Second Wild Card Didn’t Ruin the Trade Deadline
As the trade deadline came and went, there seems to have been a feeling of disappointment about its activity, or perceived lack thereof. Too many players stayed put, while too many teams failed to improve. Ken Rosenthal went so far as to say that “life was getting sucked out of the sport.” Rosenthal cited the Dodgers, Cardinals, and Yankees as clubs that failed to do anything of significance, with the Angels, Phillies, and Red Sox as other teams who failed to do much at the deadline. Rosenthal includes a quote from White Sox GM Rick Hahn and floats the idea that the one-game Wild Card doesn’t provide enough incentive for teams to want to win. That statement isn’t really supported by this deadline, though.
Rosenthal correctly identifies that baseball’s economic system, which has fallen behind the times when it comes to rewarding players monetarily for their play on the field, is broken, and he’s hardly alone in suggesting that the second Wild Card helped to cause a trade deadline that lacked movement (or, more specifically, big movement — as Ben Clemens noted, the deadline was incredibly busy). Jayson Stark included a quote from an executive in his piece on the deadline:
“If you do that, you’re putting a lot of your future on playing one game,” said one NL exec. “It doesn’t make sense [to go all in to play one game]. If you made the Wild Card two out of three, I bet you’d see more teams willing to do something. At least that’s a series. But who’s going to make a big trade for a chance to play one game?”
Let’s put that logic to the test. Here are the playoff odds after the games on July 30:
| W | L | W% | Win Division | Win Wild Card | Make Playoffs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dodgers | 70 | 39 | .642 | 100.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% |
| Astros | 69 | 39 | .639 | 99.6% | 0.3% | 99.9% |
| Yankees | 67 | 39 | .632 | 91.9% | 6.9% | 98.8% |
| Braves | 63 | 45 | .583 | 74.7% | 22.1% | 96.8% |
| Twins | 65 | 41 | .613 | 73.7% | 21.9% | 95.6% |
| Indians | 62 | 44 | .585 | 26.3% | 52.7% | 79.0% |
| Nationals | 57 | 50 | .533 | 21.7% | 56.8% | 78.5% |
| Cubs | 56 | 50 | .528 | 51.3% | 19.0% | 70.3% |
| Cardinals | 57 | 49 | .538 | 30.1% | 22.8% | 52.9% |
| Red Sox | 59 | 49 | .546 | 4.5% | 46.3% | 50.8% |
| Rays | 61 | 48 | .560 | 3.6% | 46.8% | 50.4% |
| Brewers | 56 | 52 | .519 | 17.0% | 18.0% | 35.0% |
| Phillies | 56 | 50 | .528 | 2.3% | 23.5% | 25.8% |
| Athletics | 61 | 47 | .565 | 0.4% | 24.2% | 24.6% |
| Mets | 51 | 55 | .481 | 1.4% | 15.2% | 16.5% |
| Diamondbacks | 54 | 54 | .500 | 0.0% | 10.7% | 10.7% |
| Giants | 54 | 53 | .505 | 0.0% | 6.2% | 6.2% |
| Reds | 49 | 56 | .467 | 1.5% | 3.2% | 4.7% |
| Rockies | 50 | 58 | .463 | 0.0% | 1.3% | 1.3% |
| Padres | 50 | 57 | .467 | 0.0% | 1.1% | 1.1% |
| Angels | 56 | 53 | .514 | 0.0% | 0.8% | 0.8% |
| Pirates | 47 | 60 | .439 | 0.0% | 0.1% | 0.2% |
| Rangers | 53 | 54 | .495 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Orioles | 36 | 71 | .336 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| White Sox | 46 | 58 | .442 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Tigers | 31 | 72 | .301 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Royals | 40 | 69 | .367 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Mariners | 47 | 63 | .427 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Blue Jays | 42 | 67 | .385 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Marlins | 41 | 64 | .390 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
In the Dodgers, Astros, and Yankees, we see three teams with their divisions sewn up. The second Wild Card is irrelevant. If we were to sort by division odds, we’d see three divisions still up for grabs: the AL Central, NL Central, and NL East. Now, if the Wild Card game wasn’t worth shooting for, we would expect the counter to be true and for teams seeking a division title to be extra-incentivized to avoid that game by winning the division. Cleveland made a big move, but merely shifted around parts for 2019 so as to remain in virtually the same spot. Minnesota traded for Sam Dyson but kept all its top prospects. The Cubs traded for Nick Castellanos, Derek Holland, David Phelps, and Tony Kemp, but emphasized Craig Kimbrel as the team’s big move. The Cardinals moved Jedd Gyorko to save some money, and take a flier on a 19-year-old pitcher. The Brewers traded for Drew Pomeranz, Jordan Lyles, Ray Black, and Jake Faria, but also traded Jesús Aguilar. Out East, the Braves and Nationals added a bunch to their bullpens. That’s seven teams with the supposed incentive of avoiding the Wild Card, and none of them went “all in” for the division.
