2025 Fantasy Baseball Week 13 Trade Values: Exploring where Hunter Goodman, Wyatt Langford, and Seth Lugo land

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Ranking most players is pretty easy. One of the easiest players to move up a whole bunch in the rankings over the past few weeks was Ronald Acuña, who is back to being ranked in the top-10 overall in both Roto and Head to Head points after returning from his torn ACL and looking immediately like one of the very best hitters in the world again.

It’s easy to move Acuña up that much that quickly because we’ve seen it before. He has a .913 career OPS and has been one of the best hitters in the world basically since he stepped onto a field. There was some room for skepticism after he struggled coming off his previous torn ACL in 2022, but with Acuña sporting the 13th-best xwOBA in baseball since his debut (.434), it’s easy enough to write that skepticism off. 

Not every player is that easy to rank. So, before we get to the updated trade values charts for this week, let’s look at three players who are becoming increasingly difficult to rank:

I’m inclined to just rank Goodman as a top-five catcher and get it over with. He’s certainly playing like one right now – only Cal Raleigh has outscored him so far in CBS Fantasy points leagues, and he is one of just three catchers currently ranked in the top-100 overall in Rotisserie League. Top-five doesn’t even sound all that aggressive, does it?

Of course, it isn’t that simple. Goodman is in the midst of a pretty massive hot streak, and we’re still at the point in the season where a couple of great weeks can really change a player’s outlook. At the end of May, Goodman was hitting .267/.317/.429 – good for a catcher, especially one who plays every day, but hardly the kind of player you’d need to rank in the top five at the position.

He’s put himself into that conversation with an outrageous June that has seen him homer seven times already, while hitting .350/.361/.850. The plate discipline is still bad – he has 20 strikeouts to one walk in 61 trips to the plate – but Goodman has legitimate plus power going back to his minor-league days, and he could legitimately be a 30-homer guy, which is special from a catcher. No matter where he’s ranked, you should be happy to have him on your roster right now.

But for as good as Goodman is, his expected wOBA for the season as a whole is 10th at the position. That’s excellent, but it’s still behind both Yainer Diaz and Salvador Perez, who have been major disappointments so far this season but who also have multi-year track records of the kind of performance Goodman has put together in fits and starts over two and a half months. Call me too slow to react to new information if you must, but two weeks ago, calling Goodman a top-five catcher would have looked ridiculous. I’m not going to go there yet. 

We know Langford is talented. If you were just doing a combine of all MLB outfielders, there aren’t many who would succeed at more separate skills than Langford, who sports premium exit velocities and athleticism, and has even turned himself into a pretty good defensive outfielder after spending a lot of his rookie season as a DH.

But the whole picture right now still looks pretty underwhelming as a hitter. Not bad, but not the superstar many wanted him to be. Langford’s plate discipline has taken a step back from his rookie season, and while his quality of contact has improved, it hasn’t been quite enough to take him to the next level. And the problem might be the same one as his rookie season: Langford just hasn’t quite shown the ability to punish right-handed pitchers yet. He had a .702 OPS against righties in 2024 and has only improved that to a .724 mark so far. And the under-the-hood metrics against righties continue to look mediocre – a .324 xwOBA this season, compared to a .321 mark last season. 

Most right-handed hitters don’t have the same kind of platoon issues as many left-handed hitters, and in the long run, I’m betting on Langford figuring this out. But we made the assumption that he would do that after an offseason of work heading into his second season, and that hasn’t actually happened yet. And I wonder if the two oblique injuries Langford dealt with early in the season haven’t derailed what could have been a breakout for him – oblique injuries have a tendency to linger and spoil production even when a player is cleared to play.

There’s clearly still plenty of upside here, and for as disappointing as he has been, Langford has 13 homers and 11 steals in 62 games, a 32-homer, 27-steal pace over 155 games. The batting average and counting stats are disappointing, but the power/speed combo and upside make it awfully tough to lower Langford too much in the rankings. There are other outfielders performing better than him, certainly, but how many truly have more upside? I don’t think it’s more than a dozen or so. So, we’ll split the difference and keep him ranked around the No. 20 OF. 

I just don’t know what to do with Lugo at all. We have a lot of ways to judge how good a pitcher is these days. Take your pick, and they all suggest Lugo is overperforming more than just about any pitcher in the league with his 3.05 ERA right now. By xERA, his 1.86-run overperformance is the second-highest in the league; by FIP, his 1.47-run overperformance is the third-highest; if you prefer SIERA, his 1.15-run overperformances is “only” the 12th-biggest among qualifiers.

Of course, last season, Lugo overperformed his xERA by 0.74 runs, the eighth-biggest mark among qualifiers. In 2023, it was 0.85 runs. At some point, we just have to accept that Lugo is doing something that can’t quite be captured by these ERA predictors, right?

I’m on board with that explanation, but it’s worth noting that his overperformance this season is about a run greater than it was in either of the previous two seasons. He’s sporting a 3.05 ERA despite his worst quality of contact metrics since 2020, his lowest strikeout rate since 2016, and his worst walk rate since 2021. I know Lugo has had a tendency to flummox our best efforts at understanding pitching, but he’s taking it to a completely different level in 2025.

I’m a believer in those advanced metrics. I have a process, and those advanced metrics are a big part of it. I have found Lugo to be one of the most frustrating pitchers in Fantasy because of this, but I’m also going to stick to my guns. Lugo is one of the most obvious sell-high candidates in baseball right now, and he’s not a top-40 SP for me. Maybe he’ll keep making me look bad, but a man’s gotta have a code. 

H2H Trade Values Chart

Roto Trade Values Chart

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