Rankings, contract projections for top 50 2025-26 MLB free agents - ESPN

The MLB offseason is officially here! As free agency kicks off at 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, it's time to rank the 2025-26 free agent class and predict how much money each player will get.

Let's start with a quick rundown of what you need to know about these rankings and projections.

For simplicity, the players are ranked by the size of their projected guaranteed contracts, including the posting fee for foreign professionals, so technically it's by the projected total cost to the signing team. (There are a number of players from Japan's NPB and Korea's KBO listed — that's meant to be all the players who could in theory come to MLB; not all of them will this winter.) The contract projections are a mix of my opinions and those of agents and executives, but the goal is to predict what will happen, not decide what each player is worth.

The qualifying offer (QO) is a notable piece of this puzzle — a team can offer a pending free agent a one-year, $22.025 million deal that he can accept, or the team gets compensation if he signs elsewhere — and I see 10 players who should be offered the QO (I added an asterisk to their projected contracts). That happens to be every free agent projected for over $50 million who is eligible to get the QO, and one player who seems to be borderline: Lucas Giolito.

Here are last year's projections to get a feel for how I did. One measure is to compare my projections with the actual contracts. There were 124 players I projected to get big league deals who did sign one — I projected $3.58 billion in guarantees and those players received $3.44 billion in guarantees.

I project overall spending this winter at a hair over $3.5 billion. That's almost exactly where last winter's spending landed, though I