Free Agent Leaderboards
With the regular season winding down, half the teams in baseball are already beginning to shift their focus to the off-season. If you root for one of those teams, you may already be looking forward to the winter and the roster changes it may bring. To help kick start your speculation needs, the guys over at MLB Trade Rumors have created four free agent leaderboards using the custom leaderboard tools here at FanGraphs. Here’s what Steve Adams wrote when he introduced them last week:
I should also note that I’ve included all players on this list that could end up as free agents, even those who have club options that are likely to be exercised. Ben Zobrist, Yunel Escobar, Mark DeRosa, Rafael Betancourt, Jose Veras, James Shields and Casey Janssen are included for now, even if they’re highly unlikely to hit free agency. The leaderboards also include injured players like Rafael Furcal and Corey Hart who will draw free agent interest despite not seeing big league action in 2013. Their stats from previous seasons will appear if you set the date range to include previous years.
A nifty feature of the custom leaderboards is that you can take what’s already been made by someone else, make whatever changes you want, and then save it as one of your own custom reports. So, if you don’t want to see guys like Zobrist and Shields on the list — because, realistically, they’re not going to be free agents this winter — you can simply remove them from the list and re-save the report to have your own version. Steve did all the hard work, but you’re free to customize his list to suit your own needs.
Without further ado, here are the links to the four lists.
Thanks to Steve and the MLBTR gang for doing the heavy lifting. Enjoy!
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
I wonder who is going to sign Mariano Rivera?
Even though he’s retiring after this season it’s an interesting thought exercise to think about how long the NYY would keep signing Jeter and Rivera if they decided they wanted to keep playing. Would they allow them to be signed by other teams if their production fell?
Holy crap, I had no idea Konerko was at -1.5 WAR.
Yunel Escobar might have the quietest 5 WAR season ever.
Ahh, I see now that it is past 365 days, not just this season
So, Garza, Lincecum, Pelfry, Or Kazmir – Two Years Ago I Did Not Think They Would Be Ranked Next To Each other
That’s the magic of WAR!
According to Baseball-Reference, Coco Crisp has a 7.5 million dollar team option. Should he be included in the list of players likely to have their options picked up by their current teams? Or is it likely Oakland will opt for the 1 million dollar buyout and choose to go young?
I would have to think they would buy him out. Not Oakland’s nature to want to pay up when you can spend just two million to not have Coco Crisp and whoever his replacement will be. They’ll find a new Josh Reddick on some team, pluck him, plant him in CF, and watch him grow.
Because it’s just that easy…
I think they will pick up the option. Coco’s should be worth that much, and the team is not so deep at CF next year (chris young probably not coming back).
To to take away from the great lists, but the part I like best is knowing that I can put ‘&players=’ with a list of IDs to get the stats page for only selected players 🙂
Is there a super-secret way to exclude players who debuted before or after a particular year too? 🙂
That was supposed to be ‘Not to take away from…’
So TL;DR for the position players available next season if all make it to free agency (and correct me if I’m wrong) there’s a wealth of FA catchers, OF’s both corner and CF’s, and Robinson Cano?