As for the Wild Card, there were seven teams with at least a 5% chance at the one-game play-in: the Red Sox, Rays, Phillies, A’s, Mets, Diamondbacks, and Giants. The Rays, A’s, and Mets made aggressive additions, giving up good prospects to improve their rotations, with the Rays trying to improve the bullpen and infield as well. The Phillies might not have gone all in, but they added a good bat in Corey Dickerson after already trading for Jay Bruce and adding Jason Vargas, Drew Smyly, Blake Parker, and Dan Straily. These weren’t big moves, but they might have traded for the best hitter moved at the deadline. The Diamondbacks, who many thought would give up on the season, arguably improved as a team despite trading Zach Greinke by adding Zac Gallen and Mike Leake without moving Robbie Ray, David Peralta, Jarrod Dyson, or any pending free agents. The Giants did a soft sell, but kept Madison Bumgarner, Will Smith, and Tony Watson.
The reason more names were not traded at the deadline doesn’t appear to be because Wild Card teams weren’t trying to better position themselves in the playoff race. Instead, it was because teams like the Mets, Diamondbacks, and Giants refused to exit the race. Maybe the second Wild Card is partially responsible for the lack of big deals, but that actually might be a positive in this case. Yes, the Red Sox didn’t do anything, but they are also defending champs with a massive payroll and a thin farm system. Rosenthal gave them a pass in his piece, and I’m inclined to do the same.
The Angels sit in a weird zone of having a decent team, but needing more than the market could provide to get them back into contention this season, while Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, and Jo Adell help to keep their window to contention open next year.
As for the losing teams contenders usually feast on, the White Sox, Rangers, Padres, Reds, Rockies, and even the Pirates all see themselves as having a shot at contention in 2020. Giving up players other than pending free agents without getting better for next season wouldn’t help achieve their goals, which are admirable and what the league and fans should want. The Blue Jays, Marlins, and Mariners did what they could to move players. The Orioles didn’t have much to trade. The Tigers dealt what they could in Castellanos, but didn’t want to give away Matthew Boyd, a good starter with three more seasons of team control, without getting a dynamic return. The Royals weren’t going to move Whit Merrifield.
So which teams would have gone all in if the Wild Card had greater incentives, and what would all in look like? The Phillies, maybe, but they don’t have a prospect in the top 50 to headline a big deal. The Rays? They gave up the third-best prospect to move at the deadline, and the best prospect for teams with a good chance at making the playoffs this season. The teams chasing Wild Card spots were generally more aggressive than the teams chasing division titles. We can argue whether the trade deadline was good or bad, whether teams are too conservative generally with prospects and young players, and how to fix baseball’s broken economic system. We can even argue about whether the second Wild Card with a one-game play-in is best for the sport. But we shouldn’t take at face value statements that the second Wild Card has prevented big deals from happening at the trade deadline. The evidence doesn’t support it.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
The second WC didn’t ruin the trade deadline…. teams’ ridiculous 100th percentile projection of prospects ruined the trade deadline.
I think what you’re running into are two problems:
The best front offices are getting really good at identifying which prospects are gonna be useful MLB pieces: see the Dodgers’ consistent refusal to trade guys who turn out to be, in fact, very useful (Bellinger, Verdugo, etc)
The Dodgers have traded prospects: Jose De Leon, Willie Calhoun, etc. What do those guys have in common?
They haven’t really worked out.
So you have a bit of an impasse: the Dodgers know who they’re willing to part with and who they aren’t, but the other teams know that if the Dodgers are willing to part with a highly regarded prospect, it probably means they know something that isn’t public about the player.
So you see them move lower-end, more replacable talents (FV 40 and 45 and 35 types), but if you’re another GM and Andrew Friedman tells you he’s willing to trade you a FV55+ prospect who hasn’t debuted yet, you have to really be alarmed about why
HOU operates similarly. Also, LAD can bring up May and Gonsolin, who might not be Vazquez right now, but aren’t likely to be much worse than Shane Greene, etc. (not counting the obvious upside of ability and cost control), while HOU managed to get Greinke without dealing Tucker.
Houston gave up a lot for Greinke
I remember a year or two ago it was common thought that the Yankees, Dodgers and Astros were demonstrating how to build a winning team with an indefinite competitive window, compared to the Cubs and Red Sox moving many prospects and committing to a single core
I think you could argue that the Astros are moving into the second category. There’s not much high end talent after Tucker and Whitley and they will be very dependent on retaining the current core to compete, and not having those players decline to have the window be long.
Meanwhile the Dodgers and Yankees continue to churn out above average talent year after year.
It’s hard to tell; they might move to a Cleveland model and swap some of the older core for younger talent: like, Correa and Springer could be moved instead of extended or re-signed.
One thing we’ve seen over and over is big budget teams adopt/adapt the tricks of the smaller teams. They might keep the “generational” talent for their full careers but churn a good portion of the roster every few years to keep the average age in check and avoid the “Philly” collapse of recent vintage.
Astros promoted Alvarez this year, and kept two top 25 prospects. Yep, that sounds like a team that is willy nilly with prospects. How did Astros get Alvarez, again?
It seems weird how good the Yankees think Deivi Garcia is. He’s not an overall top 50 prospect and is very high risk, yet they apparently weren’t willing to trade him for anyone not named Syndergaard.
