Season grade leaderboard

An MLB grade measures runs above an average player. Every way a plate appearance can end has a run value: what it does, on average, to the runs a team can expect to score in the rest of the inning. A home run is worth about 1.39 runs, a double 0.75, a single 0.47, a walk 0.32, and an out costs 0.27. We worked these out from every play of the 2023 to 2025 seasons, the years since the pitch clock and the shift ban. A player is credited with how far his results beat what an average player would have done in the same plate appearances, and parks are taken into account: a hitter at Coors Field has it harder to stand out than one at T-Mobile Park.

• Hitters are graded on every plate appearance except intentional walks and sacrifice bunts, plus stolen bases and times caught stealing. Reaching on an error counts as the out it should have been.
• Pitchers' game grades count everything the batters they faced did. Season grades count strikeouts, walks, hit batters and home runs in full but balls in play only a quarter for how they turned out, because over a season those depend mostly on the fielders and on luck. Tested on 2022 to 2025, that blend predicted the next season's runs allowed almost as well as ignoring balls in play entirely, and far better than a pitcher's own runs allowed did.
• Season grades rank runs above average per game a player's team has played, so they count how much he plays as well as how well, against this season's qualified players in his role: hitters with 3.1 plate appearances per team game, starters with an inning per team game, relievers with 40 innings over a full season.
• Game grades need 3 plate appearances or batters faced, and rank one game against every such game of the regular season. Starters are ranked against starts and relievers against relief outings.
• Defense isn't in it. The play-by-play we use names fielders only in words, so a great shortstop's glove doesn't show.

How NFL grades work →