Use FanGraphs Tools to Preview the Trade Deadline

The major league season can seem interminable at times, but July marks a pivot from a stately march into a playoff chase. There are several milestones in the month — the halfway point of the season, the All-Star break, and so on — but the rubber doesn’t really hit the road until the trade deadline. By July 31 (or, this year, July 30), teams have to decide what their plans are for the rest of the year, and often future years as well. Buy? Sell? Hedge? The hot stove can determine the course of seasons, and we’re here to help you follow it.

FanGraphs has myriad tools that can help you figure out deadline targets, potential team weaknesses, and even who should be buying and selling. Let’s take a tour of those tools, because articles about which team should trade for which reliever might feed you for a day, but generating your own lists will feed you for a lifetime — so long as you derive sustenance from knowing which relievers and players on expiring contracts will most help your squad.

Playoff Odds

First things first: if you want to understand the trade deadline, you’ll need to know who’s buying and who’s selling. You could simply look at the current standings in each division, but that won’t always tell the whole story. Take the Yankees: they’re 4.5 games back in the AL East and five games over .500. Our playoff odds, however, take their roster into account and give them a 59.2% chance of making the playoffs. They’ll be buyers.

The Cardinals, meanwhile, are only three games back, though with a record of .500. We project that they’re far less likely to reach the playoffs (9.1%), because quite frankly, they just aren’t as good. That might lead them to trade some pieces, planning for next year. It also might mean they’re in the market for a huge upgrade that could drastically improve the team.

The odds can’t tell you what a team thinks about their own chances, or whether the owner is agitating for (or against) a playoff push, never mind the math. They do a good job of separating teams into general tiers, though. Teams with playoff odds higher than 75% generally shop to shore up weaknesses. Teams stuck in the middle — between 25% and 75% — might look for bigger upgrades or several complementary pieces. Teams with slim but real odds — say 10% to 25% — might sit on their hands or might go for broke. Below 10%? You’re either looking for one trade to change your situation dramatically or waving the white flag and selling.

Depth Charts Projections

The same tools that power our playoff odds (Steamer and ZiPS rate projections, RosterResource playing time projections) also produce rest-of-season WAR projections for each position on each team. If you’re wondering where your team might want an upgrade, or who might be acquiring the player your team is trading away, you can see those projections here.

For example, the Red Sox have a projected 0.4 WAR coming from first base the rest of the season. Bobby Dalbec has been awful so far this year, and Danny Santana has been even worse. If the Royals decide to trade Carlos Santana, they’d almost certainly call Boston first, unless Cleveland or Milwaukee, two contenders with equally messy first base situations, have prospects more to their liking.

This method isn’t perfect, because our projections aren’t perfect and we don’t account for the fact that players can change positions to accommodate trade acquisitions. It also doesn’t account for teams who view their own players differently than our estimates; the Padres also show up on our list of teams in need of help at first, but they’re perfectly happy with Eric Hosmer, or at least, likely to keep playing him. But if you’re simply looking for a first cut of which teams match up, Depth Charts has what you need.

Splits Leaderboards

Rest-of-season WAR leaderboards might be great for finding position player fits, but they fall short when looking at pitchers. Just because a team has a No. 1 starter doesn’t mean it can’t acquire another ace. The same goes for the bullpen; no matter how many lights-out arms you have, another one can always find somewhere to slot into the bullpen. At the same time, even teams with bad aggregate rotations and bullpens might have individual standouts to trade.

To get a list of these players, you’ll want to use our Splits Leaderboard. This page might be the most powerful tool on the site; you can slice and dice data to your heart’s content, whether it’s to look at actual splits or to filter on any number of other criteria. Here, for example, I’ve entered the 12 teams whose playoff odds are below 10% and asked for every reliever with 10 or more innings pitched.

