Contract Crowdsourcing 2020-21: Ballot 1 of 10
Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowd to better understand and project the 2020-21 free-agent market.
This year, we’ve added a few new features to the ballots based on reader feedback. You now have the option to indicate that a player will only receive a minor-league contract, or won’t receive one at all. We’ve elected to show averages from the 2017-2019 seasons so that this year’s shortened slate doesn’t skew the numbers, but we’ve also included 2020 stats as a point of recent reference. 2020 salary figures represent players’ pre-pandemic contract amounts. Statistics are prorated to full season where noted; the projected WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2021 Steamer600 projections.
Below are ballots for six of this year’s free agents — in this case, a designated hitter as well as a collection of catchers.
Meg is the editor-in-chief of FanGraphs and the co-host of Effectively Wild. Prior to joining FanGraphs, her work appeared at Baseball Prospectus, Lookout Landing, and Just A Bit Outside. You can follow her on Bluesky @megrowler.fangraphs.com.
Hoo boy, this is gonna be a hard one.
Lots of guys who would have gotten 2 or 3 year contracts are getting one year contract; lots of guys who would have gotten 1 year contracts are getting minor league deals.
Confused by the low JT Projection, also if you looking the FA page of roster resources Yadier is projected for more war? Some other projections that confuse me on that page: Andrelton Simmons at replacement level, Tanaka at 2.9 (seems high), Turner at 3.7 seems a bit high too though not crazy. Shoemaker at 2 feels high as well
Yep, every single one of those seems wrong. It’s possible that it’s just a bunch of gibberish numbers but you could argue it looks like they’re scraping off of the projections for the 2017 season instead of the 2021 one. It holds up for basically every single player I’ve clicked on.
Yeah something seems up with some of these for sure. Especially the Realmuto-Molina thing.
This entire exercise feels almost impossible given, you know… everything. It’ll certainly be interesting to see how wrong we all are!
I think a lot of these are pretty straightforward–they’ll be getting one (or maybe two year deals in the case of Cruz) with what they made last year. The real question comes in with guys who won’t get 1-year deals for what they made last year (e.g., Realmuto). I don’t have any idea how that is going to play out because there will be fewer mystery teams.
I am of the opinion that there will be very limited attendance in 2021 but I don’t know how much that affects revenue and with that as my basis of making any guesses I think this exercise is impossible. It really hurts a great player like George Springer who appears to be forced to take a short term deal, probably only one year, which sucks because he is past 30 and could see his chance at a huge deal never materialize.