2024 MLB Trade Deadline Debrief
The biggest takeaways from an unusually busy Deadline Day.
Trade deadlines can often fall short of the hype. While fans and analysts always enter Deadline Day with visions of blockbuster trades and a wild flurry of activity, those expectations are frequently unmet.
MLB’s 2024 trade deadline, though, saw a whirlwind of moves that broke the usual mold. Every team made at least one deal either on or around Tuesday, with roughly 70 major moves playing out in total over the past month — involving players who produced more than 33 Wins Above Replacement so far this season. And collectively, those deals told us a lot about how each team is looking ahead to the final few months of the regular season.
To sort out what just happened, let’s start by mapping out the Net WAR each team added — which I tracked throughout the day on Tuesday — against teams’ Doyle Numbers, which measure whether a team would be better off buying (Doyle >= 1.00) or selling (Doyle <= 1.00) based on the value of a present win relative to a future one. Here’s that breakdown a couple of different ways, using only 2024 WAR per 162 and using each player’s “established level” of WAR from both this year and the previous 2 seasons:
A few important takeaways emerge from these charts:
The Dodgers and Padres staged an NL West rivalry for the most talent added this deadline.
Depending on how you look at it, either San Diego (+7.1 net 2024 WAR/162) or Los Angeles (+6.5 net “established” WAR/162) bolstered themselves the most on and around Tuesday. The Padres added Tanner Scott, the best reliever available on the market, to go with a variety of other arms. (They also ditched a few sub-replacement players, which helped them by subtraction.) But the Dodgers countered with Jack Flaherty, the top-ranked pending free agent starter, along with Kevin Kiermaier, Amed Rosario and a fascinating move for former Cardinal Tommy Edman, who hasn’t played yet this season but was elite (5.8 WAR/162) a few years ago.
Most of the contenders added some value — except the Twins.😬
As we can see in both charts, the zone on the bottom right — clear buyers, with a Doyle over 1.00, who subtracted talent — was almost completely empty. In other words, the teams who had the most to gain (in terms of World Series odds) by loading up generally bolstered themselves to some degree or another. But the exception was the Minnesota Twins: While they did pick up Trevor Richards and Rylan Bannon during the deadline frenzy, both players have produced negative value so far this season, leaving Minnesota with sub-zero net WAR added. Every other team with a Doyle north of the Rays’ 0.30 mark added positive net WAR.
Many — though not all — of the biggest would-be sellers sold big.
We already know that the Rays spent all deadline selling everything that wasn’t bolted down, and they were joined in that endeavor by the Marlins (who challenged Tampa on 2024 WAR sold), Blue Jays, Tigers, Nationals and White Sox. These were teams going nowhere despite holding coveted trade chips, and they acted accordingly. But there were also teams with low Doyle numbers — and thus, little in the way of playoff and/or World Series odds — who only sold slightly, or even added.
The Cubs are a weird case because they added Isaac Paredes, who is having a good season now but also has three more arbitration years after 2024, so it was a move for the future that also improved Chicago now. But the Rockies, A’s and Angels didn’t have the WAR to ship away, and the Giants tried to have things all was at once: They kept a number of their biggest would-be free agents even while trading others away. Trying to straddle the line between buyer and seller seldom works out, and we’ve seen this kind of thing fail many times before.
The teams that could go either way erred on the side of buying.
As mentioned above, the Doyle Number theoretically represents each team’s optimized trade-off between present and future wins of talent. At 1.00, a team should be indifferent between trying to win now and hoarding for the future — but go much below that, and future wins start to get a lot more valuable than present ones (which probably aren’t going to win you a World Series). It’s not a strict cut-off, though, and I noted last week that teams with Doyle values as low as the 0.50 range could conceivably still find scenarios where adding big talent would be worth going in on 2024.
However, what I’m calling the “zone of delusion” — the range where teams seem to still think they can gain value by buying, despite all evidence to the contrary — seems to extend quite a bit lower than that. Instead of existing on a straight line, the plot of net WAR added versus Doyle instead looks like a logarithmic function that stays relatively flat as Doyle decreases until it drops dramatically around the 0.20 range. That means there were a number of teams (such as the Cardinals, Rangers, Pirates and Giants — and the Reds weren’t far off) who seem to have squinted at their number of games behind in the standings rather than their playoff and World Series odds, and decided to add to what is likely a doomed effort.
(This is part of what made the Rays such an outlier — they did the exact opposite, clearly guided by a probabilistic method of analyzing their chances.)
Overall, a lot of teams went for it.
To get such an active and interesting deadline, you need a group of bad teams to sell, and a large set of bunched-up contenders who see a benefit in going for it. This year sort of saw the perfect mix of those factors, with a lot of clubs carrying respectable Elo ratings but nobody (not even the All-Star laden Phillies) really pulling away and establishing themselves as dominant favorites. Going back to the start of the modern end-of-July trade deadline in 1986, this year’s Top 5 teams have the eighth-lowest average Elo rating of any season in that span.
That means more opportunity for more teams, which is why we saw the clubs in that Doyle range of 0.50 to 1.00 — the Red Sox, Mets, D-Backs, Mariners, Royals and Padres — make just as concerted an effort to improve as the top contenders. Some of that might also stem from the misguided idea that sneaking into the playoffs is all that matters (to the contrary, talent actually matters a lot in boosting your World Series odds conditional on making the playoffs), but it’s an indication of how wide-open the championship race is this season, and just how many teams are willing to load up in pursuit of that.
Filed under: Baseball