Trout, Betts, Rodríguez: The definition of MLB’s five-tool players

By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer

“Five-tool player.”

It’s a term uttered hundreds if not thousands of times on baseball broadcasts, podcasts and pre- and postgame shows in any given season. It’s typically used to refer to any position player who isn’t just a hulking, one-dimensional slugger or a player who consistently showcases an impressive level of speed and hitting ability.

But in truth, that’s a pretty oversimplified version of the term. For professional scouts and baseball evaluators, that term, “five-tool player,” is hallowed ground, a rare honor bestowed upon only the true unicorns of the sport.

So what does “five-tool player” actually mean? And how many five-tool players are actually in the big leagues right now? Let’s hop right into it.

MLB’s five-tool players

FOX Sports’ Jake Mintz reveals the true five-tool players in MLB, not including Angels superstar Shohei Ohtani. Check out Jake’s reasoning as well as his list.

The Origins of “Five-tool Player”

Instead of giving players a letter grade like an A+ or a C- at a particular skill, scouts grade on something called a 20-to-80 scale. It’s a bit cockamamie, but at the very least it comes from a scientific place. The idea is that 50 is average, and every 10 points above or below that represents a standard deviation from the average — three deviations above the average and three below.

20 is horrible

30 is poor

40 is below average

50 is average

60 is plus

70 is plus-plus

80 is just 80

Some teams and scouts will use 45 and 55, some will even use 35 and 65, but that basic 20 to 80 scale is vital in (1) understanding how pro baseball folks think about players and (2) the origins of “five-tool player.”

Scouts use that grading system to score position players on the five main tools, which are:

1. Hitting for average (batting average)

2. Hitting for power (slugging/home runs)

3. Defense (eye test/defensive metrics, but those can be inconsistent)

4. Speed (sprint speed)

5. Throwing arm (eye test/velocity tracking from Statcast)

(Pitchers have their own grading system, but we’re gonna just gloss over that here for the purposes of this discussion.)

Each of those five tools gets a grade from 20 to 80, and for a player to be a true five-tool player in the eyes of most professional evaluators, he needs to be at least plus (60 or above) in all five categories. By using a combination of traditional stats (batting average and slugging percentage over a multi-year span) and modern motion tracking data from Statcast (sprint speed, arm strength), we can determine who the real five-tool players in the bigs are.

A Note on Shohei Ohtani

Ohtani quite literally breaks the scale. He’s probably a 60 hitter with 80 power, an 80 arm and 70 speed. But we can’t put a number on his defense because he has barely played outfield in the big leagues. As a pitcher, he’s borderline elite, but that’s a different thing.

So yeah, call Ohtani a five-tool player if you want, but he’s honestly more like a six-tool player, or a superhero. Again, this dude just breaks convention.

Here are the players who are on my list.

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