MLB’s Middle Class Has a Free-Agency Problem
The middle class is embattled in America. Wages have stagnated. As a result, the percentage of people residing in the middle tier of income has declined over the past 40 years.
Baseball isn’t exempt from this problem. While even those players receiving just the minimum salary wouldn’t be classified as “middle earners,” context matters in this case. And in the context of baseball’s wages, the middle class is shrinking, too.
There are common obstacles facing baseball’s player pool and workers at large: a willingness among owners to pay a premium for top talent but an effort to replace other areas of the labor force with cheaper alternatives. Efficiency is king.
The ice-cold stove at the beginning of the present offseason, this period of little activity, is perhaps related and of interest.
Perhaps it’s possible that the market is sluggish simply because teams are waiting on the outcome of a potential Giancarlo Stanton trade and also the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes. But neither matter seems as though it could fully explain the slow start to the winter. Ohtani will be relatively cheap. As for Stanton, most teams are unlikely to be serious bidders for his services.
Yahoo’s Jeff Passan spoke with several MLB executives regarding the lukewarm stove. There are two points from that story relevant to this post.
Point No. 1: More teams believe they benefit from being patient.
From Passan’s piece:
“The clubs each believe, and maybe correctly, that the longer they wait, the prices will come down,” one longtime official said. “That usually has not been the case as it relates to the premier free agents, so either there’s nobody in this marketplace that teams wouldn’t live without or it’s just the latest turn that even for premier free agents we’re going to delay, delay, delay.”
I was covering the Pirates two years ago when a former World Series MVP and solid regular David Freese was still looking for work in March, coming off back-to-back two-win seasons. Freese settled for a one-year, $3 million contract. It’s possible teams have placed too much weight on pre-arbitration talent and are costing themselves modestly priced via veteran players. In the following season, Freese signed a two-year extension with the club, perhaps wanting to avoid the waiting game again that offseason.
Did Freese consider testing the open market for a more lucrative deal?
“Potentially. I also could be sitting at home until the middle of March next year,” Freese said. “You look at both markets from this winter and next winter [2016-17], they don’t seem too different.
Regarding patience and free agency, agent Scott Boras has had some success in waiting out the market and eventually getting a lucrative offer for his clients. Said Boras way back in January of 2013 when a number of his big-name clients at the time — including Michael Bourn, Kyle Lohse, and Rafael Soriano — were still unsigned:
“People call me all the time and say, ‘Man, your players aren’t signed yet,'” Boras said. “Well, it doesn’t really matter what time dinner is when you’re the steak.”
On the one hand, Boras might be correct. All three players eventually signed multi-year deals at $10-plus million plus in average annual value. On the other hand, what if you’re not the steak? What if you’re a just a decently tasty hamburger?
In an ESPN Insider post, Dan Szymborski hypothesized that a certain sect of the free-agent population would be smart not to wait for a club to meet their demands because they could end up waiting a long time to receive an offer. Once they received the offer, it could be well below the years and dollars they had initially sought. Freese is such a case. Freese had been in talks with the Angels earlier in the 2015-16 offseason.
Wrote Dan:
“Free agency is a game of musical chairs, albeit one that tends to be a bit more lucrative than the version you played in kindergarten.”
The problem for the middle tier of free agent is that this game of musical chairs is more often being filled with young talent. That brings us to the second point from Passan’s piece on the ice-cold stove…
Point No. 2: More and more teams are leery of free agency.
From Passan, again:
Added a GM: “Teams are smarter. They know how terrible free agency is.”
As a front-office official told me recently, “It’s not whether you will lose on a free-agent deal, it’s ‘how much’ a club will lose on a free-agent deal.”
More than ever before, teams understand the downside risk of free agency. Perhaps teams have become too risk averse in free agency. More teams are operating in a similar way. Many teams might prefer internal replacement options at pre-arbitration wages compared to more expensive, modest upgrades on the open market. Moreover, many teams are clearly in rebuilding mode and the Cubs’ and Astros’ success will only further incentivize dramatic teardowns.
The average MLB position player age was 28.3 years old last year, 28.4 in 2015, 28.5 in 2014, 28.9 in 2010, and 29.1 in the first year of PED testing in 2004. Notice a trend? More and more, age-30 seasons have been replaced by those from 20-somethings. Hundreds of free-agency salaries have been replaced by minimum-wage earners over the last decade.
Baseball is a young man’s game again.
