How the Teams Are Built

It’s been a busy offseason. Don’t believe me? Dave Cameron started out a post with the words “Screw it, I can’t even keep up anymore.” Take a look at this guy’s picture from the winter meetings. That’s the face of a writer at 1 a.m. who knows he’s going to be up until 4 a.m. because of all these damn trades the Dodgers are making.

A lot has gone on. By a quick count, well over 100 players have changed teams due to trades alone since the start of the month, and that’s so many players. That many transactions can be overwhelming, and sometimes it’s easy to forget who is on which team. To keep yourself in check, an incredibly useful site is RosterResource.com, which used to go as MLBDepthCharts.com. Jason Martinez and his crew do a great job of staying on top of recent transactions, the projected lineups and 25-man rosters are interesting to see change in real-time, and there’s other nifty tools to play with on his pages.

One of those tools recently caught my eye and held my attention, due to the bevy of aforementioned trades. It’s the “How Assembled” pages. They’re hardly a new concept, and the idea is simple: each player on the 40-man roster for each team was acquired in a specific year, and in a specific way. Whether it be through the draft, free agency, trade, or some other means, this table lets you know.

The team that really got me thinking was the Oakland Athletics. Of course, we know about Billy Beane. Something to the effect of “no player is safe” has been a mantra regarding Oakland this offseason, because it appears truly no player is safe in Oakland. Beane trades at will, so long as he feels he is improving the team, and it doesn’t matter who you are or where you came from. That leads to the A’s being the most unique team in baseball, in this one specific way, by having only four homegrown players on their 40-man roster. That is, of the 40 players who resemble the current Athletics’ roster, only four were actually drafted by the organization at some point. The MLB average is 17. Only one other team has less than 10.

Looking at the A’s 40-man roster, 27 players were acquired via trade, the most in the MLB, and five more off waivers. The A’s aren’t like most teams, with regards to their payroll, and so the A’s aren’t like most teams, with regards to how they’re built.

Sean Doolittle is the longest-tenured A’s player, drafted in the first round of the 2007 draft. A.J. Griffin was a 13th-round draft pick in 2010, and Sonny Gray was a first-round pick in 2011. The fourth guy is Renato Nunez, who wasn’t even taken in the June draft, and was instead selected as an amateur free agent out of Venezuela in 2010. That’s it for homegrown players in Oakland.

Compare that to the 27 homegrown players on the New York Mets’ 40-man roster, and the differences in organizational philosophies become readily apparent. The organizational ladder for the Mets dates all the way back to 2001 when franchise-favorite David Wright was drafted in the first round. Jon Niese and Bobby Parnell were both drafted in 2005, Juan Lagares, Daniel Murphy and Ruben Tejeda followed in 2006, and a whole host of current 40-manners came in 2007, including starters Jenrry Mejia, Lucas Duda, Dillon Gee, Jeurys Familia and Wilmer Flores.

It’s interesting because the Mets have been undergoing something of a rebuilding process over the last several years, which could help explain their stockpiling of homegrown players. They trust their draft selections, and so they want to see them pan out. At the same time, the other end of the spectrum includes the A’s, who are constantly in some state of rebuild despite whether or not they’re competing, and the Astros, who have been undergoing one of baseball’s most known rebuilds, despite having just nine homegrown players on their current 40-man roster. It just goes to show that there’s no one way to run an organization, and there’s not even one way to rebuild.

In case you’re as interested in all of this as I am, I constructed a sortable table that puts all of the “how assembled” data in one place for your convenience. Not all of the rosters add up exactly to 40, because not everything is finalized just yet. But it paints the picture all the same:

The other part of this that really held my interest was free agency. Trades are sort of their own beast. They can be as inconsequential as a single-A non-prospect for cash, and sometimes a trade simply amounts to a salary dump. But a free agent signing, more often than not, means something. A free agent signing typically makes a statement. Prices are high in the free agent market, so you don’t commit dollars to one unless it has a real purpose.

At the top of this table, in the free agency column, we find the usual suspects. The Red Sox, the Dodgers, the Yankees — it’s about who you’d expect. But the inclusion of the Twins and the Giants among those teams show that not all free agents are alike. I wanted to take it a step farther and evaluate how each team plays the free agent market, and how it’s paid off for them.

So I added up the 2015 salary commitments for the free agent acquisitions of each team, and I added up their projected WAR for 2015, taken from our in-house depth charts, which are based on Steamer projections. Using these totals, I was also able to calculate $/WAR — how much each team is paying for their wins, and $/FA — how much each team has paid their free agents. All dollar figures are, of course, represented in millions:

The table is sortable, so play around with it. I’m not presenting this data to draw and sort of conclusion, it’s just really interesting to me.

Although the Yankees and Red Sox don’t necessarily stand out in terms of the number of free agent contracts, they certainly stand out in committed money, each with well over $100 million committed to free agent signings in 2015. The $/WAR column isn’t a perfect method of “evaluating” how each organization’s free agent contracts have panned out because there’s still a lot of noise, but it’s a decent gauge.

One team who really stuck out to me were the Red Sox, who really don’t have an ugly free agent contract on the books this year despite having $120 million committed. Their average free agent will earn $11 million this year, third-most in the MLB, but they all project to earn it. David Ortiz ($16M), Junichi Tazawa ($2.5M), Shane Victorino ($13M), Koji Uehara ($9M), Mike Napoli ($16M), Rusney Castillo ($11M), Hanley Ramirez ($20M), Pablo Sandoval ($18M) and Justin Masterson ($9.5M) are all projected to be worth what they’ll earn, if you assume somewhere around $7M/WAR. Add it all up and Boston is paying their 11 free agents a respectable $6.2 million per projected win in 2015. The Yankees are in a similar situation, at $7.6 million per projected win, which is higher than league average, but still not terrible.

On the other end of the spectrum is Philadelphia, who, thanks to Jonathan Papelbon, Cliff Lee and Miguel Gonzalez, are paying their eight free agents nearly $15 million per projected win, easily the highest in the MLB.

This is starting to run long, so I’ll shut up and let you guys play around with the data and find some more interesting nuggets on your own. That isn’t a very good way to conclude a blog post, is it?