The trade deadline is less than a week away, and the buyer/seller sorting has begun. The Royals are buyers, the Reds are sellers, and while some teams will try to chart a middle course, it’s rare for a franchise to not ultimately find itself labeled one way or the other. The Twins might not get aggressive, given fiscal constraints, but they aren’t going to sell. The Cubs might try to keep all doors open for next year, but they aren’t going to buy.
It’s often easy to determine who will buy and who will sell. Many years, you can draw a line on something like the FanGraphs Playoff Odds, with buyers up top and sellers beneath. Within specific trades, plenty of analysts have developed frameworks for measuring the value of major and minor leaguers, with WAR, arbitration numbers, and free agent contracts making it possible to convert each player’s worth into dollars. For numbers nerds like us, this conceptualization of the trade deadline is a dream, an abstract exercise made quantifiable. Take the time, and you can determine not only how each team’s playoff chances and World Series chances changed at the end of July, but also how much richer or poorer every franchise became in terms of the future value of their major and minor league rosters. In exchange for increasing their World Series probability by two percentage points, maybe the Yankees forked over thirty million dollars worth of long-term value, or something like four future wins.
We’ve often aspired to do this very calculation, at a grand scale. We want to know that going rate: How much is this year’s World Series worth in terms of future possibility? How much are teams paying in cash and prospect capital for every percentage point of hope? We’ve made attempts to this end, but they’ve ended in failure, and not only because different teams value different prospects differently. The attempts have failed because you can’t quantify the trade deadline. Or rather, you can, but nobody seems to have publicly developed the right tools.
The conversions of player value into wins and dollars are a mighty step. Comparing each player’s expected WAR to how much you could get on the free agent market for the same money? Brilliant, and helpful. But what trade deadline calculations often don’t calculate is the actual impact those wins and dollars should have. The truth, in baseball, is that not every win and not every dollar is created equal, and while we don’t know for sure which team will need exactly one more victory in 2025 to make their first playoff appearance in years, we have enough of an idea that we could make some projections. We know, for instance, that 2025 value doesn’t matter as much to the Chicago White Sox as 2027 value. We know the opposite is true for the Philadelphia Phillies.
What would really be helpful, in measuring the trade deadline, is numbers for future championship probability and future playoff probability. We know with such confidence how likely every team is to win this year’s title, but what about the title two years from now? Yes, the confidence interval would be wider, but it’s not impossible to simulate.
I would guess most teams are doing this, at least implicitly. There’s some sense of the farm system and when it will produce. There’s a very clear view of active or impending championship windows. I’d guess a few are doing it explicitly as well, actively measuring how trading away Josue De Paula would hurt championship chances, how acquiring Garrett Crochet would help them, and how much more a World Series percentage point is worth this year than four years down the line. Maybe I’m underestimating the industry. Maybe every franchise is running these kinds of numbers. But given how the blogosphere has often led analytics departments rather than trailed them, and given how little can be found online even attempting this feat, I’m skeptical that any of us are putting the time into this that it deserves.
Bill James wrote recently about how fixation with the little things has pulled baseball analytics away from the big picture. Excerpts, somewhat edited for clarity:
“My goal in starting sabermetrics was to use measurement and logic to address basic, large-scale issues about baseball and sports. Why do teams win? What are the characteristics of a winning team?”
“The vast proliferation of small measurements represents not the success of sabermetrics, but its failure.”
“Of course new measurements are valuable, but the fact is that the development of real understanding about the essential questions that form the game—all games—has essentially stopped. At some point, our field must find the courage to set the decimal points aside and return to the study of basic, large-scale questions about which we know no more now than we did in 1970.”
Is James correct? The answer to that is partly subjective. But objectively, what he seems to propose is that there is value still available in big questions. It doesn’t only have to be about revolutions per minute. It can be clubhouse chemistry. Or 2027 World Series odds.
Miscellany
- Houston Christian’s motion to intervene in House v. NCAA was denied. I am not a lawyer (Sam C. Erhlich is, and he shared a helpful thread on the ruling), but my impression is that in addition to other things, the judge effectively said, Sorry, HCU, but you’re part of the NCAA. If the NCAA wants this settlement and you don’t like it, you’ll have to take it up with them. The settlement still hasn’t been submitted to the court, let alone been approved, and the issues on the athlete side of the lawsuit (namely that the settlement seems to be short-changing athletes) remain unresolved. But this does appear to put the school-side issue to bed. If smaller-conference schools don’t like the NCAA’s preferred settlement, they’ll have to take it up with the NCAA.
- Ross Dellenger reported this morning that power conference commissioners agreed on roster maximums. For most sports, the increases are small, but baseball and softball are going to see their numbers go way, way up, probably reflecting how much those sports are growing in popularity. Why were maximums necessary? The House settlement, if approved, will get rid of sport-by-sport scholarship restrictions, allowing schools to award as many scholarships as they want in a given sport so long as they’re still meeting Title IX’s requirements for gender equality. Roster maximums, then, set some guardrails on how many football players, basketball players, volleyball players, etc. each school can have. Depending how Group of Five schools and the rest of Division I respond, this could be the beginning of different strata of Division I operating under different rules. We’re in favor of that. We don’t see how Division I can survive if it doesn’t allow Florida State to award more scholarships than Florida Atlantic. Try to force the two together, and eventually the big schools will get fed up and break away.
