The slow unfolding of this winter's hot stove season has once again placed competitive issues on the front burner in the tug-of-war between baseball's labor and management. The markets have changed. Players don't like it, and neither do their agents. You can hardly blame them, but it's not clear that there really is anyone to blame. The system itself might have slipped into obsolescence.
My bugaboo when it comes to this topic is that I sense an emergent groupthink emanating from analysis-fueled front offices. Teams are valuing players the same way. They have reached similar conclusions when it comes to analyzing career patterns and the questions of supply and demand. This, in conjunction with a startling deference to the luxury tax threshold, has broken the current model of free agency.
However, a related issue that might be just as important is the sheer number of rebuilding teams. We certainly hear about it a lot, and it's a factor cited by agent Scott Boras, among others. A conservative count of the current big league landscape suggests that at least nine teams are not in win-now mode as we start to close in on spring training. What's worse, few of the teams that are clearly trying to win now are actually behaving like it.
One possible factor in this is baseball's current six-division, 10-postseason-team format.
Look at the current hierarchy within each division through the prism of the Steamer team projections at fangraphs.com. In the American League East, the Boston Red Sox are forecast to have a narrow advantage over the New York Yankees in their ongoing arms race. The Yankees have been one of the more aggressive teams this winter; Boston has not. Neither moved to jump in front of the markets for Machado or Harper, though clearly either player would have created a buffer for one team over its archrival. However, both teams look like good bets to get back to the playoffs one way or another.
But look closer. While the Tampa Bay Rays look like strong contenders for the second wild-card spot, they project 10 games worse than the Yankees -- not nearly enough to light a fire under the behemoths of their division. In the AL Central, the Cleveland Indians have an 11-game projection edge on the Minnesota Twins, the same advantage the Houston Astros hold over the Los Angeles Angels in the AL West. Both division leaders have been passive this winter. The National League East looks competitive, and indeed, every team but the Miami Marlins has been pretty active since the World Series ended. The NL Central has drawn closer, with improvements by the St. Louis Cardinals, but a key factor in that is the Chicago Cubs' inactivity. In the NL West, the Los Angeles Dodgers have rearranged things on their roster but avoided a Harper or Machado splash they were well-positioned to make. No small factor in that approach has to be the 11-game bulge they are projected to own over the Colorado Rockies. Everyone else in the division, on paper, looks like a sub-.500 outfit.
With five playoff spots available in each league, none of the elite teams has to be particularly concerned about positioning for the postseason. Things could go askew. It's baseball. The Dodgers and Cubs had similar on-paper edges last year but ended up in tiebreaker games. The Nationals were similarly heavy favorites in the NL East but missed the postseason. But things should have worked out. The Cubs and Dodgers both ended up with sizable run-differential advantages over everyone else in their divisions. The Washington Nationals didn't lead their division but were plus-89 in run differential, 13 runs behind the Atlanta Braves but still one of the better totals in the NL.
In other words, all of these teams justified the way their rosters were set up and managed. Skipping to the present, it's likely that all of the Steamer favorites right now feel pretty good about where they stand. But consider how those Steamer projections might look in a different format:
AL EAST
Red Sox (97-65)
Yankees (96-66)
Indians (93-69)
Nationals (92-70)
Rays (85-77)
Blue Jays (77-85)
Tigers (69-93)
Orioles (62-100)
AL WEST
Angels (84-78)
Twins (82-80)
Athletics (81-81)
Rangers (74-88)
Mariners (73-89)
Royals (70-92)
White Sox (70-92)
NL EAST
Cubs (87-75)
Cardinals (86-76)
Mets (85-77)
Braves (82-80)
Reds (81-81)
Pirates (80-82)
Phillies (79-83)
Marlins (67-95)
NL WEST
Astros (95-67)
Dodgers (93-69)
Rockies (82-80)
Diamondbacks (79-83)
Brewers (79-83)
Giants (76-86)
Padres (76-86)
To balance the leagues and divisions, I've shuffled the Astros to the NL West and put the Nationals in the AL East because, damn it, Washington is an American League city. That doesn't matter for our purposes here. The point is the landscape of any given snapshot of baseball can be drastically altered by how you group the teams. Here, we have at least three divisions that in theory would be a transaction free-for-all this winter. Even the somewhat separated NL West would have an interesting arms race between the Astros and Dodgers.