When you’re not the steak, when teams are prizing young, cheap talent more than ever before, when you play in a sport with a soft salary cap (luxury cap) but no salary floor, forcing owners to spend in a $10 billion industry… you have a problem. Free agency has a problem. Baseball’s veteran middle class has a problem.
There are 150 some free agents this winter. Most of them are not elite players, so this lukewarm stove should perhaps be a concern to a players’ union that has seen its average player salary rise to record levels but has also watched owners’ share of revenue increase year after a year. It can be argued the union is too concerned with protecting its top 1% and maximum earning potential, and not concerned enough with jobs and salary levels for a broader portion of its constituency.
More free agents will be waiting until March and some will wait longer.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
So I don’t disagree with anything substantive here, but it’s worth noting that the rise of the 1% is as much a story about ownership (returns to capital) as it is about salaries. Thus, the more useful contrast in this analogy is likely between team ownership and players.
It is also worth noting that much of the divergence in top and bottom income shares over time is due to declining abilities for unions to set wages, deindustrialization, and lack of real-dollar increases in the minimum wage in the face of inflation. These have somewhat awkward but potentially illuminating parallels in the scenario Travis describes.
Of course, part of the problem is that in the MLB CBA, you essentially sign five-year apprenticeships (maybe fewer if you’re really good) followed by six-year contracts (if you’re lucky), which has less of a parallel in today’s the broader American economy. You could bargain for higher minimum wages or job protection for “middle-class” veterans who lost their jobs in the changing economy but there are some odd quirks of this labor market where those might not be as effective strategies.
Google: Jason Groome Barnegat, NJ
Jason Groome was drafted by the Red Sox and then immediately renamed “Jay” Groome in a lame attempt to signal that there would be no discussion as to how Jason Groome the prospect was able to afford to attend all those prospect showcases even though his father’s real job was long ago exported out of the USA to some third world dung hole where the workers make at best one eighth what their now permanently unemployed American counterpart was paid.
MLB owners cannot export their teams to third world dung holes. If Trout, Harper and the rest are not on the field wearing the uniforms they’re supposed to be wearing then those billion dollar TV deals are voided and the ballparks are empty.
The players are 100% of the game and they need to put down real demands like a $300 million payroll ceiling before taxes kick in and reduce their free years from seven to four. Sure the owners will say no, but the strike won’t have to go on too long before the owners figure out that this union is a lot different than the ones they destroyed to obtain their stolen wealth.
Teams are just better at assessing talent now. They realize that while a mediocre veteran may have a higher floor than an unproven prospect, they also have a lower ceiling, and a roughly equal risk of injury. The performance of the younger player may be more volitile, but it’s much easier to jettison them and start over if things don’t work out.
Hopefully this will lead to an increased appetite to take large steps to restructure pre-arb and arb salaries. I’d love to see the following in the next CBA:
1) minimum salary raised to at least $1 million – closing the gap between the lower and mid-tier FAs may have the effect of broadening the base of FA contract money available, even if we start to see a total decline in the number of contracts in the $6-9 million AAV range.
2) get rid of the ridiculous rule that teams get to pay whatever salary they want for pre-arb years and replace it with minimum salaries based on years of service time for pre-arb players
3) restructure arbitration itself so that it’s more like a true adversarial process. No limits on the evidence. Allow for true expert testimony – subject to the same limitations as the federal rules of evidence – and challenges to same, instead of the convention now where the arbitrators have only just been given permission to look beyond baseball card stats. Hopefully that will make arbitration salaries start to look more like free agent salaries. Based on the premise for arbitration, there is no justification for the salaries awarded through that process to be so far below free agent salaries, particularly since so many arbitration-eligible players are in their prime years. Side benefits: a potentially lucrative career for a number of analytically-minded baseball analysts and a private practice alternative for working for a team’s analytics department, which I’ve heard is a job hat forces people to pay a high premium (in the form of low salaries and long hours) for the privilege of working in baseball.
I agree in principle, however, the union looks out for tenured members, as evidenced by the draft and international spending caps. Young players have little clout in the union and nobody has any incentive to find ways to pay them more
if they can’t restrict the incoming supply of labor, lowering the price of that labor is just going to lower the price of their replacement. that’s an incentive to make young players more expensive.
but alas
Your point would be well-taken in a world where any but the very best FAs are signing lucrative contracts. In a world where the middle tier of free agents (and players still under club control who know that’s where they’ll end up) aren’t sure if they’ll end up getting any sort of offer at all, then the interests of tenured players starts to align with the interests of youngsters. The whole reason this problem exists is the huge disconnect between the price of pre-arb and arb-eligible players and free agents. Raise the price of the replacements, and there’s less incentive to ditch non-star veterans in favor of unproven younger guys.
