	0.522	0.519	SQUARE	311
24	Jo Adell	CLE	27	.695	140	110.1	110.9	-0.8	0.405	0.371	SQUARE	389
25	Griffin Conine	MIA	29	.856	75	109.8	—	—	0.513	0.490	SQUARE	139
26	Hunter Goodman	COL	26	.846	122	109.7	109.7	+0.0	0.466	0.502	PAID	289
27	Mike Trout	LAA	35	.798	123	109.7	110.6	-0.9	0.465	0.407	OWED	304
28	Munetaka Murakami	CWS	26	.832	107	109.6	—	—	0.496	0.485	SQUARE	216
29	Julio Rodríguez	SEA	25	.696	132	109.6	111.1	-1.5	0.408	0.360	OWED	396
30	Jake Burger	TEX	30	.722	136	109.6	109.8	-0.2	0.407	0.396	SQUARE	346
31	Samuel Basallo	BAL	22	.713	101	109.6	—	—	0.427	0.382	OWED	234
32	Jarren Duran	BOS	30	.618	134	109.5	110.0	-0.5	0.393	0.337	OWED	357
33	Heliot Ramos	NYY	26	.693	98	109.5	109.3	+0.2	0.435	0.388	OWED	247
34	Matt Olson	ATL	32	.838	142	109.5	110.1	-0.6	0.473	0.446	SQUARE	391
35	Michael Harris II	ATL	25	.816	136	109.5	110.1	-0.6	0.425	0.421	SQUARE	407
36	Austin Riley	ATL	29	.659	140	109.5	110.9	-1.4	0.414	0.383	SQUARE	328
37	Pete Alonso	BAL	31	.852	143	109.4	112.5	-3.1	0.512	0.442	OWED	388
38	Jorge Soler	—	34	.664	86	109.4	109.1	+0.3	0.401	0.388	SQUARE	201
39	Riley Greene	DET	25	.825	121	109.4	109.6	-0.2	0.483	0.451	SQUARE	303
40	Ketel Marte	AZ	32	.766	122	109.3	110.7	-1.4	0.385	0.355	SQUARE	401
41	Carter Jensen	KC	23	.755	133	109.2	—	—	0.389	0.412	PAID	320
42	Shea Langeliers	ATH	28	.829	93	109.2	109.5	-0.3	0.457	0.431	SQUARE	281
43	Cam Smith	HOU	23	.671	139	109.2	107.5	+1.7	0.395	0.355	OWED	324
44	Matt Chapman	SF	33	.692	84	109.2	109.7	-0.5	0.328	0.345	SQUARE	225
45	Owen Caissie	MIA	24	.697	102	109.2	—	—	0.452	0.444	SQUARE	167
46	Kyle Stowers	MIA	28	.815	105	109.2	109.5	-0.4	0.477	0.477	SQUARE	246
47	Amed Rosario	NYY	30	.695	81	109.2	107.7	+1.5	0.410	0.371	SQUARE	156
48	Dominic Canzone	SEA	29	.807	127	109.1	109.4	-0.3	0.435	0.405	SQUARE	307
49	Ryan Vilade	TB	27	.796	82	109.1	—	—	0.404	0.402	SQUARE	157
50	Lars Nootbaar	AZ	28	.715	72	109.0	108.4	+0.6	0.398	0.333	OWED	179

Showing 50 of 384 · — 334 more below the cut, not left out of it

Left of the rule is the league’s own line on the player — his results, not our numbers, and never an input to any FVR signal. Right of it is what the engine measures. The board ranks the distance between them.

OPS — On-base plus slugging — the league's own line, not an FVR signal · G — Games played — how much season is behind that line · EV95 — 95th-percentile exit velocity (mph) — how hard he hits it at his best · EV95 ’25 — The same hitter's EV95 in the previous season, for the men who qualified in both · Hold — Change in EV95 against last season, in mph — a difference, not a speed · Deserved — What his contact was worth — the value his batted balls earned, per ball in play · Got — What his contact actually produced, per ball in play — on the same scale as Deserved · Read — Whether his results have kept up with his contact, run behind it, or run ahead of it · BIP — Sample size — how many batted balls the signals are measured on

Names without a link are hitters the engine ranks but does not yet keep a page on. The table is the whole qualified league; the pages are the set we track, and we do not grow one to flatter the other. Median EV95 in this league tonight is 105.8; the range runs 96.8 to 112.6.