Projecting All of the Prospects Traded at the Deadline

In the table below, you’ll find a treasure trove of information pertaining to the prospects who changed hands this trade deadline. There were 67 of them in all. Since there was a flurry of early trade activity this year, I’m using a liberal definition of “trade deadline” that considers all trades since the July 13th Jose Quintana deal. For reference, I performed a similar exercise last year.

The “KATOH” and “KATOH+” columns refer to each player’s projected WAR forecast for the first six years of his major-league career, as evaluated by my KATOH projection system. KATOH denotes the stats-only version of the projection system, while KATOH+ denotesthe methodology that includes a player’s prospect rankings. James Kaprielian and Gregory Santos have not played in the domestic minor leagues this year, and therefore did not receive projections. Players whose projections are based on less than 100 plate appearances or batters faced (PA/BF) have a “*” next to their names, and should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

I aggregated these KATOH+ projections both by acquiring team and trading team. Then I took the difference to make the following chart. Prospects with less than 100 PA/BF were excluded from this analysis.

By my math, the Chicago White Sox’s farm system benefited most from this year’s trade deadline and it isn’t particularly close. Chicago added a whopping 25.2 WAR, which is essentially twice as much as many as any other team. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given all of the big-league assets Chicago traded away. Eloy Jimenez accounts for nearly half of their prospect value, with Blake Rutherford, Casey Gillaspie and Dylan Cease also projecting for more than 2.0 WAR while under team control.

The next teams are Oakland and Texas, who got some serious prospect value in exchange for Sonny Gray and Yu Darvish. Detroit also got a decent haul for Justin Wilson, Alex Avila and J.D. Martinez. Toronto quietly added nearly 7 WAR in KATOH’s eyes, despite only selling off two unremarkable relievers in Francisco Liriano and Joe Smith. Toronto landed KATOH top-100 prospect Teoscar Hernandez, intriguing lefty Thomas Pannone and low-minors performer  Samad Taylor in return.

For those interested, here’s the data behind the above graphic.