The result, I think, would be slightly lower salaries for the guys in that 1.5-3-win group who do sign, but more of them signing. For a group of players who must be getting increasingly nervous every year about whether they’ll be good enough for a FA contract by the time it’s their turn, I think that would be pretty appealing to about 4/5ths of active players – all but the very best post-free-agent players, who may see slight declines in their deals to offset the millions extra that teams would have to spend filling out their rosters and paying talented arbitration-eligible guys.
The other change I’d like to see but can’t envision MLB agreeing to is cutting back a year of team control. 6 years to free agency (7 with service time manipulation) is ridiculous in a post-steroid-era world where fewer and fewer players are making it to their early 30s, let alone their late-30s, and the market isn’t valuing them once they get there.
I agree that there is an interaction between the salaries of younger players and free agents. The claim, however, that we live “in a world where the middle tier of free agents … aren’t sure if they’ll end up getting any sort of offer at all” is vastly overstated and not reflective of reality.
Based on your next paragraph, you seem to define that group to be “1.5 win to 3 win players”, who you claim often simply aren’t signing at all. I don’t believe that premise to reflect reality very well at all. The example from this article, David Freese, is a pretty significant outlier as a 2-ish WAR, older in baseball terms but not ancient player (he was entering his age 33 season when he signed the referenced free agent contract) who signed well below what we’d expect by $/WAR.
As for 1.5 to 3 win players, look at the top 50 free agent list this year – https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/2018-top-50-free-agents/ . Even if we exclude the lower WAR total for relievers, 1.5 to 3 win position players roughly starts with names like Zack Cozart (#9 on the list) and continues through names such as Neil Walker, Todd Frazier, Jarrod Dyson, Eduardo Nunez, Jonathan Lucroy, Logan Morrison (actually a bit below 1.5 WAR), etc. Are you really claiming that these players are facing a big risk of not getting any offer at all and having to be, for example, non-roster invitees with minor league contracts?
“The example from this article, David Freese, is a pretty significant outlier as a 2-ish WAR, older in baseball terms but not ancient player (he was entering his age 33 season when he signed the referenced free agent contract) who signed well below what we’d expect by $/WAR.”
Might still depend on some context. Was he holding out for an offer from a small number of teams earlier on? Perhaps he had five teams in mind and passed on some better offers from some of the other 25?
Possible that earlier on he was passing on some better one year offers expecting some multi-year offers to roll in?
—
Using a 3-2-1 weighted average of his previous fWAR and figuring -0.5 fWAR per year aging, I get a projected 1.15 fWAR. If the $/win was around $7M then, he might have reasonably been expected to get 1/$8M or 2/$13M or 3/$14M.
[edit] granted “the crowd” came up with a median 2/$18M, which I get if I ignore the -0.4 year in 2013 and treat it more like a 1.75 fWAR year.
MLBTR estimated 3/$30M — to get there with the 3-2-1 weighting, I have to assume the -0.4 win year was an aberration and make it a 4.0 win year.
“Young players have little clout in the union and nobody has any incentive to find ways to pay them more.”
I’m guessing you’ve never been a part of a union? Taking a stand on principle or ensuring that future members have it better and easier than you did are common arguments for protecting the most vulnerable members – and even the not-yet-members. A lot of unions fight for gains that won’t actually benefit their current members and may actually hurt their earning-power, at least in the short-term.
While your ideas would very likely raise the overall amount of money going to players, I don’t see it as at all a given that they would increase free agent salaries. My best guess is that they’d have little impact on free agent salaries and could conceivable actually decrease salaries for the middle-class of free agents who rely, much more than star free agents, on low revenue and middle revenue teams being part of the market for their services. Look at it this way: if a given team has a maximum amount that it will be willing to spend on player payroll, then pushing up the cost of parts of that payroll could just limit what it budgets to spend on another part of the payroll (free agents).