The guy did shred AA at age 20, so you could make the argument that he belongs more in FV55 level. There’s some concern that the reason he has performed so well is that almost nobody in AA can hit a 60-70-grade curveball, but I suspect the bigger problem with Garcia is that he is an extreme fly-ball pitcher in an era where fly balls are going for home runs at an alarming rate, and it’s not clear you can fix that without affecting the K rate.
I’ve said this before, that while I think it is understandable that the Yankees didn’t want to trade him for Stroman, it also wasn’t that far off a fair ask. And given the way that Yankee Stadium inflates left-handed power of Yankee stadium, the best thing for Garcia’s career (as a fly-ball heavy righty) is for him to be pretty much anywhere else.
There wasn’t anyone else really worth getting unless you wanted to break the bank for Greinke.
Spot on. I love Rosenthal, but was disappointed in that article. You could argue that teams like the Mets, Reds, Pirates, and Rays are even looking ahead to next season’s wild card.
Isn’t this supporting the argument that the second Wild Card is impacting the deadline? Each team’s chances of making the playoffs next season increased almost 7% by expanding the field from 8 to 10.
Even if their behavior isn’t geared toward winning a division / avoiding a Wild Card this season, teams have reason to be more optimistic toward their 1-3 year outlook based on the increased field.
This partially restricts the market to “rentals”, and GMs appear to still be re-calibrating what the appropriate value for those are. Bumgarner would have been a good use case.
I’m not saying this is good or bad, but I think it’s fair to say there’s an impact. My gut reaction is that it’s good.
It’s a matter of semantics. Making the wildcard play-in game is not really “making the playoffs,” after all. Teams should not be doing anything drastic to make it into this play-in game.
I dunno (I genuinely don’t know)- do you get a playoff bonus as a player or FO for making the wild card? That seems pretty relevant to me, if that’s the case. People stink at temporal discounting, so that would only make bullwhip style effects WORSE.
I think the bigger picture is just that teams don’t want to trade away their prospects anymore. You saw this trend last year too, where the 3rd best prospect traded at last year’s deadline was Dillon Tate (or if you prefer, Taylor Hearn, or Jorge Alcala, or Jalen Beeks). Nobody wants to trade away guys at the FV50-FV60 level anymore, because they’re terrified of what they’re losing out on. Never mind that you’re much more likely to trade away Lewis Brinson than Yordan Alvarez, teams are just much more risk-averse.
There’s a secondary part to this, which is that the teams that like to buy at the deadline and who have reason to buy have shipped out a lot of their mid-level talent in recent years. Take a look at the Cubs, Red Sox, Cardinals, Nationals, Brewers, and A’s farm systems. There’s not very much left in the better region of the farm system in a lot of places. Houston was clearly an exception. It’s a little silly that neither the Yankees nor Dodgers addressed their pitching issues, given the former’s Rule 5 crunch and the latter’s incredible depth, but that’s just two teams.
Also, if anything, teams were more willing to part with top prospects this year than last year, at least if you have some questions about their approach at the plate (Jazz Chisholm, Jesus Sanchez, Taylor Trammell). In addition to them, there are probably another 5 prospects better than the FV45 Tate/Hearn/Alcala/Beeks prospects swapped last year that were traded this year (Logan Allen, Corbin Martin, Seth Beer, Woods Richardson, and Nick Solak).
There may be another aspect to this. There was an article last year on The Ringer which noted that traded prospects tend to do worse than non-traded prospects. For example, one of the findings was:
“And on the most successful end, traded prospects were three times less likely to develop into stars than their non-traded counterparts. Just 2.9 percent of traded players accumulated 24-plus WAR over their first six seasons (or 4-plus WAR per year, meaning consistent All-Star-level production), versus 8.8 percent of non-traded players, and a gap appears in the 18-24-WAR group (3-4 WAR per year), too.”
This despite the fact that there was virtually no difference in prospect ranking between the two groups (27.8 vs 25.0).
To the extent that teams are now aware of this, it may create a disconnect during trades. Team A may value their prospects at a certain level, whereas Team B values them at a lower level. In fact, Team B may think “Why are you willing to trade this guy? There must be something wrong with him that you’re not telling me about”.
Anyway, the whole article is worth reading. I won’t link to it, but you can google it: Why Trading for Top Prospects Is Less of a Win Than MLB Teams Seem to Think.
On sports radio yesterday, they made a list of the prospects the Yankees had traded at the trade deadline going back to the 1990s. The best player of the bunch was Ted Lilly, who had a pretty good career but at the time of the trade he was 26 and already had 200+ innings in the majors. The rest of the list was underwhelming. It was suggested that other teams were not interested in trading with the Yankees unless the deal was really good, and also because they are the Yankees.
There may be something to what you say.
I’m trying to figure out what this means, because there’s a lot of different weird things at play…teams are more likely to give up on players who they don’t believe in. Other teams are more likely to ask for players who are performing at an increased level, and so they may not be taking into account regression to the mean. It’s also an interesting cutoff…4 wins per year is a really select group of players!
