Top 10 MLB Free Agent First Basemen & Designated Hitters For 2025

Image credit: Pete Alonso (Photo by Tom DiPace)

October baseball is in the air, meaning the offseason isn’t far behind. We’re identifying the top MLB free agents teams could target this winter by taking a data-driven approach to this year’s crop of players. We will release new position groups in the coming days.

Below, you can find our breakdown of the top 10 free agent first basemen and designated hitters in the 2025 class, including three-year season averages in several key metrics.

Our list leverages work from MLB Trade Rumors for the list of free agents, as well as FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus and Baseball Reference for player win values above baseline, Baseball Savant and Baseball Prospectus for defensive data and FanGraphs for all other data. We encourage our readers and subscribers to consider subscribing to FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus as well.

SEE THE LIST

1. Pete Alonso

Alonso is a model of consistency and is the rare player for whom you can comfortably give 35 home runs as a reasonable floor of production. There’s a very odd quirk in Alonso’s Statcast data: His top-end exit velocities, as measured by his 90th percentile exit velocity (EV90) listed above, are borderline elite. However, his average exit velocities hover around one mph above league average, year after year. This points to a hitter who has the potential to be even better than he has been.

Alonso optimizes his swing to do damage to his pullside, as illustrated by this Baseball Savant home run spray chart:

When he isn’t able to pull the ball, he struggles to do damage. But even when he does pull the ball, he’s only about 1-2 mph above the major league average for pulled and straightaway batted balls. With this much data, it’s likely that this is just who he is. Theoretically, it may point to a player with some untapped potential, and some team may believe in their player dev enough to help him unlock a little bit more consistency.

2. Christian Walker

Walker has been an excellent defensive first baseman, and according to Baseball Savant, has put up some of the best defensive seasons of anyone at the position going back to 2016. According to Baseball Prospectus, Walker’s defense over the past three years has been elite:

2024: +3.3 Runs (third best)
2023: +1.7 Runs (MLB best)
2022: +1.3 Runs (MLB best)

I’m not sure what drives the difference in run values between the two sites, but what is very clear is that Walker is a fantastic defender at first base, possibly the best at the position. Let’s talk about the bat now:

Walker is the rare hitter that has above-average in-zone aggression, and above-average avoidance of chase. It’s a shockingly good, nearly-flawless profile, with at least 70 grade raw power, excellent launch angles and about MLB average contact rates. All of it plays up because of his excellent decisions against all pitch types.

3. Marcell Ozuna

Ozuna has been the top performing 1B/DH in this free agent class, and appears to be getting better the less he has to worry about playing a position. If he were 3-4 years younger, he’d be at the top of the list. He’s been more valuable than Walker, but he occupies a DH slot, giving the team that signs him less roster flexibility.

4. Rhys Hoskins

From 2017-2022, Hoskins was one of the most productive hitters in baseball. In 2023, he suffered a terrible knee injury that knocked him out for the entire season. No matter how you slice it, 2024 was a very bad year for Hoskins, providing almost no value compared to a readily-available player. His optimized launch angle swing helped him swat 25+ HRs, but his sprint speed was a career worst 25.3 feet/second, and his bat speed was a very concerning 71.2 mph, which is 37th percentile.

The question becomes, was he still recovering from the torn ACL, or has the injury permanently sapped him of his power? Theoretically, the further away from surgery he gets, the healthier he’ll be. If he’s fully healthy, he’s one of the few batters you can pencil in for 30+ HRs.

So why do we have him ranked fourth? Because he showed some very encouraging bat speed data to end the season.

From April trough July, Hoskins maxed out at 83.7 mph bat speed, with his second highest bat speed clocking in at 81.6 mph. Since then, he’s uncorked multiple 85+ mph swings, suggesting that he may finally have turned the corner from a health perspective. That may be reading a lot into a 5-6 swings, but despite all his challenges this year, he still hit 25 HRs. This is perhaps a bold ranking, but after the top three, Hoskins has the best combination of upside, floor and age.

5. Paul Goldschmidt

Our natural tendency with players of a certain age is to write them off when they have a bad season. I was curious if age-related performance cliffs was a real thing, or a cognitive bias I had created in my head, so I reached out to Jonathan Judge over at Baseball Prospectus. I highly recommend you read his research on the subject of aging curves. What he sent over surprised me somewhat: The typical player will see a decline of 6-7 points of OPS per year in the early to mid 30s, and then roughly 8 points of OPS through age 40. That’s significant, but also strongly counteracts the “cliff” narrative I had built in my brain. I love it when data proves me wrong.

