Kevin McGonigle: Baseball's Most Underrated Player by WAR

Detroit's rookie shortstop ranks third in MLB position-player WAR, but his quiet stat line and non-contending team keep him off the radar.

Published: September 2, 2026 · Figures as of September 2, 2026

Asked: Who’s the most underrated player in baseball?

By WAR, Kevin McGonigle is the strongest case for underrated

A note on the method first: "underrated" isn't something we track directly — we don't have media coverage, awards voting, or All-Star data to measure a player's reputation against. What we can measure is the gap between a player's actual value (bWAR, which folds in hitting, baserunning and defense) and how quiet his profile looks — a losing team, no gaudy counting stats, no star billing. On that basis, the strongest candidate in the majors right now is Detroit's 22-year-old rookie shortstop, Kevin McGonigle.

McGonigle ranks 3rd in the majors in position-player WAR at 6.11, out of 326 qualified hitters — behind only Pete Crow-Armstrong (8.4, Cubs) and Bobby Witt Jr. (6.31, Royals), both of whom are already recognized stars on winning or nationally visible teams. McGonigle's own team, the Tigers, sit 63-74 (.460), 24th of 30 teams in the league and out of the playoff race, currently on a three-game losing streak. Nothing about his raw stat line jumps off the page either: .274 average, 14 home runs, 58 RBI over 133 games — modest counting numbers that undersell a genuinely elite season.

That value isn't just bat-driven. He also carries 1.84 defensive WAR, tied for 8th-highest among all MLB position players (min. 84 games), meaning his ranking is built on both sides of the ball rather than one loud offensive category. That combination — a near-top-3 overall value on a non-contending team, without a single traditional stat that would put him on a leaderboard a casual fan checks — is exactly the profile that gets overlooked.

A parallel case on the pitching side, worth a mention: Seattle's Bryan Woo leads all qualified starters in ERA-minus-FIP at +1.07, the widest gap in the league — meaning his results have actually run worse than his strikeout/walk/homer peripherals support, the clearest "his stuff is better than his ERA suggests" signal in this year's data. It's a diagnostic rather than a value ranking, so I'm not treating it as the headline case, but it's the strongest data-backed argument for an underrated arm.

Confidence: Medium. The WAR-based case for McGonigle is well-supported by measured value and team visibility, but "underrated" ultimately depends on public perception we can't observe directly — a fan or scout weighing name recognition, scouting reports, or award buzz could reasonably land somewhere else. What the data does establish cleanly is that he's producing top-3-in-baseball value with a profile that gives him almost no reason to be noticed.