A Graphical Look at Free Agency
Since my specialization at FanGraphs is graphics creation, I aim to produce many non-traditional, yet thought-provoking data visualizations regarding different aspects of baseball throughout the year.
With free agency is winding down as pitchers and catcher report to Spring Training, I created two graphics showing different views of the free-agent signing period from November to February 18, 2015. I pulled data from FanGraph’s 2015 Free Agent Tracker, which includes the signing date, salary information and the contract length.
The first graph shows the total Average Annual Value (AAV) of all players signed each week. From this visual, teams spend the majority of their money within the first two months of the off-season with the bulk of the money spent right after the Winter Meetings. January and February show substantially less activity except for Max Scherzer’s $210 million, 7-year deal. Overall, most of free agency activity takes place before Christmas.
The next graphic is an attempt to visualize the complexity of Major League Baseball contracts, which includes two critical dimensions: total salary and contract length. Each box represents an individual contract, and the attributes of the box reflect the details of the contract. The length of the box corresponds to the length of the contract, a darker colored box represents a higher AAV, and the text inside the box summarizes the total salary commitment and the contract length. Finally, the chart is sorted by total salary the team committed in 2015 free agent signings during the off-season.
The Nationals, Red Sox, and Cubs lead MLB for the total amount of salary they’ve committed in free agency. In that group, the Max Scherzer and Jon Lester signings standout as the two largest contracts of the off-season in terms of total salary, AAV, and contract length.
The White Sox have signed the most multi-year contracts and consequentially have the most free agent player-years (analogous to man-hours) this off-season. This visualization allows you to spot short-term contracts with high AAV. For example, Alex Rios has the largest 1-year contract with a total salary value of $11 million.
I hope that these visualizations give you a more comprehensive view of the free agent activity this offseason.
I build things here.
I think the inevitable February spike in spending should be called the “Boras Bump”
Very effective graphics.
Sean, could you overlay previous year on this graph, so we can see how the flow of activity goes year to year?
I’d have to find data for it, but that’s a good idea. If anyone ever have suggestions or ideas for what you want to see graphically, just tweet at me: @seandolinar.
I really appreciate the good infographics you’re bringing to the site. I think the ability to communicate a lot of information in a clear, appealing, and effective graphic is so critical. Not that it was exactly bad before, but you’re really taking it to another level. Thanks and welcome!
(Bear in mind I may be a robot.)
I’m pretty sure I used this sentence in my cover letter to FG:
“I think the ability to communicate a lot of information in a clear, appealing, and effective graphic is so critical.”
Thank you!
Cool, I didn’t know fangraphs had a free agent tracker. How do I find it on the front page?
I don’t know if it’s on the home page, but it’s here:
http://www.fangraphs.com/freeagents.aspx?sign=all&pos=all&nteam=all&oteam=all
It looks like the Red Sox are missing the Koji Uehara signing (both in your chart and the source data). Maybe he is getting missed because he missed being a free agent by about a day (signed 10/30/2014, one day before he officially become a FA)? Not sure how many other players are in similar situations, but for all intents and purposes, he was a FA.
I went off of FG’s FA tracker, so this is essentially a visualization of that, but in my opinion that’s an extension rather than a FA signing.
Fair enough. Guess you have to draw the line on FA/extension somewhere.