With the All-Star Break now fully in the rearview mirror and play entirely resumed, it’s officially Trade Deadline season, and the buyer/seller decision tree is the focus of the baseball world.
It’s a fascinating thing, the decision to buy or sell. At the moment, entering play tonight, you could make a case for everyone as good as the Yankees to sell, and you could make a case for everyone as bad as the Cardinals to buy. The decision seems straightforward, especially because it’s so easy to present as binary in nature even when the reality’s more mixed. There are two words, after all. Buyer and seller. But just as the reality is mixed, the decision is far from a simple one.
I’ve been told before—and I’ve found this true—that a helpful thing to do when facing a convoluted decision is to try to describe the objective as concisely as possible. For buying and selling, I’ll offer two possible definitions of the goal:
The first is to maximize the probability that one’s team will win a World Series at some point in time.
The second is to maximize the expected number of World Series that one’s team will win.
There’s no explicit time limit on these things, and what natural implicit limits exist are limited in scope. You’re almost definitely not going to acquire a prospect at the trade deadline who you expect to impact your championship odds in 15 years. With minor league service time and the major league arbitration rules what they are, it’s technically possible to acquire one who can help your championship odds in ten years. Eight years out? Now we’re starting to see a little impact, but it’s tiny. Six years away? This is where the championship window talk enters a place of legitimacy, even if there are still myriad external variables which will also have their say.
Really, though, there is no hard time limit using either of these two measuring sticks. For a team like the Pirates or the Yankees—each of whom just wants to win one, dammit, though that desire comes from very different places—a title in 2023 isn’t all that different in value from one in 2027 if the probability is truly the same. For a team like the Astros or Braves—each of whom is trying to put up a crooked number in the ring department—two titles in five years is a reasonable goal to pursue, and there’s no qualification at all on which two years are best.
This isn’t exactly how teams approach the decision, but it’s how teams should approach it. This is the set of incentives ownership should push upon the front office. For franchises which really want one title right now—teams who haven’t won one ever or haven’t won one for a while and don’t enjoy the exhilarating empowerment of holding a massive collection of young talent (like the Orioles, Diamondbacks, and Reds all do)—the objective should be to maximize the probability of winning one title. For franchises which aren’t in a rush—those three with cause for sky-high ambition right now plus the Astros, Braves, Dodgers, Nationals, Red Sox, Cubs, Royals, Giants, Cardinals, Marlins, and maybe the Phillies—the goal should be to maximize the expected number of titles won.
In practice, pursuits of these different goals look very similar to one another. Front offices are trying to get to the postseason table as many times as possible, and front offices who’ve earned or whose players have earned a good shot this season want to lock that possibility up while also giving the team the best chance of winning at that table once seated. Winning titles in American professional sports is often described as an exercise in maximizing the number of times you get to roll the postseason dice. The trade deadline is an exercise, then, for buyers, in ensuring one’s team gets a roll this year, and to a separate extent an exercise in acquiring the best dice possible to roll once the rolling is ensured.
For sellers, it’s different, and this is where the question’s essence lies. How much are sellers improving their future championship odds? Over which years are they improving them? Entering tonight, FanGraphs gave the Guardians a 22.2% chance of making this year’s playoffs and a 0.7% chance of winning the World Series, meaning there’s something like a 3% chance Cleveland will win a title if they do make the MLB postseason. This further means: Even if the Guardians could assure themselves a 100% chance of making the playoffs, they’d still only be 3% likely to win the World Series with this current roster, and no trade deadline upgrade doubles a roster’s relative quality. If the Guardians could assure themselves a 100% chance of making the playoffs each of the next ten years but they made it each time with a roster only as good as theirs is right now, their probability of winning at least one title would only be about 26%. In the old postseason format—the 8-team or 10-team format—the Guards would likely have about a 6% chance of winning the World Series this year conditional upon them making the playoff field. That number brings the 10-year probability to 46%, almost twice what it is with the current setup. (This is a conversation for another time. Maybe tomorrow, even.)
We’re getting pretty in the weeds now, but what we’re trying to say is: For each franchise, there is a playoff probability above which they should be buyers and there is a playoff probability below which they should be sellers, and there is a space in between them in which it depends heavily on the move in question. For the Brewers, a team with a similar 3%-ish conditional probability of winning the World Series if they make the playoff field, there really are probably players to sell, players like Josh Hader last year. But, there are additional ramifications there. What does it do to the rest of the team’s performance if one of their best pitchers is sent to another team? The Mariners got away with trading Kendall Graveman in 2021. The Brewers did not get away with trading Josh Hader in 2022.
