A month ago, we were immersed in the usual whirlwind of speculation, reports and reactions that accelerate as the MLB trade deadline approaches. So, just like that, it’s over, back to the regularly scheduled flag races. Thank you for your attention.
For contending teams, the trade deadline and pennant races are intrinsically linked. The players you buy in the first date are expected to help in the second. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
It will be years before the final winners and losers of the individual contracts are announced. What we can do is look at which teams have taken the biggest hit – so far – from the deadline race, and which teams are still looking for a return on their investment.
In the past, we’ve revisited our initial analysis of the contract by looking at how the playoff odds have changed over the next month. We’re doing it again, but we’ve added a look at the individuals involved in the contracts by adding the added earning potential for each player in their new organization, using TruMedia’s WPA model. We ran two metrics for each team: the post-trade WPA for each player the team added, as well as the WPA of all players sent in the trade. Teams were then ranked based on the net total of these two measures.
A month ago, we thought we knew who won and who lost at the deadline, but given the early results of what actually happened on the ground, how do these estimates hold up?