The population, not a board

The Baseline

Every qualified major-league hitter — all 309 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.

263 hitters qualified in both seasons · r = 0.887 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

309 hitters · 2026 · data through July 20, 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 259 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	Junior Caminero	TB	23	.933	99	112.8	111.2	+1.7	0.450	0.448	SQUARE	286
2	Jordan Walker	STL	24	.880	97	112.8	112.0	+0.8	0.465	0.471	SQUARE	271
3	Jac Caglianone	KC	23	.784	94	112.6	111.4	+1.2	0.489	0.449	OWED	230
4	Oneil Cruz	PIT	28	.822	64	112.6	114.0	-1.4	0.519	0.514	SQUARE	146
5	Yordan Alvarez	HOU	29	1.083	100	112.4	112.0	+0.4	0.569	0.513	OWED	289
6	James Wood	WSH	24	.954	101	112.0	112.8	-0.8	0.601	0.533	OWED	246
7	Nick Kurtz	ATH	23	.902	92	112.0	111.1	+0.9	0.535	0.532	SQUARE	203
8	Fernando Tatis Jr.	SD	27	.736	99	111.9	110.2	+1.7	0.419	0.370	OWED	306
9	Elly De La Cruz	CIN	24	.854	80	111.6	109.8	+1.8	0.478	0.476	SQUARE	214
10	Willson Contreras	BOS	34	.941	92	111.5	110.2	+1.3	0.500	0.505	SQUARE	232
11	Henry Bolte	ATH	23	.680	57	111.2	—	—	0.352	0.375	SQUARE	128
12	Shohei Ohtani	LAD	32	.930	96	111.2	111.0	+0.1	0.512	0.471	OWED	256
13	Coby Mayo	BAL	25	.664	78	111.1	107.6	+3.5	0.415	0.387	SQUARE	147
14	Bobby Witt Jr.	KC	26	.800	94	110.9	111.2	-0.3	0.454	0.388	OWED	292
15	Aaron Judge	NYY	34	.908	59	110.9	112.7	-1.8	0.542	0.467	OWED	141
16	Vladimir Guerrero Jr.	TOR	27	.695	95	110.8	112.1	-1.3	0.371	0.313	OWED	300
17	Garrett Mitchell	MIL	28	.833	90	110.7	—	—	0.494	0.508	SQUARE	180
18	Hunter Goodman	COL	27	.881	93	110.5	109.7	+0.8	0.488	0.520	SQUARE	220
19	Kyle Schwarber	PHI	33	.923	97	110.4	111.6	-1.2	0.561	0.577	SQUARE	212
20	Heliot Ramos	SF	27	.779	62	110.3	109.3	+1.0	0.471	0.447	SQUARE	168
21	Michael Harris II	ATL	25	.837	93	110.1	110.1	+0.0	0.446	0.432	SQUARE	277
22	Jo Adell	LAA	27	.680	100	110.1	110.9	-0.8	0.393	0.360	SQUARE	292
23	Jorge Soler	LAA	34	.667	78	110.0	109.1	+0.9	0.407	0.387	SQUARE	182
24	Mike Trout	LAA	35	.846	82	109.8	110.6	-0.8	0.500	0.419	OWED	200
25	Riley Greene	DET	26	.854	99	109.7	109.6	+0.1	0.475	0.475	SQUARE	246
26	Samuel Basallo	BAL	22	.755	86	109.7	—	—	0.448	0.411	SQUARE	201
27	Jarren Duran	BOS	30	.594	92	109.7	110.0	-0.3	0.397	0.329	OWED	242
28	Matt Olson	ATL	32	.875	99	109.6	110.1	-0.5	0.467	0.454	SQUARE	282
29	Ketel Marte	AZ	33	.773	96	109.6	110.7	-1.2	0.407	0.363	SQUARE	323
30	Amed Rosario	NYY	31	.737	57	109.6	107.7	+1.9	0.410	0.386	SQUARE	115
31	Jake Burger	TEX	30	.724	96	109.4	109.8	-0.3	0.400	0.397	SQUARE	252
32	Seiya Suzuki	CHC	32	.833	84	109.3	109.7	-0.3	0.413	0.445	PAID	226
33	Colton Cowser	BAL	26	.638	88	109.3	108.1	+1.1	0.398	0.348	OWED	142
34	Dominic Canzone	SEA	29	.846	86	109.3	109.4	-0.1	0.446	0.419	SQUARE	185
35	Julio Rodríguez	SEA	26	.737	90	109.2	111.1	-1.9	0.411	0.377	SQUARE	272
36	Lawrence Butler	ATH	26	.590	92	109.2	109.3	-0.1	0.374	0.312	OWED	172
37	Carter Jensen	KC	23	.739	93	109.2	—	—	0.375	0.416	PAID	224
38	Jake Bauers	MIL	31	.852	91	109.2	108.2	+1.0	0.468	0.453	SQUARE	209
39	Matt Chapman	SF	33	.692	84	109.2	109.7	-0.5	0.328	0.345	SQUARE	225
40	Owen Caissie	MIA	24	.756	80	109.2	—	—	0.492	0.498	SQUARE	129
41	Shea Langeliers	ATH	29	.819	90	109.1	109.5	-0.4	0.451	0.427	SQUARE	274
42	Jesús Sánchez	TOR	29	.753	73	109.1	111.0	-1.9	0.424	0.393	SQUARE	165
43	Austin Riley	ATL	29	.656	99	109.0	110.9	-1.8	0.394	0.357	SQUARE	243
44	Francisco Alvarez	NYM	25	.766	67	109.0	110.2	-1.2	0.443	0.416	SQUARE	156
45	Juan Soto	NYM	28	.954	82	109.0	110.4	-1.4	0.462	0.415	OWED	243
46	Pete Alonso	BAL	32	.807	101	109.0	112.5	-3.5	0.489	0.420	OWED	264
47	Cam Smith	HOU	23	.645	100	109.0	107.5	+1.5	0.408	0.335	OWED	243
48	Luke Raley	SEA	32	.747	86	108.9	109.5	-0.5	0.503	0.438	OWED	159
49	José Tena	WSH	25	.713	74	108.9	105.4	+3.5	0.415	0.408	SQUARE	118
50	Brady House	WSH	23	.681	44	108.9	107.8	+1.1	0.428	0.385	OWED	113

Showing 50 of 309 · — 259 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 106.0; the range runs 96.7 to 112.8.