In the end, then, it’s hard to imagine a more difficult decision for teams in our “Factors” category from Friday to make than whether to buy or whether to sell and how, if the answer isn’t binary, to thread the needle. There are probabilities. There are numbers out there in the universe, numbers an all-knowing mathematician could share with a general manager. But there are no all-knowing mathematicians in front offices, and to make things even harder, there’s fan sentiment to manage and individual GM’s must prove themselves in finite time periods and there maybe is something to be said for being in playoff contention regularly in and of itself, even if no titles ever come of it. The July 31st playoff probability at which every team buys or sells is very difficult to guess, which makes it that much harder to know whether the decision each team makes is the right one.
Good luck to those making the calls.
The Cubs Ran into a Good Team
A team looking more clearly like a seller than they were on Friday is the Cubs, who had their best pitcher on the mound in the rubber match yesterday with Boston but failed to get the win.
It’s something that happens, Justin Steele is not a bona fide ace, you can’t expect him to be flawless every time out there and the offense didn’t give the guy any help at all until it was too late. More often than not, you will lose to a better team, and on most days these Red Sox are a better team than these Cubs. Still, just because a result is understandable and—on the aggregate over the series—somewhat expected, doesn’t make it inconsequential. That was a big game for the Cubs. This was a big series for the Cubs. They lost it.
Making matters worse, the Brewers swept the Reds. We’d wanted the Brewers to win that series. We’d wanted a minimal gap between the Cubs and first place, and the Reds were leading the division on Friday morning. Were we to choose a team to lead the other by two games, though, we’d have wanted the Reds. Because on paper, the Reds are not as good as the Brewers. Instead, it’s Milwaukee, the best NL Central team on paper out of those which have a real chance, that the Cubs trail by eight with two weeks to go before the deadline. It’s not too promising.
There is time, though, and that means we have time to root for things, and those things are the Cubs going something like 5–2 this week while the Brewers have a hard time in their six against the Phillies and the Braves. If the Crew goes 2–4, the Cubs could narrow the gap to five and a half heading into next week by winning each of these two series. With the Reds facing the Giants and Diamondbacks for seven, the Cubs could get within three or four games of second place by having a good week. It would take more from there to really get into the race—one more great week ahead of the deadline—and it would take even more after that to crack the playoff crust, but all the Cubs can do every day from here until August is try to win. Do it enough before either the deadline comes or someone makes an offer Jed Hoyer doesn’t want to refuse, and maybe this season won’t be lost. Entering tonight, the team’s at 7.2% likely to make the playoff field. A one-in-fourteen chance.
For this series, none of the three games offers a slam dunk opportunity, but the Cubs should be favored in all three. The Nationals are bad but not wholly noncompetitive, MacKenzie Gore is underperforming but not terrible, Trevor Williams is hanging in there, and Patrick Corbin (if he’s indeed the starter on Wednesday) has had some terrific recent outings but continues to get rocked with some frequency. Hopefully Drew Smyly can do what Jameson Taillon did in the Bronx and earn some faith back.
Carlos Alcaraz’s Moment
Carlos Alcaraz had one won other major, but it was last year’s U.S. Open, from which Novak Djokovic was absent due to vaccine restrictions. This was the pair’s second meeting in a major, and it wasn’t just the first time Alcaraz came out ahead in such a matchup. It was also the first time Alcaraz beat Djokovic in such a tournament.
It’s unclear if this is the start of an Alcaraz era, but it’s his second major title in less than a year, and he’s evidently capable of beating the best player in the world right now. He’ll have to keep doing it, but he can do it, and that’s more than anyone else in the world can say right now.
Iowa State Has Its Rock
On Friday, Iowa State announced that 7’1” JT Rock will reclassify from the 2024 class to 2023 and join the basketball team this fall. Rock, a Sioux Falls product, was a top-100 2024 recruit, and while jumping up a year lessens at least his short-term quality, it’s hard to believe Iowa State doesn’t think it’s getting something important from him if they’re willing to get him on campus already this year. At the least, the Cyclones are happy to have him develop in Ames rather than spend another year developing in high school. That’s not a bad situation.