The wrinkle in all of this is that I have neglected to mention the wild card. I wish I didn't have to. But if we had three non-first-place teams in each league joining the division champs in October, any team projected to win 90 or more games would have to feel pretty comfortable. In this way, the mid-1990s expansion to six divisions, and the current 10-team playoff format, might serve to undermine market aggressiveness, not enhance it. Obviously, you'd have to put someone from each team on a polygraph machine to glean the real reason they haven't been more aggressive. That's one project I'm sure Boras and rival agent Dan Lozano would be on board with.
For the first 68 years after the American League was born in 1901, we had just two "divisions," one in each league. That expanded to four in 1969, a format that existed for 25 seasons. Then we went to six divisions in time for the ill-fated 1994 campaign, so that means last season marked the 25th season of the six-division format. Seems like a good time to do a comparison.
Let's do this through the prism of close races, which is something I think all fans would agree we can't have enough of. Here are the percentages in each format for how often teams finished three or fewer games behind the division champ:
One-division-per-league format (1901 to 1968): 6.3 percent
Four-division format (1969 to 1993): 9.5 percent
Six-division format (1994 to present): 10.1 percent
That's good. More divisions, more teams involved in close races. The same pattern holds true if you change the definition of "close race" to five games behind or fewer.
There is a problem with the data, however. What I've done is simply count how many teams played under each format and the percentage of times the teams participated in a close race. However, as in the 1967 American League or the 2015 National League Central, it's not uncommon for more than one team to be chasing the leader. That's no coincidence. Except in rare instances, such as the 1993 National League West, close races are often the result of a circuit in which no one team is markedly better than the other contenders. But that's one of the oft-cited defenses of the six-division/wild-card format: It gets more teams involved. By and large, over the past quarter-century, that has been the case.
However, what does it look like if we do an actual count of close races? Let's define it like this: Anytime the second-place team in a league/division finishes five or fewer games out of first place, we'll call that a close race. The number of teams running close doesn't matter. Either it's a close race, or it's not.
Well, during the 25 years of the four-division format, there were 50 instances of a close race. There were also 50 instances in which a division didn't have a close race. It was 50-50. That was more or less equal to the one-division-per-league era, in which 51 percent of races didn't meet our definition of close. You'd expect the percentage to be higher, actually, because baseball used to be more stratified. But there wasn't much difference between the one-division-per-league and the four-division eras. Pretty much, 50-50 is the historical standard.
During the six-division era, the raw number of divisions without a close race rose to 83 over the past 25 years. That makes sense, of course. More divisions, more chances for runaway races. But that's also more divisions without drama in sheer number. More telling is the fact that the percentage of races decided by more than five games has risen from its historical average of 50 percent to 55. As always, correlation doesn't mean causation, and there are a lot of reasons the percentage might have risen. For now, we'll leave it at that: Close races occurred at a higher frequency before we moved to six divisions.
But the wild card! How could we forget the magical addition of second- and third-place teams in the postseason party!
Through the prism of competitiveness, the wild card has not proven to be the panacea one might have thought, and that is very much reflected in the way teams have behaved the past two offseasons. The main reason for this is you simply don't have to be that good to be a wild-card team. Not anymore. And if you don't have to be that good to be a wild card, you don't have be that good to sneak into the playoffs. If you get off to a good start, then you can add during the season to fill roster holes. But as long as you're comfortably mediocre on paper, why go all in during the hot stove?
After an initial ramp-up after the wild card was adopted, the five-year average win total for wild cards ran between 94 and 95 in each season between 2001 and 2005. That was the heyday of the wild-card era. You had to be dang good to be a second-place team in the postseason in those days. The Angels, Marlins and Red Sox all won World Series as wild cards in those seasons. After that, the five-year average started to fall and has settled between 89.4 and 91.4 in each of the past seven seasons.
That span -- from 2012 through last season -- coincides with the addition of the second wild card in each league. In baseball history, there have been 57 teams to make the postseason without winning at a rate of at least 90 victories per 162 games. Fifteen of those instances (26.3 percent) have occurred since 2012, even though no sub-90-win team got in last season. Forty-one of the sub-90 playoff teams (71.9 percent) have come since the introduction of the wild card. Such a thing never happened during the one-division-per-league era.
You just don't have to be that good to get into the postseason these days, and it seems likely that has some bearing on the collective aggressiveness in the marketplace. Can we blame it all on the format? No. But it certainly doesn't seem to be helping.
Organizational WAR
I enjoy projections. I enjoy reading them. I enjoy doing them. Well, maybe it would be more accurate to say I feel compelled to do them. I might be a bit different than most who participate in this exercise in that my interest has never been to forecast a player's season, which is useful for fantasy leagues and such endeavors. My area of interest has always been to come up with as good a model for predicting the final standings as a mathematically untrained English major can hope to fashion. It's a process that will never end. The result is that I end up doing little research projects in hopes of introducing elements into my projection model to improve the results. I come up with something, test it against prior seasons and, if it works, add it.