It’s a really interesting idea, but I have no idea how to interpret the study.
I thought the same thing re the cut off. It seems slightly arbitrary.
“a gap appears in the 18-24-WAR group (3-4 WAR per year), too.”
The specifics of that “gap” would be very relevant. Their omission makes me think that their less supportive of the hypothesis.
Still, an interesting theory and I think that the dynamic outlined wherein teams are valuing a given prospect differently for these reasons are likely in play, at least in some cases.
In response to Sadtrombone and Oozyalbies1:
As I noted in my comment, the findings with the 24 WAR cutoff were just one of the findings of the study. I didn’t want to list every single result from the study. But here’s another one:
“Through their first six MLB seasons, the non-traded prospects accrued an average of 27 percent more WAR than their traded counterparts, with sizable advantages for both pitchers (who saw a 25 percent gap) and position players (31 percent). It’s a statistically significant difference, too, which suggests that the discrepancy stems from a real effect and not mere chance.”
This is just top-50 prospects by the way. Several years earlier Ben Lindbergh did another study looking just at top 10 prospects and reached similar conclusions. (Overthinking It: The Prospects Who Get Traded)
Of course, how this all plays into who gets traded and who teams refuse to trade is conjecture at this point. But we do know that the team that is asking for prospects is at a clear information disadvantage relative to the team trading the prospects. As are the people like Kiley and Eric who rate prospects.
Anyway, just wanted to point out that there may be various reasons why we’re seeing fewer prospects traded.
@emh1969
While I think some element of “buyer beware” has always existed, it’s definitely an interesting article with significant statistical evidence backing up the premise. I’m sure FOs are armed with at least this much data, and it’s likely impacting their decision making. Thanks for sharing.
The Ringer article compared prospects of similar rank who were and were not traded; not traded prospects generally lived up to the billing, and traded ones didn’t
When a team is willing to trade a highly regarded prospect, it generally means that they have reason to believe that prospect won’t live up to the ranking.
The ones who do, they keep, and they work out (see the Dodgers refusing to move Bellinger, Verdugo, etc, while moving Willie Calhoun)
“The Ringer article compared prospects of similar rank who were and were not traded;”
Ummm…no they didn’t. They looked at all top 50 Baseball America prospects from 1990 through 2011. The fact that the average rank of those who were traded and those who weren’t was similar was just a coincidence, it wasn’t something they controlled for.
“When a team is willing to trade a highly regarded prospect, it generally means that they have reason to believe that prospect won’t live up to the ranking.”
Yeah, that was kind of the speculation of the article and the point I was making above.
Top 50 prospects generally encompasses pretty much the same quality of prospect from season to season; its not like some years the top prospect is an FV45 guy and the other year there are 5 FV70s.
This idea from emh1969 and mikejunt was discussed decades ago by economist George Akerlof as the “market for lemons” problem.
Quoting the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry for Akerlof’s paper: “‘The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’ is a well-known 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only ‘lemons’ behind.” Akerlof used the market for used cars as his example.
It’s logical that there’s an information asymmetry regarding a team’s prospects: a team should logically know more about its own prospects than other teams do. The question for baseball is whether the degree of information asymmetry is large enough to make a meaningful difference in the accuracy of evaluations. The cited analysis from The Ringer indicates – or at least strongly suggests – that it does.
Talk about small sample size!!!
That’s what she said.
Curious how much of the perceived inactivity stems from the removal of the August 31 deadline.
Yes, I agree with the article that the problem this year is that “too many teams thought they were still in it at the deadline.” While that can be reduced by either fewer playoff spots or a later deadline, it seems obvious to me that a later deadline is the better choice compared to more teams feeling dead in the water earlier.
I guess it depends on whether (as Craig puts it) “teams like the Mets, Diamondbacks, and Giants” are failing to make trades because they still feel like they are in contention this year, or if these teams feel that they are one-or-two lucky breaks or additions to be in contention next year. If it’s the former, a later deadline might flush out a few more trades, but if its the latter, then it would explain why the market freezes btw/ teams that are both seeking current production within similar time horizons.
I’ve seen criticism for:
–Going for it when you’re not a powerhouse (Mets, Reds)
–Being a powerhouse because dynasties are bad (Yankees, Dodgers)
–Not becoming more of a powerhouse even if you’re projected to win 100 games (Yankees, Dodgers)
–Tanking (Astros, Braves, Marlins)
–Not rebuilding aggressively enough (Mets, Tigers)
–Trading prospects too much (Mets)
–Not trading prospects enough (Yankees, Red Sox)
As much as I’ve been frustrated by the Mets, they are squarely in contention. They definitely could have done it better and maybe it all won’t work out and they should have blown it up. Same for the Reds. And why is everyone expecting some over the hill superstar for a huge prospect haul when those kinds of move are almost universally panned? Just look at the Mets–BVW made one of those trades, and everyone can’t stop joking a few months later about how shortsighted it was. You just can’t have it both ways.
Great comment. Pretty much any team’s strategy is getting trashed these days and if you do build a dynasty then everyone hates you anyway.