Important background to bear in mind is that the marginal cost per WAR in free agency is far greater than the average cost per WAR including minimum salary players, arb awards, and pre-free agency extensions. We can see this clearly in thinking through it would cost to build a team solely in free agency. A replacement level team is regarded as about 48 wins over a full seasons. So building even a true talent .500 team (33 WAR) at free agent prices (on the order of $8 to $9 million per WAR) implies a major league payroll of about $260 to $300 million. That’s obviously not how teams in fact build out a full roster, and so that’s one sign that it’s not at all a given that pushing up the average price of WAR – by increasing minimum salaries and arbitration awards – would push up the marginal price of WAR in the free agent market.
:shrug:
players deserve this development for participating in the drive to lower the price of their younger and captive competition(replacement).
Meh. It’s begging the question to say that it’s a “problem” if teams have realized that the marginal difference in expected performance between “middle class” veterans and minimum-salaried young players is not worth the cost to sign the veterans.
That is no more of a problem than if a middle-class veteran like Matt Adams, Lucas Duda or Logan Morrison gets a marginally higher salary because teams compete just a bit harder for them because they realize that paying a lower amount for their performance is more efficient that signing Eric Hosmer.
Moreover, if teams are actually seeking efficiency, but are being inefficient in the short term by not sufficiently paying the David Freese’s of the world, then there will be a market correction.
Finally, if the real issue is simply a widening gulf between total revenues and the players’ cut of total revenues, then this is the subject of collective bargaining, and can be fixed, e.g., by raising league minimum salaries.
Yes. Waiting later netted teams some value because the demand decreased terms of number of teams needing holes filled. Now if everyone is playing the waiting game. It really shouldn’t net as much value.
Competitive teams still need depth coverage and lineup stability. Re-builds still have an incentive to give out short term deals with healthy AAS. To control the arb clock on their prospects a bit better + try to flip if their gamble rolls snake eyes.
Your own article ‘baseball’s embattled middle class’ actually shows that the middle class is growing. By excluding minor league players, you have incorrectly labeled the actual middle class ‘minimum or near minimum,’ but in reality professional baseball players on or around $500k are the middle class. As you noted, this class is growing rapidly as a percentage of MLB players, from 18% in ’95 to 39% today. This class is also growing generally, as teams become smarter and more strategic about giving more lower class players a chance on the 40 man roster.
The 40 man roster, and limited option years, is actually the main culprit preventing more lower class players from breaking through into the middle class.
As others are saying, the reduced frequency of overpaying for mediocre veterans it’s simply a market correction. The added value of a marginal win tops out around $6.5m, the current free agent market rate 50% higher is not sustainable, particularly for performance levels that are not far above replacement.
Freese is a rare example of a player taking an under market contract. The number of absurdly bad free agent contracts given out last year are too numerous to list, simply for example consider every MLB free agent last year to sign for $3m AAV or more, just going A-through-D:
Brett Anderson ($3.5m, +0.8 WAR)
Jose Bautista (17.5m, -0.5 WAR),
Carlos Beltran (16m, -1.1 WAR),
Joaquin Benoit (7m, +0.2 WAR),
Joe Blanton (4m, -0.3 WAR),
Jerry Blevins (6.5m, +1.0 WAR),
Andres Blanco (3m, -0.4 WAR)
Chris Carter (3.5m, -0.7 WAR),
Andrew Cashner (10m, +1.8 WAR),
Santiago Casilla (5.5m, +0.1 WAR),
Welington Castillo (6m, +2.7 WAR),
Jason Castro (8.2m, +1.6 WAR),
Brett Cecil (7.6m, +1.1 WAR),
Yoenis Cepedes (27.5m, +1.6 WAR),
Aroldis Chapman (16.2m, +1.6 WAR),
Jesse Chavez (5.8m, +0.3 WAR),
Bartolo Colon (12.5m, +0.6 WAR),
Rajai Davis (6m, 0.0 WAR), 39
Ian Desmond (14m, -0.7 WAR),
R.A. Dickey (8m, +1.6 WAR),
Stephen Drew (3m, +0.1 WAR),
Mike Dunn (8.3m, +0.2 WAR).
By my count, that’s $198.6 for 1 season of each of the players above, resulting in +12.3 WAR, or roughly $16.15M per WAR. Almost none of these players, on multi year deals, have projected surplus value. Only one of these players provided 2.0+ WAR. Even if this sample is
Any serious minded comprehensive look at recent ‘substantial money’ FA signings would make the opposite conclusion of your suggestions that “Perhaps teams have become too risk averse in free agency,” or “It’s possible teams have placed too much weight on pre-arbitration talent and are costing themselves modestly priced via veteran players.” Only cherry picking a single David Freese example, and ignoring the dozens listed above, could put forward a pseudo-logic in support of such a conclusion- it is empirically impossible to make the case that clubs are costing themselves ‘modestly’ priced veteran players, unless you mean those FA making near minimum.
to be fair, 8 of the 22 players are relievers, so maybe WAR/$ isn’t the best metric. Also, Jose Bautista.