Here's one quick project I did. I'm not sure what it means, and I have no idea if I'll try to incorporate it into my projection model. Still, I found the question interesting enough that I thought I'd share the results. Maybe it will inspire someone to dig deeper. Here's the core question, mostly inspired by what seems to be an emergent trend of teams such as the Astros and Dodgers getting better performances from freely available players than would have been expected based on track records: Should I add an organizational component to the projection model?
I decided to see how much WAR each team has gotten from players beyond X number of roster spots in each season, using data from fangraphs.com. We tend to focus on teams' primary 25-man rosters or even their everyday lineups and rotations. And we should. But beyond those areas, might there be teams consistently getting production simply because of their organizational processes? It's a big question, and this research is too basic to provide a definitive answer, but let's see what we have.
Another way to phrase the problem is to ask, "Where do teams get their WAR from?" I looked at the past 10 years' worth of data.
Some rosters are top-heavy. The Angels of the Mike Trout era have been accused of having top-heavy rosters. Does it pan out that way? Here are the five teams that have gotten the highest percentage of their WAR from the top five spots on their rosters: 1. Mariners (68 percent) 2. Marlins (66) 3. (tie) Diamondbacks (63) and White Sox (63) 5. Angels (62).
The Angels check out as a team that over the past decade has been top-heavy, but other teams have been worse. The average team has gotten 58 percent of its WAR from the top five spots on its roster. That's why the stars get paid the way they do. The low-end teams by this measure were the Athletics (52 percent), Dodgers (51 percent) and Yankees (49 percent).
That league-wide number goes up to 87 percent if we go to the top 10 roster spots. The Mariners got 97 percent of their WAR from top-10 spots over the past decade. That's pretty amazing. The Angels (88 percent) fall to 14th. Once again, the Dodgers and Yankees have been the least dependent on the top 10 spots. Of course, that mostly means that typically there isn't much drop-off between the elite slots and those beneath them. That suggests something about the power of the big market; the Yankees and Dodgers are baseball's richest teams.
These patterns stay consistent whether we look at the top five, 10, 15, 20, 25 or 30 spots. The hierarchy remains largely the same, with a little shuffling here and there. But the final area to focus on is the last one: WAR obtained from roster spots after No. 30. This is where we get into organizational depth, the kind of production teams are more likely to get from internal processes and scouting than raw spending power.
First, no team wins based on these deep-depth spots. Every team's composite production from roster slots beyond No. 30 is well below replacement. By and large, the more a team has to rely on players in these tiers -- minor leaguers, pretty much -- the more trouble it will be in. This is intuitively obvious, and it's the curse of injury-stricken teams.
But some teams fare better than others. The average team has gotten minus-46 WAR from spots over 30. Here are the worst five: 26. Padres (minus-52.3) 27. Rockies (minus-52.6) 28. Mariners (minus-54.9) 29. White Sox (minus-56.9) 30. Orioles (minus-57.0). Some of the same teams that popped up on the top-heavy list are here, which is not surprising. If the back end of your roster is losing a lot of WAR, the production of the top portion becomes amplified.
Now here are the top five: 1. Cardinals (minus-33.3) 2. Brewers (minus-34.1) 3. Dodgers (minus-38.3) 4. (tie) Nationals and Braves (minus-39.2). To me, these make a lot of sense, especially with the top three teams. The Cardinals, Brewers and Dodgers have been cited at various times over the years for having terrific organizational depth. These numbers seem to underscore that perception.
Can we just pencil in a certain amount of depth for some teams? Maybe. It kind of looks that way. But before we would add that to a forecasting model, we'd need to dig deeper. What is at the root of the effect? Is it the lead executive? It is a scouting and development person? It is just a function of market? Answering these questions would be among the next steps.
About Adam, Big Train and the Babe
As much time as I spend doing cross-era comparisons of baseball players, I have stayed away from Adam Ottavino's comments a few weeks back about how he'd strike out Babe Ruth "every time." It wasn't that big a deal, and I'd mostly forgotten about it. The topic came up again this week when a very contrite Ottavino explained that he wasn't trying to hammer on the Babe but was merely making a point about the difference in players today. Well ... I see his point, but I still don't particularly agree with it.