Paul Fry, Kendall Graveman, and Richard Rodriguez feature prominently; all three would be solid additions to a playoff hopeful’s bullpen. Want to sort by strikeout rate and look for the types of high-octane arms that are so familiar in October? Head to the “Advanced” tab and sort by strikeout rate, and you’ll see that Daniel Hudson, Paul Sewald, and Cole Sulser sport the best strikeout rates of the bunch. That doesn’t mean everyone on this list will get traded; Anthony Bender, Marlins rookie, is excelling but unlikely to move, and I don’t think the Twins are trading Taylor Rogers. But as a first cut, it’s an excellent sorting tool.

More interested in starters? You can run the same query with “as starter” selected, and the leaderboard will populate a new suggested minimum. Here’s that list; Danny Duffy, Max Scherzer, and Kyle Gibson all look like interesting trade pieces.

Again, not everyone on this list will be moved. Trevor Rogers has the second-best FIP in the group, and he’s staying in Miami for the foreseeable future. The same goes for Sandy Alcantara, and the Rangers are unlikely to trade Dane Dunning. Utilize a little common sense, though, and you can see a list of trade candidates for pitching-needy contenders everywhere.

THE BOARD

What will it take to acquire the aforementioned pitching help? Prospects, naturally, and boy oh boy do we have coverage of those. Eric Longenhagen eats, sleeps and breathes THE BOARD, which our doctors have said is “unhealthy” and “frankly not going to end well, I mean how can you eat an internet list?” The result of that single-minded focus on prospects is a comprehensive list of each team’s system, from shiny top 100 studs to organizational depth.

The scouting reports and tool grades are overwhelming in their depth and breadth, but they’ll give you a good idea of what types of prospects your team might move, or who they might look to acquire if you’re a fan of a team on the selling side of the ledger. It’s easy to get lost in a list of names you’ve never heard before, but THE BOARD has the inside scoop on all of them.

What’s a fair return for a given trade chip? Former FanGraphs writer Craig Edwards did extensive valuation work to come up with prospect valuations for both top 100 prospects and lower-tier players. These aren’t gospel by any means, but they do a good job of capturing how teams value prospects when making deadline deals.

RosterResource

One thing I haven’t covered so far is how contracts and team control play a role in deadline acquisitions. The Twins likely expect to compete next year, so a teardown wouldn’t make sense. They have four players who will reach free agency after this year, though, and those four are all likely to be fair game. As part of its extensive suit of offerings, RosterResource has payroll pages that show the long-term contract structure for every team, from pre-arb journeymen to stars on lengthy deals. It also gives you a team’s estimated payroll for Competitive Balance Tax purposes, which can be relevant to the kinds of deals a buyer entertains depending on how concerned with and close to the various thresholds they might be.

Contract situation might determine which major league pieces are on the move, but the vagaries of roster construction can lead teams to trade their prospects rather than losing them in the Rule 5 draft. On each team’s overview page, the “Options or R5 Status” column will highlight players the team will need to add to the 40-man roster or trade if they don’t want to expose them to the Rule 5 draft. Teams with particularly acute roster crunches, like the Rays, might make trades that look like losers on the surface to ease their 40-man roster pressure. The more intriguing prospects a team has eligible for the Rule 5, the more motivated they are to make moves.

Some of this roster crunch is too nuanced to handle on a single leaderboard. A team might have players already on its 40-man roster who it plans to trade, or even to waive in the offseason. Players on the 60-day IL complicate this decision further. Managing a roster is hard work, and teams don’t all approach the task in the same way. For a rough first cut, though, RosterResource is a great starting point.

None of these tools are going to magically tell you who your favorite team will trade for, or affect what happens at the deadline. You could, if you wanted to, do nothing at all and merely read the trade news on deadline day; we’ll cover it all, from the blockbusters to the bench-player swaps. If you’re like me, though, you get a lot of joy out of making predictions and seeing whether they come true. If that’s what you want to do, we can help with the tools I listed above, and with the innumerable other tools, articles, and chats the site provides.





Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Twitter @_Ben_Clemens.

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