Last week, I took a look at the best 10-year periods in baseball history by position player WAR. As it relates to the modern game, Mike Trout is on one of the greatest 10-year runs in history, and he’s only been at it for eight seasons. Currently, there isn’t a Mike Trout equivalent on the pitching side, but that shouldn’t be surprising – the only player with a more impressive record than Trout over the last 50 years is Barry Bonds. There just isn’t going to be a Trout-like pitcher in every generation because Trout’s talent and production are so rare. But that doesn’t mean that the last decade of Clayton Kershaw isn’t one of the more impressive performances in baseball history.

Over the last 10 seasons, Clayton Kershaw’s 59.1 WAR is the best in baseball among pitchers, four wins clear of Max Scherzer, who is a win ahead of Justin Verlander. Kershaw was actually slightly better from 2009-2018, with 59.8 WAR, which also led baseball. He’s also first in the 10-year periods beginning in 2008 and 2007 despite not playing in the majors in 2007 and not making his debut until late-May of the 2008 season. Kershaw has ended a season as the 10-year WAR leader four times, and is very likely to do so for a fifth time in 2020, but would need to be a couple wins better than Scherzer over the next two seasons to extend that streak to 2021.

Since 1909, only 30 pitchers have ended a season as the game’s 10-year WAR leader. Only eight have more than Kershaw’s four seasons as 10-year WAR leader and only Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens have more than Kershaw over the last 60 years:

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We tend to think of decades in two ways. The first is to classify a set of years with the same number in the tens column i.e. 80s, 90s, etc. This makes for very easy groupings when looking at the best what-have-you of a decade, or an all-decade team, but it can also be fairly restrictive. Just because 1961 and 1969 are both in the 60s, doesn’t really make them the same; we certainly hope that 2029 looks both much different and better than 2020 is shaping up to be. This manner of grouping arbitrarily chooses endpoints. But there is another way to look at a decade, and that’s to see it as any 10-year period. It’s much less restrictive and provides for more comparisons, particularly when it comes to baseball players, who tend to have relatively short primes that overlap different decades.

That was a relatively long-winded way to lead into what I’ve done, which is to look at a rolling 10-year position player leaderboard for every year since 1909. It should come as no surprise that Mike Trout’s 74.3 WAR leads the 10-year period from 2010 to 2019. He also leads the period from 2009 to 2018 and from 2008 to 2017. Since he didn’t play in 2010 and only accumulated 0.7 WAR in 2011, he’s almost guaranteed to lead the periods ending from 2020 to 2022 as well. For reference, the only players since the 10-year period ending in 1909 to be 10-year WAR leaders in six separate seasons are Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt, and Barry Bonds. Only 24 players have topped the 10-year WAR leaderboard even once in the last 111 seasons. Here are those players:

If Trout is even halfway decent over the next few years, he’ll end up in the top-five of that list with the potential to hit double-digits. This is what the top-three for position players has looked like over the last 10 years:

If you are wondering where Trout’s 73 WAR ranks historically, it’s 101th, though if Trout were to have standard Trout seasons in 2020 and 2021, he could get into the top 10 and potentially have the best 10-year period in history since Babe Ruth. Here are the very best decades in history:

Since World War II, only Willie Mays and Barry Bonds have averaged nine wins per season for an entire decade. The only other player in the last 75 years to hit 80 WAR in a 10-year period is Mickey Mantle. That’s a mark Trout would likely have gotten to this year with a full season’s worth of play, with an outside shot at topping Mays and Bonds with another Trout-like season in 2021. Even Trout’s 70 WAR puts him in pretty rare company. Below is the complete list of position players with 70-WAR decades:

Mike Trout is already guaranteed two more decades of at least 70 WAR, with an 80-WAR season a reasonable possibility. I should also note that Ted Williams hit his 70 WAR in 10 seasons from 1946-1955, but he also put together 67 WAR from 1939-1948 despite missing three years in that time due to World WAR II. Over the last 50 years only six players have bested Trout’s eight-year stretch over the course of a decade.

With a 5.5 WAR season in 2020, Trout would pass everyone on the list above except for Barry Bonds. There are a lot of ways to talk about just how good Mike Trout is as a baseball player, and this post is evidence that we haven’t run out of ways to show his brilliance on the diamond.

Lastly, for the sake of being a completist, here’s the top-three in WAR for every 10-year period going back to 1909:

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Last week, readers answered the survey questions regarding what the upcoming season will look like that I have posed several times since the end of March. In late March, nearly 72% of respondents believed some sort of major league baseball would be played this year. That number dipped slightly two weeks ago, and with another 1,500 or so votes, the confidence level has dropped further.

This is how the results look over time:

Fewer readers believe major league baseball will be played this season, but a majority still fall on the optimistic side of the fence. As for how many games will be played… Read the rest of this entry »

We don’t spend a lot of time talking about batting average at FanGraphs. While getting on base with a hit is still important in today’s game, getting on base via a walk is nearly as good as a single. Hitting doubles, triples, and homers is also very important and looking at batting average doesn’t factor in any of that production. It’s missing out on a lot of important results and thus, isn’t as useful as it was once thought to be when determining how good a hitter is at the plate. To some, this might be a slight, impugning players with great batting averages like Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn, two of the only three batters in the last 50 years with career batting averages over .320 (Rod Carew is the other). But it’s important to note that just because Boggs and Gwynn had high batting averages, doesn’t mean that they would be less valuable in today’s game.