So what do we make of Goldschmidt’s 2024 season? We have three perspectives. On the surface, his performance was much worse, hovering close to league average, as measured by wRC+.

As per Baseball Prospectus, DRC+ is a “rate measure of a player’s batting performance based on fundamentals, not merely results; indexed to a league-average of 100, with higher values indicating better performance”. In 2022, he had a DRC+ of 154, followed by a 126 last season and an even 100 this season at the time of writing. Our natural human tendency is to continue the trend line, 154, 126, 100 must mean 75 is next, right? Maybe.

Despite the surface level numbers looking much worse this season and the process metrics such as DRC+ looking much worse, Goldschmidt’s underlying metrics such as zone contact rates and his various exit velocity metrics were the same this season as last season. That suggests to me that a large component of his decline may be random variation, bad combinations of exit velo and launch angles that may regress to the mean next season. Or he may have lost bat speed and it’s affecting his timing. I think he’ll post a season closer to his 2023 numbers and will likely be a tremendous value, the way Brandon Belt was in his final season.

You could make a reasonable argument to slide him down this list, but we felt his combination of track record and quality defense puts him ahead of the other names on this list.

6. Joc Pederson

Did you know Joc Pederson will be almost 33 years old on opening day? Feels like just yesterday he was an up-and-coming slugger for the Dodgers.

Pederson has accrued just 57, 52 and 40 plate appearances against lefties in 2022, 2023 and 2024 respectively (at the time of writing). He’s only a DH! He’s a platoon only guy! Sure, but he was worth three wins this season.

Pederson is a shining example of a player who does his job exceptionally well (DH against RHPs) and will likely be a tremendous value for any team that scoops him up. He’s also a great example of why you shouldn’t write a player off after a bad season. He likely won’t be as good as he was this year, but even a repeat of 2022 would help a lot of teams.

7. Ryan O’Hearn

The quality of the free agent class really drops off after Pederson. O’Hearn is a solid player, but his ability to impact the ball is rapidly diminishing, and that’s quite worrisome. Exit velocity is one of those metrics that don’t usually bounce back, and his was down no matter how you slice it. While his average exit velo is still above the MLB average, it declined by almost two mph from last year. His 90th percentile exit velocity is now four mph below average after a decline of two mph from last season, and his max EV is about one mph below major league average and also declined by about one mph.

That all makes him sound like a player whose value will collapse in the coming years, but baseball is a funny sport. You can also succeed by being a contact machine. O’Hearn avoids swing-and-miss 82% of the time on all pitches and 91% of the time on pitches in the zone, both marks that are 8% better than the average hitter. He looks likely to be useful bat that won’t hit a lot of home runs, but will do enough damage and get on base enough to be a slightly-better-than-average hitter. This is the type of player that often returns positive value in free agency.

8. Carlos Santana

Remember our discussion on age related decline? Santana is another great example of why we shouldn’t write off a hitter once they hit a certain age.

In 2020, Santana’s overall performance dipped below average for the first time, but he still walked more than he struck out. Then, in 2021, his wRC+ dipped to a very concerning 81, which would have led you to believe he had “lost it.” With his three-year wRC+ trend of 138, 99 and 81 might make you assume the next season would be something like 70. The underlying skills of quality contact and patience were still there, and he’s been a better than average batter for three seasons since then, and he is suddenly playing great defense at first base, according to both Baseball Prospectus and Baseball Savant. He’s very likely to be in the 1-2 win range for at least another two years, but his value is limited as most teams will shy away from a player approaching 40.

9. Josh Bell

It’s worth noting that Baseball Prospectus has a relatively bullish view on Bell’s three-year value compared to the FanGraphs and Baseball Reference. This is a good example of the error bars around any particular player’s win values, and at the risk of sounding like Nate Silver, usually the best bet is to just “toss ’em in the average”.

While his 90th percentile exit velocities have dipped below average, his max is still above average, and in the aggregate, Bell looks like he’ll be a league average hitter, anchored to first base. Depending on team context, he’ll be a useful addition. Given the decline in top-end exit velocity and the 25th percentile bat speed, he’s unlikely to recapture some of his great early-career seasons.

10. J.D. Martinez

The market for a 37-year-old DH coming off a poor offensive season might be light, but his underlying metrics are still very strong, as he hits the ball hard and in the air. Depending on how his market plays out, he’ll be a fantastic addition to a team looking to deploy him as platoon bat against lefthanders, against whom he has posted a wRC+ of 139, 142 and 174 over the past three seasons. If a team is willing to have both Martinez and Pederson on the roster, the platoon combination of this pair could be one of the best hitters in baseball.