The population, not a board

The Baseline

Every qualified major-league hitter — all 406 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.

296 hitters qualified in both seasons · r = 0.896 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

406 hitters · 2026 · data through September 27, 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 356 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	James Wood	WSH	24	.891	135	112.8	112.8	+0.0	0.556	0.490	OWED	334
2	Oneil Cruz	PIT	28	.854	97	112.6	114.0	-1.3	0.491	0.519	PAID	220
3	Jac Caglianone	KC	23	.834	143	112.3	111.4	+0.8	0.478	0.466	SQUARE	367
4	Jordan Walker	STL	24	.793	158	112.1	112.0	+0.1	0.434	0.438	SQUARE	432
5	Junior Caminero	TB	23	.884	162	112.1	111.2	+0.9	0.429	0.425	SQUARE	475
6	Nick Kurtz	ATH	23	.879	99	112.0	111.1	+0.9	0.531	0.524	SQUARE	210
7	Elly De La Cruz	CIN	24	.880	143	111.7	109.8	+1.9	0.481	0.481	SQUARE	370
8	Fernando Tatis Jr.	SD	27	.828	159	111.5	110.2	+1.3	0.445	0.406	SQUARE	502
9	Yordan Alvarez	HOU	29	1.033	158	111.5	112.0	-0.5	0.521	0.488	OWED	445
10	Henry Bolte	ATH	23	.764	119	111.2	—	—	0.389	0.433	PAID	281
11	Shohei Ohtani	LAD	32	.889	139	111.2	111.0	+0.2	0.510	0.465	OWED	369
12	Coby Mayo	BAL	24	.758	132	110.9	107.6	+3.3	0.462	0.432	SQUARE	272
13	Aaron Judge	NYY	34	.871	66	110.8	112.7	-1.8	0.541	0.468	OWED	151
14	Willson Contreras	BOS	34	.902	130	110.7	110.2	+0.5	0.461	0.471	SQUARE	312
15	Vladimir Guerrero Jr.	TOR	27	.688	144	110.7	112.1	-1.4	0.362	0.316	OWED	462
16	Bobby Witt Jr.	KC	26	.800	143	110.7	111.2	-0.5	0.441	0.384	OWED	443
17	Spencer Jones	NYY	25	.742	86	110.6	—	—	0.512	0.483	SQUARE	151
18	Garrett Mitchell	MIL	28	.770	145	110.5	—	—	0.479	0.452	SQUARE	297
19	Agustín Ramírez	—	25	.672	72	110.5	110.8	-0.3	0.339	0.346	SQUARE	166
20	Luis Robert Jr.	BAL	29	.707	61	110.5	109.0	+1.5	0.388	0.354	SQUARE	148
21	Taylor Trammell	HOU	29	.626	99	110.4	—	—	0.373	0.359	SQUARE	161
22	Kyle Schwarber	PHI	33	.857	156	110.4	111.6	-1.2	0.506	0.490	SQUARE	362
23	Jo Adell	CLE	27	.699	159	110.1	110.9	-0.8	0.404	0.368	SQUARE	442
24	Esmerlyn Valdez	PIT	22	.855	72	110.0	—	—	0.515	0.556	PAID	132
25	Griffin Conine	MIA	29	.846	94	110.0	—	—	0.506	0.483	SQUARE	189
26	Julio Rodríguez	SEA	25	.708	150	109.6	111.1	-1.5	0.405	0.364	OWED	452
27	Mike Trout	LAA	35	.803	142	109.6	110.6	-1.0	0.472	0.410	OWED	346
28	Jake Burger	TEX	30	.723	155	109.6	109.8	-0.2	0.407	0.394	SQUARE	389
29	Michael Harris II	ATL	25	.812	155	109.5	110.1	-0.6	0.420	0.416	SQUARE	473
30	Samuel Basallo	BAL	22	.697	112	109.5	—	—	0.423	0.375	OWED	256
31	Pete Alonso	BAL	31	.885	161	109.5	112.5	-3.0	0.527	0.459	OWED	435
32	Matt Olson	ATL	32	.823	162	109.5	110.1	-0.6	0.461	0.430	SQUARE	456
33	Austin Riley	ATL	29	.654	159	109.5	110.9	-1.4	0.419	0.380	OWED	369
34	Munetaka Murakami	CWS	26	.825	127	109.5	—	—	0.510	0.486	SQUARE	250
35	Riley Greene	DET	26	.844	140	109.4	109.6	-0.2	0.480	0.460	SQUARE	355
36	Jorge Soler	—	34	.664	86	109.4	109.1	+0.3	0.401	0.388	SQUARE	201
37	Hunter Goodman	COL	27	.839	138	109.4	109.7	-0.3	0.445	0.479	PAID	342
38	Jarren Duran	BOS	30	.627	151	109.4	110.0	-0.6	0.393	0.338	OWED	392
39	Ketel Marte	AZ	33	.748	141	109.3	110.7	-1.4	0.380	0.342	SQUARE	474
40	Roman Anthony	BOS	22	.735	55	109.3	108.8	+0.5	0.437	0.402	SQUARE	145
41	Heliot Ramos	NYY	27	.716	112	109.3	109.3	+0.0	0.438	0.401	SQUARE	280
42	Francisco Alvarez	NYM	24	.710	113	109.2	110.2	-1.0	0.454	0.410	OWED	246
43	Cam Smith	HOU	23	.669	157	109.2	107.5	+1.7	0.397	0.359	OWED	361
44	Matt Chapman	SF	33	.692	84	109.2	109.7	-0.5	0.328	0.345	SQUARE	225
45	Owen Caissie	MIA	24	.700	108	109.1	—	—	0.458	0.445	SQUARE	175
46	Shea Langeliers	ATH	28	.802	106	109.1	109.5	-0.4	0.443	0.419	SQUARE	316
47	Randal Grichuk	CWS	35	.880	117	109.1	109.3	-0.2	0.436	0.464	PAID	205
48	Carter Jensen	KC	23	.790	149	109.1	—	—	0.412	0.433	SQUARE	362
49	Jake Bauers	MIL	31	.873	144	109.0	108.2	+0.8	0.478	0.468	SQUARE	320
50	Juan Soto	NYM	27	.908	111	109.0	110.4	-1.4	0.452	0.393	OWED	335

Showing 50 of 406 · — 356 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 97.0 to 112.8.