Ross Atkins pulled veil off the bride when he came out and bragged about how many years of control he traded for. These guys aren’t interested in winning, they’re interested in making money and maximizing ultra-long-term perceived ROI.
In a world with a soft cap, ROI and winning are virtually inseparable. Without it, there’s no room to buy FAs
The ROI is for the owners, not in a sabermetric “efficiency of a win” sense that drove much analysis over the first ~decade and a half of this century. The economic model has become very broken because teams are no longer dependent on attendance; there’s guaranteed media deals, revenue-sharing, etc. which all guarantee that teams are going to make money regardless of how well or how poorly they’re doing.
Every team then comes up with its own calculus of how much they want to put into the efficiency of the win while trying to maintain their given profit margin; outside of eg Mike Ilitch, or the early years of the present Dodgers ownership group, the profit margin is the driving force.
If winning were the driving force, we would see the opposite of what we do: more teams near WC/2WC would be buying, that’s all of those Mets-to-Giants teams. GMs are not incentivized to win, but rather to cut payroll, trade away wins in the hope of X prospects working out 7 years from now, and sell fans who were pushed by MLB marketing for decades to believe that players are greedy malcontents on the idea that selling and tanking is actually good.
What would you have TOR do? The guys they traded away were not superstars, nor are they close enough (this year) to buy their way into contention at the deadline.
TOR will be competitive again when all of that young talent matures. In the meantime selling short term assets and expiring contracts for whatever they can get is absolutely the way to go.
I think you’re missing the opportunity cost calculation inherent in the soft cap game…
Premise 1: A team has a budget which is dictated by revenues. (Note, a common business model in pro sports is to attempt to run at a break-even year to year, and count the appreciation of the franchise value, along with side hustles like real estate, merchandising, etc. as the “profit”)
Premise 2: Player salaries count against the soft cap, which imposes fines for exceeding certain thresholds.
Premise 3: There are ways to spend money on improving the team that don’t count against the soft cap (This is the important one)
Premise 4: Any money spent on fines for exceeding soft cap thresholds may not be spent in other ways
The game gets even more complicated when you consider the increasing penalties for exceeding thresholds for longer periods of time, and now the opportunity cost of making a poor decision on a player contract is multiplied. A new player contact represents not just the raw player salary, but also makes every other player you have more expensive by moving you closer to or over the cap
All of this, when coupled with the fact that even the best teams have relatively low odds of winning the championship in any given year, mean that the commonly accepted best path to success in MLB right now is to be as good as possible EVERY year, as opposed to trying to pick your spots and go “All In”. This means minimizing peaks and valleys, and beating the opposition with a volume and consistency of superior decision-making.
I think the issue is that the real world revenues of even the top teams isn’t enough for them to spend all they think would be beneficial on development, health, scouting, coaching, facilities, etc. AND hit the soft cap, AND pay the fines
TLDR: Winning is the driving force, just not winning *this year*. The economic model isn’t broken because the teams are doing it wrong. The economic model is broken because it makes player contracts the most expensive way to spend your money. Teams are just playing the game with the rulebook they have
Great comment, except for the last sentence. The teams make the rules.
Your argument is that an economic model is broken because teams focus on profits, which is exactly what businesses do in any sensible economic model. Even from a pure win/loss consideration, unless MLB was losing a lot of talent to Japan the market in its whole would be working fine.
They’re almost $90M under the luxury tax this year; let’s not pretend Toronto is going to use that room to buy FAs.
https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/tax/
The point of those years of control are that they provide you with a bunch of wins to make you competitive at low cost, and once they are doing so you can then spend the money.
Where Toronto is relative to the luxury tax this year has no particular relation to where they’ll be when that core of control is making them competitive (and we have seen Toronto spend at least a decent sum on players when they had a competitive team).
It’s certainly a problem there’s no reason to spend while they’re not competitive, though.
So if this organization was operating in good faith with the “years of control” argument, they would bank that money and then go crazy when the team has matured and is competitive again, right? Or, as we see literally every team do, arguably except Houston, will they continue to penny pinch and seek profit margin over on-field product, despite having potentially banked hundreds of millions in additional funds for just such a time?
I think that you are right to be skeptical about the Blue Jays, but aside from Houston other teams have done this too: The Brewers, Cubs, Red Sox, and Mariners have all done this recently.
(There are other teams that also just spend at a fairly large clip no matter what, like the Dodgers and Giants and Yankees and Cardinals, but that’s not really relevant)
In the Blue Jays’ case, it seems like they’re trying to do the same thing that they did in Cleveland (or Tampa Bay), except worse. Cleveland did add some salary when it was making a run, but not much, and they’re still in the middle of that run and have snapped back to their usual spending levels. So while you might see the Blue Jays spend more when they get closer to contention I think there are also good reasons to doubt that.
The theory is suspect too. Imagine you’re battling to catch up in the wild care race. Under the old system, your playoff hopes die unless you pass ALL the other wild card contenders by the end of the season. One might ask: “Who’s going to make a big trade for a chance to pass everybody?” The new system actually reduces risk by spreading the wild card chances across the best two runners-up.
