Esmerlyn Valdez

The Seam

The Barrel and the Whiff — The best contact quality in baseball and one of its worst in-zone whiff rates come out of the same swing. Which way it breaks is the whole story. July 25, 2026

The card rack

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FlagshipEsmerlyn Valdez #CPA-EV · 2024 Bowman Chrome Prospects Autograph · 257 recent sales 7N ▼30.2%

His flagship is his rookie — one card, one market.

$62.00Raw$162PSA 9$322PSA 10$419BGS 10PSA 10 · 60 nights

Live on eBay now · asking, not sold · as of 2026-10-11 · paid links

$49.95Ungraded$65.99Ungraded$69.97Ungraded

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Scout’s note

Esmerlyn Valdez hits the baseball as hard as anyone in Triple-A — his EV95 of 110.64 lands in the 99th percentile of the 504 AAA bats we track, grading at 0.48 on the MLB value grid. The 22-year-old from San Juan La Maguana has 17 home runs in 72 games for Pittsburgh, but 108 strikeouts tell you the contact comes with a long swing. The engine says the power is real and rare; the whiff is the tax. Contact is all this board ranks.

Note written Oct 4 · FVR scout (GLM-5.2)

Current signals

The read: Valdez's EV95 of 110.6 sits in the 99th percentile of the 504 AAA bats we track (median 104.9), and on the MLB value grid his contact grades at 0.48. Contact is what this board ranks and all it ranks — no name is held off it.

EV95 (mph)

110.64

xVal (MLB grid)

0.4822

Balls in play

139

Age

22

A market fact, not an engine read: what a club decided about him, on the season before this one. Figures from Cot’s, as of August 7, 2026.

2026 salary

—

Tax hit

—

Service time

0 yr 116 d

Options left

2 / 3

Cash and the tax hit are two different rulebooks and are never subtracted from one another — see the payroll board for his club, Pittsburgh Pirates.

A second set of books

The same contract, read by MLB Spreadsheets (Ethan Hullihen), as of September 17, 2026. We keep two sources on this because one source cannot check itself.

Tax AAV

$0.78M

Guaranteed

$0.78M

Term

1 yr

His class

Pre-Arb

The tax AAV above is his number under the CBA’s own rulebook, not the average we work out from Cot’s total. On a contract with deferred money the two come apart on purpose — and neither is subtracted from the other.

Collect Esmerlyn Valdez

If the signal is right, the cardboard usually finds out later. Current listings:

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Not financial advice. We take positions only after publication — never before. Misses stay on the record.

The Bureau on Esmerlyn Valdez

The scouting press, in their own words