Dollar Per WAR 2025/2026 - Fangraphs Perceptions
Photo Credit: Michael Reaves/Getty Images
Fangraphs has released its 2026 free agent crowdsourced contract projections and WAR projections and they show an interesting trend about how the baseball community perceives the value of WAR.
For each of the 22 players who are projected 2+ WAR, the average $/WAR projection is $7.7m, just a bit below the $8m per WAR from last offseason.
Figure 1 shows a plot of $/WAR (y-axis) against projected WAR itself (x-axis). I’ve highlighted five sections of players:
Best Player Available: Kyle Tucker; $7.95/WAR
Allstar level FA: Bo Bichette, Alex Bregman, Dylan Cease, Framber Valzdez; average $7.28m/WAR
Tier 2 Allstar-level FAs: (9 players—see graph); average $7.62m/WAR
Pete Alonso: $10.3m/WAR
High Leverage Relivers: Edwin Diaz, Devin Williams, Robert Suarez: $17.5m/WAR
Figure 1: Dollar/WAR (y-axis) versus WAR (x-axis)
There’s a slight premium placed on the best player available. Perhaps an expectation of a bidding war? Tier 1 and Tier 2 allstar level players are valued in a tight range a bit beneath the average value of the 2+ WAR players. Pete Alonso has his own valuation tier. Seems like the perception is that Mets owner Steve Cohen is going to overpay to keep his homegrown slugger. And the best relievers on the market have an eye-watering valuation of $17.5m/WAR, more than double the average value of the 2+ WAR players. A massive premium is placed on leverage— perhaps Dollar per Win Probability Added (WPA) is a better metric than Dollar per WAR here.