Also, if we take the argument seriously, we should also conclude that division leaders should have MORE incentive to make acquisitions since the loss of dropping into the wild card position is now greater.
Overall, I think it’s more sound to say that the second wild card can have positive or negative effects on a team’s likelihood of making it to the divisional series, and therefore positive or negative effects on trading incentives. The aggregate impact is ambiguous and depends in a complicated way on the standings at the time of the trade deadline.
An exciting trade deadline seems like a secondary aspect of the baseball season to me.
Yeah, it’s fun to imagine rosters going crazy for a day. But it’s a weird sideshow on the way to the postseason.
I think most MLB front offices recognize the relative variability of outcomes in baseball (i.e. the ubiquitous crapshoot) and are becoming more conservative about making big bets (trading prospects) for marginal theoretical bumps in projected Win% over 60 regular season and/or 19 postseason games.
The difference between Felipe Vazquez and the last guy in the LAD bullpen is less than 1 WAR over the rest of the year. It’s a FIP difference of about 1.50, which means over any given 6 inning stretch Vazquez will give up ONE fewer run. Maybe that all-important inning will occur in the World Series. Maybe. This is supposed to be worth Gavin Lux?
Greinke displaces Wade Miley in the HOU postseason rotation. And that sounds huge! It’s also an upgrade of 0.59 FIP. How many runs is that over the entire postseason … 2? 3?
The notion that any given contender HAD to do SOMETHING is overblown.
That’s true, but also, the average prospect you has a terrible return on what you traded away as well. One of the most impressive things about the KATOH system was that it showed the probability of ending up different buckets of production, and the returns were almost always terrible.
Also, the likelihood of winning any given game is pretty heavily weighted towards 50%, right? So there are some pretty strong forces that are both making bad teams better and good teams worse. Right now, the team with the best winning % in baseball are the Dodgers, who clock in at about 65%.
It can be really easy to rationalize not making a move in baseball, because the average effect of a transaction of any type has no discernible impact. It’s very easy to get to a place of existential crisis, where absolutely nothing a team does has any effect, and where the proper course of action is to never make any move at all.
But why even baseball?
*lol*
That’s true, but it further serves to make my point. The talent differences between MLB quality players are NOT actually all that great. Upgrading from generic roster player #25 to a pending free agent all star just doesn’t make that much difference over the short term.
Baseball makes big moves for tiny gains all the time. Inserting a LHH for a RHH as a pinch hitter, or pinch running for a slugger despite the bottom of the order coming to bat, these have very small benefits but are done routinely.
The trade deadline is no different. Some top teams refused to budge on prospects who may never play in the majors, and who probably earn 1 WAR or less in their ENTIRE CAREER.
I believe the difference between Greinke and Miley is exacerbated against an elite offence like the Twins or Yankees. Thats the difference between WS champ & also-ran.
There’s an enormous difference between playing matchups, or shifting a defense to nudge a percentage … and trading prospects with projected values measured in millions of dollars.
We all imagine Greinke throwing 7 innings of 2 run ball in the WS while Wade Miley gives up 4 in barely making it through 5 frames. But that’s just it. Belief. The reality is that they’re both most likely to put up something in the neighborhood of 6 and 3.
Greinke replaces Jose Urquidy or Rogeilio Ardmentos or last-second stretched out Peacock or McHugh. It is a significant upgrade over the undetermined 4th starter.
Urquidy has a projected 4.64 FIP for the rest of the season. Armenteros a 4.75. That’s nearly identical to Miley, and a tenth of a run worse respectively.
Greinke is a significant upgrade over 162 games. Over one or two? It will be likely be outweighed by batted ball luck.
We all want baseball to be more determinitive than it is. “Greinke is awesome! Urquidy is just a guy!” is a statement of faith and long term averages, but almost meaningless within the context of any single game.
I feel its appropriate here to attach a list of recent perfect game pitchers:
Felix Hernandez
Matt Cain
Phil Humber
Armando Gallaraga*
Roy Halladay
Dallas Braden
Mark Buerhle
…
Yes, in the specific game it’s entirely possible Grienke will give up 7 runs in 2 and a third innings in game 3 of the ALCS while Rando 4th Starter goes 7 no-hit innings. I know which way I’m betting though.
Remember that KATOH was being made with public data by one guy, so there’s a decent chance that the equivalents being used by the best teams have better data and greater accuracy than what we were seeing from KATOH on FG. A big part of the high bust rates shown by KATOH were due to uncertainty/wide error bars
I actually ran some numbers. because it’s Friday and I’m bored.
Let’s pretend the Nats won the trade deadline in impossible fashion. Somehow (let’s just pretend, remember?) they managed to land Kirby Yates, Will Smith, Felipe Vazquez, and just for grins they got Marcus Stroman as well.
Right now, the entire WAS pitching staff projects for 7.3 WAR for the rest of the season.
Now displace the Ross/Voth/Fedde garbage truck in SP5, and kick everyone out of the bullpen except current positive producers Doolittle, Rodney, and Suero. And we’ll keep even value but useful guys like Rainey and Grace around to handle a few innings in losing games.
Now this amazing super staff has a combined ROS WAR of … wait … really … 9.3? That’s it?
