2022 Outfielder and Designated Hitter Rankings

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Up this week are my just-for-fun 2022 player rankings. I’ve done my best to list players where they’ll be eligible next year, and the free agents-to-be are listed without teams. Players with options for next year are still listed with their current teams if those options have a legitimate chance of being exercised. Those players are noted with asterisks.

Click to see other other preliminary 2022 rankings:

Top 300 | SP | RP | OF | 1B | 2B | SS | 3B | C | DH

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Outfielder and Designated Hitter Rankings

• Ronald Acuña Jr.’s unfortunate knee injury drops him out of the top spot here. I probably would have kept him over Fernando Tatis Jr. as the No. 1 overall player if not for his torn ACL. As is, I’m putting him fourth among position players. He should be ready for Opening Day, but he probably won’t be 100 percent.

• It’s not a great class of free agent outfielders behind Starling Marte and Michael Conforto, though it will get better if Nick Castellanos opts out. That would seem to be an easy call for him if he finishes off his career year healthy. He’s owed $34 million over the next two years under the terms of his Reds deal. J.D. Martinez, who has one year and $19.375 million left on his contract, also had another opt out after declining to exit Boston each of the last two offseasons. It’d be an easier call for him if he knew whether the DH would be available in the NL next year, but it seems highly unlikely that will be determined by the time he needs to make a decision. Unless he’s willing to take a big pay cut to play for a contender, Charlie Blackmon will pick up his $21 million player option to stay in Colorado.

• There are some key eligibility questions here. Eloy Jimenez could return to the White Sox lineup at the end of the month, but he’ll probably DH the majority of the time and might not get the 20 games in the outfield he’d need to maintain eligibility in standard leagues. It looks like Yordan Alvarez will get his 20 games in the outfield, assuming that he stays healthy; he’s at 12 right now. Shohei Ohtani probably won’t, since he’s sitting at five. Whit Merrifield has 14 games in the outfield, so it looks like he’ll probably remain eligible here in addition to second base.

• The DHs are listed with the outfielders here. As of right now, there seems poised to be five significant DH-only players in standard leagues: Ohtani, Franmil Reyes, Nelson Cruz, Giancarlo Stanton and Yermin Mercedes (although labeling Mercedes as significant might be a stretch).

• The top minor leaguer on the list is Boston’s Jarren Duran, who should debut sometime this year. I don’t know that he’ll hit for average initially, but he will offer power and speed while batting in a quality lineup. Then it’s quite a drop to Julio Rodriguez, Josh Lowe, Riley Greene and Ryan Vilade. No one from that group is assured of being up at the start of the year, though. Lowe probably has the best chance; he has been great in hitting .290/.362/.518 in Triple-A this year and he could debut for the Rays this summer. Julio Rodriguez might be more of a 2023 guy, but as one of the game’s top-five prospects, he can’t be ignored here.