8 of 22 players being relievers isn’t all that far off constructing an actual roster, however, where we’d expect that 7 or 8 of 25 players would be relievers.
the original comment was about WAR/$. That the list of players to sign a $3M+ contract resembles a whole team, in part, is irrelevant to the comment.
If the sample resembles an overall roster, it’s highly relevant.
I take the point of the rebuttal about relievers to be that this group is not reflective of the cost of WAR overall, because of the oft-noted observation that the cost of reliever WAR is higher overall than it is for other players.
If, however, the percent of relievers in the sample mirrors an overall MLB roster, then the number of relievers should be valid for a comparison to what we think of as the overall average cost of WAR in free agency. That’s often quoted to be about $9 million per WAR right now. The number of relievers in the sample is a bit high, but randomly picking one or two relievers and removing them from the sample shouldn’t meaningfully change the overall total.
Putting specifics to it, I count 7 relievers on this list: Benoit, Blanton, Blevins, Casilla, Cecil, Chapman, and Dunn. (Chavez was a reliever in 2016, but he made 21 starts in 2017 that accounted for a bit over 80% of his innings pitched).
For those 7 relievers, I get a total of $55.1 million of salary and 3.9 WAR using the numbers in ThomServo’s post. That’s total $ per WAR of $14.1 million for the relievers in this group. In other words, assuming that Thom’s totals are accurate, the relievers are actually less expensive in terms of $ per WAR than the other players on his list.
The Major League minimum needs to be increased by ~1,000%
I would love to meet the MGTOWs downvoting this.
Please elaborate further on your points. Because:
1) the MLBPA only covers MLB players, hence why you should ignore minor leaguers
2) Relievers can’t be valued well with WAR or contracts, because of a myriad of issues.
3) Any serious minded comprehensive look at recent ‘substantial money’ FA signings would make the opposite conclusion of your suggestions… that “Perhaps teams have become too risk averse in free agency,” is the only conclusion your argument could come to. If you argue that aging vets are overpaid, the only conclusion is that GMs ARE too risk averse in FA, paying extra for the perceived security of a track record and low ceiling – mid floor veteran who is declining but more predictably than a minor leaguer’s performance would be.
This really gets to the heart of the issue. Teams can no longer count on free agent contracts to provide value.
The only way to build winning teams is through the draft and with international signings – two things that teams have to give up when signing a lot of these guys.
Ban billionaires.
And the world wonders why Americans continually vote against their interests.
Solid article that gives plenty of “food for thought”.
Just an idea: Some middle-class veterans might be at a disadvantage because their point of greatest value is not when they are signing contracts. A versatile, high-floor player can become more valuable than a high-ceiling player under control at midseason. A team doesn’t know they need that veteran until injuries – or flame-outs by youngsters – show their vulnerability. All of a sudden, the veteran is in demand. Kind of fits the recent “ex parte”/”ex ante” article. Reasonable?
This is exactly why the player’s union needs to not only fight for a bigger piece of the pie, but also for rookies, minor leaguers, and international prospects to be able to earn what they deserve. If the rookie contract wasn’t so low, older veterans wouldn’t be so replaceable.
But mostly the MLB and other major sports leagues need to be nationalized.
As to this quote:
“People call me all the time and say, ‘Man, your players aren’t signed yet,’” Boras said. “Well, it doesn’t really matter what time dinner is when you’re the steak.”
Oh, if only t’were true. I’d be happy to be a cannibal for a day, as I think many of us would be. I’m drooling right now, just thinking about a dinner where Scott Boras is the main course.
reminds me of that movie ‘Ravenous’
I think there is slightly too much talent now for the number of teams and that’s driving down prices for all but the most premium players. Why too much talent? Maybe teams have overall gotten better at developing players or keeping the players they have healthy. Also players seem like they are useful for longer because of modern medicine and video helping players stay on top of the game.
MLB needs an expansion to thin out the rosters and give some of these FA’s and minor league FA’s a home.