All that, and they’re still not gonna catch the Braves.
Start up the trolls, because I am wondering about something of a team chemistry effect. It might be telling to see how teams which made big deals at the deadline have historically done *after* the deadline. We can talk about projected or actual WAR of the players traded–but do players that *weren’t* traded start playing better for the teams that got better at the deadline?
Ah. Here there be dragons!
Given that notions of team chemistry and player motivations are unfalsifiable, it is entirely the province of one’s own personal metaphysics and dependence on post hoc explanation. Bring on the trolls indeed…
It’s more that if untraded players on bolstered teams do better after the deadline, in a statistically-significant way, that is an area worth exploring (and, possible, due to some currently-untrackable “team chemistry” effect). But I guess we can check which bolstered teams did better after the deadline and what players contributed. Though I am not capable of running such an analysis.
In the Miley case, there is a cascade effect because Miley will also replace someone in the bullpen he’s presumably better than, but otherwise you are spot on.
i think this is exactly it
I would like to note that when making a deal, being willing to walk away is important. While we like to point out that an upcoming free agent on an also-ran might as well be traded for something, just dumping him for whatever marginal prospect they can get is not particularly all that useful. If you always accept “whatever” that’s all you are ever going to get unless you make it clear that “whatever” is not good enough. Anyway, keeping a good player on a bad team for a few extra months might be more worthwhile for ticket sales and goodwill than getting the potential utility infielder or #17 pitcher of the future.
Not to mention, their may be a compensation pick attached to that player with greater value than the return offered.
I know that people will point to Kimbrel and Keuchel to counter this, but I think it’s obvious that their markets had more to do with their ridiculous asking prices. It’s not like they got the cash they were (purportedly) looking for after the draft.
Great point! I would like to add that making a trade that hurts the long term value of a team is excusable when you are in “win now” mode, but really inexcusable when you are not.
Yankees’ Cashman made some great trades in 2016 when they were out of contention & helped set them up for their current run. You could reasonably argue that what he traded away wasn’t all that special; bad teams always have a few good players.
He’s a great “builder” GM (a lot of reams could use one of those) but I wonder if he has the guts when it’s for all the marbles.
The Yankees got great value with those 2016 deals, but if you look back at what they actually got out of it, aside from Torres the biggest value they’ve gotten has been from flipping those prospects to other teams for big-leaguers. McKinney went to the Blue Jays in the Happ deal; Sheffield went to Seattle in the Paxton deal. Neither of those guys look like they’re going to be good, and Frazier’s biggest value will likely be whenever he gets flipped for something of value. There’s a case to be made that Cleveland “won” the Andrew Miller trade.
Similarly, if you look at the Lucroy trade, Lewis Brinson was the headliner in the package that brought back Yelich, Ortiz was packaged up for Schoop, and Cordell got swapped to the White Sox for…a reliever? I think? The Brewers definitely wound up winning the deal but only because they found someone else to give them something valuable for Brinson. If they had held onto all three of them the Rangers would have gotten more value out of the Lucroy swap than the Brewers did.
There are plenty of examples that run the other way, of course, but I’m not convinced that the current trend of prospect hoarding is the best way to win.
Hard to say with Frazier. He appears to be a good, perhaps very good, hitter but just an awful defender. If he can get his defense up to, say, somewhat below average in the outfield then his floor is a regular with all-star potential. Losing that year to the concussion did him no favors.
Its really not realistic to evaluate the Miller trade without including the way those guys who didn’t work out were leveraged in acquisition. That Sheffield never provided on-field value to the Yankees isn’t the full story: Paxton is there because of Sheffield, and his value is also a consequence of the trade.
I agree with you, but my point is that the main value of getting prospects in A+/AA is often that you can trade them away again when they’re in AAA. There’s a bit of a bubble going on.
It’s not possible to build a competitive team completely with trades and FA signings so it’s not surprising that prospects have inherent value. I think you’re overstating the bubble a bit.
It really depends on what you mean by “win now” mode. If you mean “win now because our window is rapidly closing” or “win now because we haven’t won a Series in triple-digit-number of years”, I agree. If you’re talking about “win now because our rebuild is bearing fruit, but the window’s still open”, I don’t.
We will see…but if pushing all your chips in takes you from a 100 win team to a 102 win team you have barely…barely increased your chances of winning the WS.
I think this played into Pittsburgh keeping Vazquez. Huntington felt like he set a bad precedent with his trading reputation with the Cole and Archer deals, so he had to set a very high bar in his ask for Vazquez and refuse to move off of it to maximize his return in future deals.
“In the Dodgers, Astros, and Yankees, we see three teams with their divisions sewn up.”
From your lips to God’s ears…
Yankees 2018- locked into a WC spot- traded for Britton, Voit, Happ, Lynn, McCutchen
Yankees 2019- extremely likely to win division- traded for no one
This is just one team, but it lends support to the notion that WC status is not a big determination of what a team does.
What if this is a media thing and not a baseball thing?
No Manny moved this year; only Houston and Cleveland made a really big move among the top contenders. As Mr Carson pointed out overall activity was about normal.
