NPB Rates & Ranks from 2024 Season

An intro to NPB blog series....

Chris Boz

Apr 18, 2025

Document : NPB Rates & Ranks Report #.5

Level : Professional - International

Source : https://www.fangraphs.com/

Offensive Date Data pulled : March 2025

Pitchers Date Data pulled: March 2025

Overview : From an offensive perspective, I rated and ranked 261 NPB position players from 2024 season. Players were assessed using a neutralized Run Value system to measure their overall offensive production, broken down into two core components:

“The Run Tool”— Captures the value generated from non-hit plate appearances (walks, stolen bases, etc.)
“The Hit Tool”— Measures a player’s offensive impact via hitting
“Overall” — A sum of the Run Tool and the Hit Tool, representing overall offensive contribution

Each player is ranked in these three categories: Run Tool, Hit Tool , and Overall .

Full List of Rates & Ranks from 2024 Season

This week, I’m releasing a rates & rankings from 2024 as a bit of a warm up for the first real blog of the NPB season on 4/21/25. I personally believe you need about a months worth of data or 100 at bats before you can have anything really tangible to say. I.e. I wouldn’t bench players using 2 weeks worth of performance data to start a season. There’s not enough of a sample size and lots of growth can happen over an offseason.

Anyways… what makes this blog cooler than the rest is that I am including the rates for position players. So you can see how much that player is worth each time they step to the plate. I will not include this in my blogs moving forward, but I wanted to show everyone the method I am using to rank players.

This is my first time covering the NPB and I’m stoked for the first blog. Each blog will include :

A top 10 position player in-depth breakdown, as well as full rankings of the entire league
Schedule for the top 10 players for the upcoming 2 weeks
Position Players Ranked by Run Value then Grouped by Age
Full Ranking of all Pitchers
Pitchers Ranked by Run Value then Grouped by Age