“I think there is slightly too much talent now for the number of teams…MLB needs an expansion to thin out the rosters and give some of these FA’s and minor league FA’s a home.”
Wow, I give you props for a unique perspective, as I don’t believe I’ve ever heard this argument before.
Travis, I love your writing and you generally do a great job connecting your analysis to people’s emotional experience of the game, but it’s a bit off-putting to see you lead with the American middle class’s modern struggle ahead of a reference to a player signing a $3 million one-year contract. That’s roughly 60x the median household income in the United States. Meanwhile, the cost of attending a baseball game is increasingly prohibitive to middle class families, who, by the way, pay taxes that subsidize wealthy owners’ and players’ place of work.
So if you made 20% less than your coworker for the same job, you’d be ok? Because you have enough to get by and be comfortable, why bother trying to get more?
Screehan, I don’t mean to suggest the average American has anywhere near the same financial advantages as a ML player, rather, that the middle-tier of many segments of society is being stressed by the search for greater efficiency
“Efficiency” is an odd term to use for this comparison; the MLB is one of the few places in American society where income is almost entirely merit driven in a meaningful and trackable way; and while labor is being replaced in this case; it’s still being replaced by humans; whereas deindustralization is largely caused by eliminating the need for human labor over time (and to a lesser extent globalization which is probably a more interesting approach to this kind of article). Your point in the article is fine just not the frame of reference.
In a neutral context it doesn’t seem like the way wealth moves in non regulated Capitalism can be anything but horribly inefficient on the whole.
Your point is simply not true. Efficiency gains in MLB performance analysis is helping the middle class of professional baseball players, greatly expanding their number. This comes at the expense of mediocre upper class tenured MLB players, overprotected by the union, earning more than the value of their contributions.
It is not the middle class being squeezed here, it is the mediocre rent-seeking upper class that is underperforming compared to the exorbitant wage. The ‘problem’ you’ve lamented is the opposite of the problem effecting the middle-tier of the many segments of society.
What an awful take.
The cost of tickets would not be affected by a change in revenue distribution.
Actually if you look at it elitist players have not done great since the mammoth contracts aigned by Arod, Manny and Jeter at the turn if the century (adjusted for payroll inflation) . Lower class players not doing well now either with the stagnant minimum and collusion that limits raises in pre-arb years. Middle class are just last dominoe to drop in the face of weakness of the MLBPA leadership the last 10 years
I think the biggest Problem is that Teams don’t pay marginal veterans anymore, instead of playing a 1 war Player 5M you can easily get a 0.8 win Player for the Minimum.
smart by the GMs but it is really endangering the old Agreement between Union and owners which is “we allow you to underpay the Young Players if you overpay the veterans”.
but if the Teams stop paying the veterans (except the upper third in Quality which probably is getting richer) without raising the salary of the Young Players this will lead to another Labor fight in the Long run.
The owners can’t squeeze the Young AND the old Players, the whole dominance of the owners was based on deviding the veterans and the Young Players in the Union with the old Players having more power there.
“you can easily get a 0.8 win Player for the Minimum.”
Not sure I’d say easily. (1) You aren’t buying widgets off the shelf, a 0.8 win projected player likely has a 1SD range of at least -0.2 to 1.8 wins, and (2) that would suggest that you could get something like a ~15 WAR team for the league minimum.
If it was easy to do so, then presumably the Padres would have been able to well exceed that with their $72M opening day payroll last year. The White Sox came in at $99M and only totaled 17.7 combined fWAR
You can certainly dig up *some* near-one-win players for around the league minimum, but they aren’t exactly falling out of trees.
It is not super easy of course but every team should have 3-4 prospects who could produce 0.5 to 1 win, shouldn’t it?
I assuming you meant players they could acquire rather than “properties” already in the system. You know what they say when you assume 🙂
That said, last year there were 435 position players who got 100+ MLB PA. 128 of them were worth less than 0.5 fWAR/600PA.
If every team had 3-4 guys who they’d expect to be better than that, I’d have to imagine they’d take it. If those 3-4 were +0.75 fWAR/600PA on average, then replacing the worst 90-120 of them you’d get +70-79 wins. That is a lot of wins being left on the table.
I generally agree with rosen380, as I think that believing that every team on average has 3-4 such prospects in the upper minors is underestimating just how bad some farm systems are.
I do have a couple quibbles with rosen380’s calculation, though.
