Let’s Track Who’s Adding (And Subtracting) the Most at the 2024 MLB Trade Deadline
I'm keeping a running tab of WAR gained and lost in this month's deals.
Apologies in advance to all of the readers interested in sports other than baseball (misguided as that may be)… I promise that my MLB trade deadline obsession will be over soon, and we can all return to not overanalyzing deals involving random lefthanded relief pitchers.
But before that can happen, we have to track everything that goes down on Deadline Day, and what it all means. And to do that, I’ve created a couple of updating trackers to watch as the deals come in leading up to the cutoff for trades at 6 p.m. ET.
Last Updated: July 30, 7:29 p.m. ET
First, let’s look at the Net 2024 Wins Above Replacement per 162 games added minus subtracted through deadline dealing, along with each team’s Doyle Number — a yardstick that tells us whether a team should buy (Doyle > 1.00) or sell (Doyle < 1.00) to maximize its total championships won over this season and each of the next six. This will tell us who has bolstered their roster by poaching other teams’ production, or — in the case of the Tampa Bay Rays — given up production from this season with an eye on the future.
I think that’s a decent measure of direct value added/lost, since it only looks at what each player did this season. But that approach also has shortcomings, in the sense that it’s more measuring production (past-looking) than talent (future-looking). So I’ve also added a tracker calculating talent added or subtracted, using a player’s “established level” of WAR, or a weighted average of his past few seasons of WAR per 162 team games.
(The two charts should correlate extremely closely, but they’ll differ in cases such as the Dodgers’ acquisition of Tommy Edman, who had 2.3 WAR/162 last year and 5.8 in 2022, but zero in 2024 because he hasn’t played yet.)
Both of these tables will be updated throughout the day today, so stay tuned to keep track of which teams are adding (or subtracting) the most before the deadline.
Filed under: Baseball