My dander about this was raised again recently when someone sent me a link to this story, reexamining the likely velocity with which Walter Johnson, possibly the hardest thrower of his time, delivered the ball. The piece is interesting and seems accurate, and my annoyance isn't in any way directed toward the author, nor am I irritated at Ottavino. As ESPN's Tim Keown pointed out back when Ottavino first spouted off that today's athletes are better than yesterday's, that's wholly beside the point, true as it might be. Obviously, with both Johnson and Ruth, you have to adjust for the fact that they were not playing against all of the best players from their era because of the color line, except on barnstorming tours from which we have little data.
Yet the "Babe Ruth would flail" argument continues, having taken on a life of its own beyond Ottavino. Such is life with social media. Here's the way I see it: Let's say Walter Johnson's innate ability was three standard deviations above the population of young players in 1907, when he broke in for the Senators. I'm not sure what the real number is, but that seems reasonable. Given the training and nutritional standards of the time, who's to say that if he had been born in 1987 instead of 1887, the three-standard-deviation difference would not still apply? Maybe there is a difference in supply because there are so many more good athletes than there used to be. In that case, let's call it two standard deviations. It's still great, and greatness is greatness.
A millennial Walter Johnson's entire upbringing, nutritional background, amateur experience, development process, pitching arsenal, etc., would have been unrecognizable compared to what he actually experienced. The world, generally speaking, moves in only one direction, and almost every aspect of human life and civilization has leaped forward since Johnson was born. You have to adjust for that temporal context to make any kind of rational comparison. The farm life of Johnson's childhood in rural Kansas bore more resemblance to Thomas Jefferson's time than our own.
If you dropped Johnson out of a time machine into today's American League, maybe he would be merely average. Maybe not. We can't know, if only because there is more to pitching than raw velocity. Even now. The same holds true for Ruth and his ability at the plate. It doesn't matter because it's a literal impossibility -- time machines don't exist. If Ottavino has access to a time machine, I'd like to know because there is a lot of research I'd like to do.
Ruth isn't the greatest player of all time because you could pluck him out of 1921 and drop him into Giancarlo Stanton's spot in the lineup on Opening Day this March. He's the greatest player because his measured performance, as compared to others of his time, was so far above anyone else's. And he pitched! His career ERA+ ranks among the top 100 in history among pitchers with at least 1,200 innings. Ruth's ERA+ of 122 is only a hair below Ottavino's 125 -- and, you know, he had to throw complete games.
In regard to that 1917 testing of Johnson's velocity referenced in the piece linked above, here's something else to consider. Through that season, he had thrown 3,474⅓ innings in 11 seasons. He went on to throw roughly 2,500 more innings, but let's say he was finished after 1917. That number would rank 74th all time. It's more than any active pitcher has thrown in his career. In other words, that workload means we might not have been talking about peak velocity for Johnson in 1917. My guess is if he had been born in 1987 instead of 1887, he would be at the very least another Justin Verlander -- maybe better. As my colleague David Schoenfield points out, if we sent Johnson to Driveline, he might have thrown 105.
I can't state this strongly enough: This debate over how Ruth or Johnson, in their pre-Great Depression bodies, would do in 2019 is silly and pointless. You compare people of a time only to others of the time. It's the only empirical way to go about it. If you know how much better or worse than his contemporaries a player was, you can start to compare players across eras, but even then, you have to be careful about it.
Suffice to say, if Babe Ruth had been born in 1995 instead of 1885, his life and work would have followed a different trajectory. For one thing, he wouldn't have been gobbling hot dogs and beer before (and during?) games. He wouldn't have developed a belly like, well, mine. He wouldn't have been using a 42-ounce bat. His technique and swing would have been honed by coaching and video work. Anyway, Babe might have held up just fine. His career OPS against Johnson was 1.169. Against Lefty Grove, it was .911.
What about an Adam Ottavino born in 1887 in rural Kansas? We have no idea. Most likely, he would have thrown in the mid-80s. There wouldn't have been anybody around to teach him the slider that has become such a weapon and made him a rich man. The slider didn't exist. Ottavino would have had to demonstrate durability because pitchers of that time didn't have one-inning roles.
The reason this bothers me isn't about Ottavino. He said he considers himself a baseball historian, and that fact by itself makes him admirable in my book. I could not have more respect for the talent, ability and focus of current players. But this thing called big league baseball did not appear out of nowhere. All modern athletes, including Ottavino, are in part the result of the collected knowledge about the craft that has been learned, tested, perfected and shared from and before Johnson's time through right now. It's a process that never ends. Ottavino, like all modern athletes, benefits from the talent and accomplishments of everyone who came before him.
It's a continuum all players from every era are a part of. That's how things evolve in a civilization.