First, this huge win total (2+ per MLB team) is based on the idea that all of these position players worth less than 0.75 WAR / 600 PA’s got 600 PA’s. Some did, but most of them didn’t. In a sample of every position player with at least 100+ PA’s, the worse performers have to be picking up a lot of bench players and injury fill-ins who got far less than 600 PA’s, greatly narrowing this value gap.
Second, per rosen380’s own comment about standard deviation, even if all of these players were true talent 0.8 or above fWAR/600 players we’d expect to see a large number of them below that production in a given year. Some of them would be well below that level, and even some true talent 1.5 fWAR/600 or above players would be below 0.8 fWAR/600 for a given year. That impact is almost certainly even more pronounced looking at PA totals as low as 100, because we’ll see greater variance in smaller samples.
There can be valid baseball reasons to keep 0.5 to 1 win prospects in the high minors at the start of the year, though.
For one thing, those players are injury depth beyond the 25 man roster, which can be especially important for contenders to think about.
Second, some prospects in the upper minors who currently project as 0.5 to 1 win players are legit prospects without much time in the upper minors who can develop into something better than that sort of player with more development time. A team – at least a team that expects to contend – doesn’t want to start that sort of player, though, so in many cases they’d come to the majors as bench players expected to get 200-300 PA’s per year while not playing every day. Such limited playing time can stunt a young player’s development, so there’s a good case for signing a roughly equivalent veteran instead and seeing if the young player playing every day in AAA can develop further into something like a 2 WAR player.
Looking at last years crowd-sourcing, here are the guys projected for 0.5-0.9 wins and what they got [sorted by AAV]:
1/$16M Carlos Beltran 0.5
3/$33M Kendrys Morales 0.7
1/$9M Michael Saunders 0.9
1/$8M Jon Jay 0.7
2/$12M Brandon Moss 0.5
2/$11M Santiago Casilla 0.5
2/$11M Matt Joyce 0.6
1/$5M Colby Rasmus 0.9
Angel Pagan declined to sign for whatever was offered.
Boras’ suggestion that any of those three players were ‘steak’ is laughable. and they were laughing off to the bank after some idiot owner put down 10 Million for one of their services.
“Baseball is a young man’s game again.”
I went a little further back and aggregated a bit:
1980-1995 28.5 [leading up to the strike]
1996-2011 29.0
2012-2017 28.4
So, we’re back to where we were, perhaps that middle period was held up by PED guys managing to be productive enough in the later years to stick around and with that largely gone, we’re back to the way things were before the meat of the PED years?
I fail to see how that is a problem and I’m not even sure that it shouldn’t have been reasonably expected.
Freese looks to be a cherry-picked example who is misleading, or at least exaggerated, to use as the example for a “trend”.
To try to pin down how much of an outlier he is, I looked at every position player at least 30 years old who totaled 1.5 to 2.5 fWAR in 2015. That’s the pre-free agency year that Travis writes about for Freese. That list includes 30 players.
Of those 30 players, I count 8 who were free agents immediately after the 2016 season.
Here’s what each signed for after that season:
Daniel Murphy: 3 years / $37.5 million
Franklin Gutierrez: 1 year / $1.5 million plus up another $2.75 million based on number of plate appearances. 2015 was his first 1+ WAR season since 2011, including missing all of 2014 due to ankylosing spondylitis (a type of arthritis) and irritable bowel syndrome.
Freese: 1 year / $3 million
Howie Kendrick: 2 years / $20 million
A.J. Pierzynski: 1 year / $3 million. 39 year old catcher who had been below replacement level in 2014.
Ben Zobrist: 4 years / $56 million. Had obviously been much better than 2 WAR before 2015, and this contract covered his age 35 to age 38 seasons.
Juan Uribe: 1 year / $4 million. Turned 37 years old before start of 2016 season.
Rajai Davis: 1 year / $6 million
So Freese, who turned 33 years old during April of the 2016 season, stands out as a huge outlier who got a contract after 2015 that was in-line with players who were either much older in baseball terms (Uribe and Pierzynsk) or had far more health and performance questions (Gutierrez).
The better question is to ask why Freese’s individual market was so weak after 2015 than to present him as the dubious face of a trend.
I don’t find the age data itself convincing. There’s also been a trend of generational young talent succeeding. And also, in the post-PED era there aren’t as many age 37 dudes stiff producing.
That said, I still think you might have an argument. But why not find some data. Look at free agents are percent of total MLB plate appearances and innings pitched?