Boggs and Gwynn both had career wRC+ marks of 132, with Boggs’ 88 WAR ranking sixth among all position players since 1969 and Gwynn’s 65 WAR making him a Hall of Famer as well. That combined the two players have fewer home runs than Ryan Zimmerman is of little concern to their overall value. The two were great hitters, though with ISO’s closer to .100 than .200, they might be referred to as singles hitters today. That’s a little unfair, and even a little inaccurate, as both rank in the top-20 of doubles-plus-triples over the last 50 years. I wondered what Gwynn and Boggs might do if placed in today’s game. The game has changed in the last few decades, with smaller parks and shrinking strike zones to go along with significant increases in average pitch velocity and many more offspeed and breaking pitches as well. Taking Boggs and Gwynn from the 80s and plopping them into today’s game wouldn’t be a fair test, but we can take a look at how they adapted to changes in their era to see how they may have adapted today. Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of last year, it looked like the Wilpon family might sell the New York Mets to Steven Cohen for around $2.5 billion. The proposed sale was an unusual one. It did not include SNY, the Mets’ regional sports network, which is owned by the Wilpons; the Wilpons were also set to maintain some degree of control of the team for years after the sale. In what didn’t come as much of a surprise given the deal’s unusual nature, things fell apart and the Mets are once again looking for new owners. Enter Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez.

As reported by Scott Soshnick in Variety, Rodriguez and Lopez have sought help from JPMorgan Chase to raise funds to purchase the team. The piece notes that A-Rod and J-Lo have a combined net worth of around $700 million, which is obviously well short of what is needed to meet a potential purchase price over $2 billion. While that gap might appear insurmountable, an A-Rod/J-Lo owned Mets team isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem. First, consider that any purchase of this type is going to be financed with a considerable amount of debt. As Tom Ley wrote in his analysis of the Cubs’ previous sale — in the Ricketts’ initial plans to purchase the Cubs, there was talk of financing as much as $750 million of a potential $1.15 billion deal, though in the end, they paid $845 million and financed $450 million — teams are bought with significant amounts of financing:

Ted Lerner purchased the Nationals for $450 million in 2006, and the “Debt Primer Presentation” GSP sent to the Ricketts includes the details of that sale as a case study for how a highly leveraged purchase can work. Lerner took on the maximum amount of debt—$360 million—in order to purchase the team. Jim Crane bought the Houston Astros for $615 million in 2011, reportedly by taking on $300 million in debt; the Dodgers ownership group assumed $412 million in debt when they purchased the team in 2012.

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Since the end of March, we’ve been tracking reader sentiment regarding the potential for an upcoming season. It’s been two weeks since the last round of polling, so here are the questions again; these are the same as our initial set. Hopefully your answers will reveal how sentiment has changed (or not) over time.

Thank you for your time and assistance. We will report back with the results.

The end of March featured a bit of relatively good news on the baseball front, as MLB and the MLBPA agreed on a deal that appeared to address issues like service time and player compensation during this unusual season, allowing for a smooth path forward once and if it is safe to begin play. (Amateur players, who saw the rounds of the June draft dramatically reduced, got a far less good bargain.) The deal looked to be a good compromise from both sides, seemingly ensuring that labor questions would not get in the way of an abbreviated season. However, recent reports, which keyed off comments from Mets owner Fred Wilpon to New York governor Andrew Cuomo, indicate that the peace is not quite as secure as was once thought.

As initially reported, the deal seemed fairly straightforward. The players would receive a salary advance of $170 million that would not need to be paid back in the event of a cancelled season. In addition, the players were to receive service time consistent with what they had accrued in 2019 if no season was played. The players and owners agreed that player salaries would be pro-rated to the number of games played, with service time calculated in the same fashion. The owners received a guarantee that players would not sue for their 2020 salaries. The owners were also given the ability to defer more than a quarter of a billion dollars of draft and international bonuses to future years while the reduction in rounds would eliminate between $50 million and $100 million from the draft pool entirely. Read the rest of this entry »

What this winter’s free agent market ends up looking like — and how lucrative it proves to be for players — is unsurprisingly very much in flux. The 2020 season is still in flux, and how it plays out, or if it ends up being played at all, will have a significant affect on the offseason. If there’s no season, we know that players will still receive service time, making guys like Mookie Betts, James Paxton, and J.T. Realmuto free agents. Players will receive raises in arbitration. For competitive balance tax purposes, no season would mean no tax payments. The Red Sox would still need to stay under the $210 million tax threshold in order to reset their tax amount, though with 2021 being the final season of the current CBA between the players and owners, the ramifications of such a move are very much unknown and could end up being completely nullified by a new deal.

Ifsome version of the season does get played, there might be slightly fewer questions, but the winter will still bring about considerable uncertainty. With that in mind, and the season still a ways off, let’s take a moment to see how team payrolls are shaping up this offseason. For the graph below, I looked at competitive balance tax payrolls, which take the average annual value of contracts and include around $15 million in benefits, with a few million for 40-man players not on the active roster, as well as expected minimum salaries players. I estimated arbitration-eligible players by giving them a 50% raise over 2020 figures and for the most part, I declined club options. The only options shown as exercised below are for Adam Eaton, Starling Marte, Anthony Rizzo, and Kolten Wong. All others are presumed declined. All figures are from our RosterResource Payroll pages. If rosters remain the same with a season played in 2020, this is what we might see as payroll heading into free agency.

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