Maybe the media is just missing the *big story*, especially in the big markets.
The second WC might not be the reason for this deadline but it definitely leads to less 500ish teams investing not only at the DL but also in the off season. The second WC simply means less incentive to be an 85-88 win team so high 70s teams have no incentive to improve.
But on top of that the problem is that teams are too smart and they exactly know the surplus value of a prospect.
But you can’t expect GMs to take the blue pill, what needs to be done is making that ridiculous surplus value of young players smaller by making young players less cheap and older players cheaper, the latter of course is already happening.
It is just ridiculous that a first year two win player is costing only like 5% of a post arb 2 win player.
They can be somewhat cheaper but not that much because that basically makes any decent prospect almost untradeable.
A bit tangential to this article, but something’s wonky when 11 teams have a >50% chance to be in the 10-team postseason.
Nope, nothing wonky with that, just how math works. Math is crazy, .9 repeating is the same as 1…
A lot of this discussion is driven by fans and journalists wanting teams to “Do Something”. Just because journalists want something new to write about and fans want something to argue about doesn’t mean that teams have to “do something”. As astute writers have pointed out, for those playoff teams that have bullpen issues, the biggest part of the solution will be moving the fifth starter into the bullpen come playoff time. None of the division leaders seem to have big offensive issues this year which is why there weren’t any high quality hitters moved. I’m not surprised to read that an analysis of the top fifty prospects shows that those that were traded had less long term success than those that were not.
It’s the quest for the *next great story*.
Sometimes the best move is no move, just let it all ride…
The whole point of baseball is entertainment… for the fans to have something to argue about, and the journalists to have something to write about. If baseball isn’t making us feel something then why do it at all? Baseball is not a controlled lab experiment that will one day spit out “42” and go back to sleep. It exists to provide us with stories. I don’t want to live in a world where trading the farm for the most famous 30 year old currently having a good season on a bad team is a bad idea!
The deadline wasn’t really inactive, just not a lot of good players moved. Only 3 guys were on pace for 3+ war (Bauer, greinke, stroman) and no top 20 prospect was traded.
Btw interesting the the Astros of all teams were doing a big time negative surplus value trade. The trade is easily minus 50m of surplus value but the Astros probably decided they have so much talent (and can produce new one with their player dev) that they give a hesitating league the knockout punch in the last second.
The playoff odds do seem off to me. I didn’t do any of the math, but how can so many teams have a greater than 50% chance. I checked BP’s playoff odds page and it is much more distributed: https://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/odds/
10 teams will make the playoffs. That is 1000% if you will. That can be distributed any way you want as long as the total adds up. You could have 20 teams with a 50% chance to make the playoffs (as long as ll other teams were 0%) and 10 will while 10 won’t.
I think that fans and media writers are too short sighted with these trades.
The way to put together a team to win in the future is NOT to trade away all your valuable talent. For example, if the Mets traded Syndergaard it would have been one of the dumbest trades in franchise history.
As the article and some commenters pointed out, the 2nd WC means that while a team like the Mets are probably out this season, next year they are just a good month away.
The value for rentals is low. I’m sure that the Mets could have moved Wheeler, Frazier, and Lagares for a bag of baseballs and a couple mil in salary relief, but how does that make the team any better this season and beyond? It doesn’t.
It’s the Mets. That wouldn’t even come close to dumbest trade in franchise history. Wouldn’t even be as bad as the Cano trade they just made.
Another big reason for the decline in star players traded at the deadline is that there are a dwindling number of star rental players on selling teams. I think there are two main reasons for this:
1. Extensions. There has been a huge increase over the last year or two in teams (especially middle and small market teams, which are most of the sellers) extending good players before free agency, meaning there are fewer star rentals available on selling teams. Examples: Nolan Arenado (imagine how hard Yankees fans would be clamoring to get him) and Sonny Gray, and if you include contenders also Paul Goldschmidt, Xander Bogaerts, and Chris Sale.
2. Since peak years are trending younger/earlier in careers, that means a higher percentage of good players have less than 5 years of service time, so the quality of upcoming free agents is not as high as it used to be. The good players on selling teams are now more likely to have multiple years of team control left, meaning the selling team is less likely to move them because they think the player will still be around on their next competitive team and because buyers are less likely to trade for them because the price is substantially higher and the player is harder to properly value. Examples: Matt Boyd, Noah Syndergaard, Whit Merrifield.
Teams have realized the entire playoffs is a crap shoot and you just need to get in to have a chance. So teams with 90+ % chances to make the playoffs have little incentive to trade top prospects unless they are getting a really good player.
Also, not sure the available evidence allows one to conclude baseball’s economic system is broken. Revenues passed $10 billion last year. Inflation adjusted revenues have grown 377% in the last 25 years. Given the demand for live events, baseball seems well situated. Perhaps baseball will continue to struggle attracting young fans, but that isn’t because of its economic model. Players in sum are still paid the same percentage or revenue they were a few years ago as collectively bargained. I think it would be better if more money was shifted to young players but that hardly suggests a ‘broken’ system. You need some really strong assumptions or political beliefs to take it anywhere near that far.