We're now officially in the month of the trade deadline, a month peppered with trade rumors, whispers, buzz, chatter, gossip and at some point even some actual trades. While significant deals do also happen in August, it's not quite the same: It's the Wild West without the whiskey, full of waiver claims and contract negotiations. July is crunch time for general managers and team vice presidents, and one of the big decisions that needs to be made is exactly when to pull that trigger. Whether you commit as early or as late as possible involves a number of risks and rewards, either way you go.
The benefits of an early move are fairly obvious. The earlier you trade for a player, the more time he has to help your team. Simply put, make a trade now and you could get 50 percent more playing time for the added player to improve your team. When we talked last week about the potential payoff in wins from July trades, we intentionally left some big June trades out of the equation. Yet if we include those late-June deals, we add some rare 3.0 WAR additions to the best trades list, including Rickey Henderson in 1989 (.294/.425/.438, 52 steals, 5.2 FanGraphs WAR), Tom Candiotti in 1991 (2.98 ERA, 3.0 WAR in 19 starts) and Nyjer Morgan, of all players, in 2009 (.351/.396/.435, 24 steals, 2.9 WAR).
Nyjer Morgan isn't a big name, but that's kind of the point -- three months of a 3.0 WAR player (per season) player is generally more valuable than two months of a 4.0 WAR player. For each of the current American League teams in the wild-card race -- I'm drawing the line after the Angels in the standings -- each team gains from 2 to 5 percentage points in their odds of reaching the playoffs by adding a 3.0 WAR player at the start of July, rather than at the end.
For a team looking to sell, the benefits of an early move are equally apparent. Ideally, you get to sell more wins to a team that is willing to pay to acquire them. If you're the White Sox and have Jose Quintana, you never put out a team news release stating that 2017 is meaningless. But in the big picture, everyone knows that it might be -- and that an extra win in 2017 doesn't make a return to the World Series more probable for the White Sox. Having more bidders tends to be preferable to dealing a star after most teams have met their needs and traded off their most interesting prospects.
But with these benefits come a myriad of risks that need to be weighed against the benefit, which is why, when push comes to shove, you typically see the bigger trades made toward the end of the month.
The first problem you run into, when making that big pickup, is that there are a lot of teams that haven't thrown in the towel on the season yet and are waiting before making a commitment one way or the other. This is most obvious in the American League, where 12 of the 15 teams still get a ZiPS-projected playoff probability of 10 percent or greater. Another month of information will hopefully draw the lines between the contenders and the also-rans a bit more obviously.
To illustrate this, I took the AL wild-card contenders that I mentioned above (including the division-leading Red Sox and Indians) and projected where their playoff probability would be a month from now. Below is the current playoff probability, the 20th percentile for playoff probability in a month and the 80th percentile for playoff probability in a month. That 20/80 split is the projection for what their playoff situation will mostly likely be on the morning of July 31. So there's a 20 percent chance that the Blue Jays will have a 24.9 percent or better playoff probability at the trade deadline, but there's also a 20 percent chance that their playoff probability by then will be down to 2.3 percent or worse.
If you look at the realistic contenders not currently in the lead in the AL, you see a great deal of variance between where they stand now and where they could stand in a month. If you call a team with a chance of reaching the postseason under 5 percent a long shot, then seven of the nine teams have decent chances to attain that label by the time the trade deadline comes around. And making an acquisition before then wouldn't necessarily arrest that drop -- individual players in baseball influence relatively few games in baseball, as compared to basketball or football. Look at Mike Trout and the Angels: The reason that they're still winning despite losing Trout is not that Trout is overrated.
If we look at the National League's most wide-open playoff spot, the NL Central crown -- who thought we'd be saying that back in April -- is similarly in uncertain waters. The Cubs could re-establish themselves as the clear front-runners or, alternatively, either the Brewers or Cardinals could keep this an uncertain race down to the wire; both are likely outcomes.
But the NL wild-card race? Done. Even the Rockies, the most vulnerable of the league's top teams after losing 10 of 11 coming into Monday, still have a six-game lead for the second wild-card spot. When you factor in that they only play a total of three games against winning teams between now and the trade deadline, ZiPS still has their playoff probability north of 80 percent.
For the top teams, it also doesn't make much sense to be wheeling and dealing until the last possible moment. The Astros and Nationals have such significant leads and the Dodgers have such a high probability of simply having a much stronger roster than their competitors as is that there's not a lot of real motivation to make any individual move, short of an emergency, such as an injury to Max Scherzer or Clayton Kershaw. Because after all, a stronger roster now doesn't really move the needle all that much for these teams, and if you're making a move in anticipation of the playoff roster, it doesn't really matter if you make it on April 1 or July 31.
Now, a team like the Dodgers would see some benefit, but remember, most players available are not the 4.0 WAR types. The ones that are, such as Jose Quintana, come at a sizable cost in prospects, and given how much a team like the Dodgers backed off on Brian Dozier or Ian Kinsler when top prospects were talked about, it would be surprising to see the team go crazy to get a big addition early.
The other benefit to waiting is simply that you have more time to evaluate your best guess as to the current ability of players. One of the challenges in any kind of baseball analysis is that the record of a player, no matter how detailed the data we can collect or the best scouting we can find, is an imperfect measurement of a perhaps-abstract concept of a player's true value. We never really know if a player who hits .300 over a season is actually a .300 hitter or a fortunate .280 hitter or an unlucky .320 hitter; we never get to know what the right answer is. So with any kind of prediction involving probabilities and a myriad of uncertainties, the longer you wait, the more information there is.
This might not be a crucial issue for a superstar, but when talking about a lesser player having a big season, just how good that player is becomes very much up for debate. Players outperforming their projections are overwhelmingly likely to regress toward their projections as a group, but you don't get to acquire players as a group; you have to acquire individuals, some whose breakouts will be fact and some whose will prove to be fiction.
Not all these players will eventually be on the trade block, but there's at least a realistic possibility that these players are shopped at some point, though the seriousness could vary. Each presents his own big questions in a trade. For example, I'm fairly confident in Yonder Alonso beating that "rest of season" performance projection, but I'm nowhere near as confident about him as I would be with a more established star. I'm not giving up part of my team's future to add him, so the stakes are higher for a general manager. (If I'm wrong, I just get teased for a while. I still occasionally get teased for not liking Atlanta signing Andres Galarraga 20 years ago.)
One special case this year is that of Johnny Cueto, thanks to the opt-out provision in his contract, which makes the decision to acquire him even trickier. In most cases when you acquire an underperforming veteran on a flyer at the trade deadline, his is likely to be a free agent in a couple of months. In Cueto's case, while the reward is high if he works out, so is the risk; if he "goes James Shields," you're on the hook for a minimum for four more years and $84 million.
Lastly, there are several other smaller factors in discouraging contenders from making early trades, such as the nasty surprise of an injury that might come after the trade or an early move simply making it more profitable for your competitor to also make a big move (and have plenty of time left to make one).
The June or early July trade does have significant reward, but for most GMs, the risks for contending and rebuilding teams have generally been judged greater, at least through the history of the trade deadline.