The Brewers Turned a Weak Talent Pipeline into a Top Team. The Marlins Did the Exact Opposite.
Which MLB teams have done the most with the least homegrown talent — and vice-versa — this season?
If the Milwaukee Brewers had to rely solely on players they originally brought to the major leagues, Milwaukee would probably be grappling with the St. Louis Cardinals to avoid last place in the NL Central right now.
Luckily for the Brewers, though, they don’t have to do that — and as a result, they currently sit atop the division.
That’s because Milwaukee has a +33.9 win gap between their actual Wins Above Replacement1 per 162 games (51.4, sixth-best in MLB) and the WAR produced by all players who originally debuted as Brewers across the league — regardless of who they play for — this year (17.5, or sixth-fewest). That’s the largest difference of any team in MLB so far in 2024:
While Milwaukee has developed a few productive homegrown players, such as 2B Brice Turang and SP Freddy Peralta,2 that cohort only makes up 22% of the team’s total value in 2024 to date. (The team even bid farewell to homegrown ace Corbin Burnes in a February trade, helping to drop the share from 48% a year ago.) Much more of the Brewers’ success is owed to external acquisitions, like C William Contreras, SS Willy Adames, LF Christian Yelich and pitchers Bryan Hudson and Bryse Wilson.
The Dodgers come in second in our differential with a +25.1 WAR gap, which might seem surprising given L.A.’s reputation for developing talent. But their homegrown WAR (44.9, sixth-highest) isn’t bad; they just have also added to their juggernaut by picking up names like Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Tyler Glasnow, Max Muncy, Teoscar Hernandez and James Paxton to complement their homegrown core.
Rounding out the rest of the Top 6: The Arizona Diamondbacks (+23.2), Philadelphia Phillies (+19.0), New York Yankees (+18.7) and Atlanta Braves (+17.6) — all of whom have made bets on outside talent to some degree or another, in the hope it puts them over the top.
The other end of the differential spectrum is just as interesting. We already know the Los Angeles Angels (-14.2) and Chicago White Sox (-18.1) have tragic tales to tell, but the Washington Nationals (-15.6), Detroit Tigers (-16.5) and Pittsburgh Pirates (-18.5) — three teams who’ve been doing better than expected early this season — could be doing even better if they’d held onto their original players.
(In particular, the former debuts of the Nationals and Tigers are each tracking for the WAR of 100-win teams, assuming all could play together at the MLB level.)3
Then there are the Miami Marlins.
Years ago, when I was at FiveThirtyEight, my colleague Ari Levin (an honest-to-goodness Marlins fan)4 wrote that the Marlins had traded away a playoff squad following the team’s various fire sales of the 2010s. And somehow, that is still close (-ish) to being true!
Between the current homegrown Marlins — guys like Bryan De La Cruz, Max Meyer, Bryan Hoeing and Jazz Chisholm Jr. — and cast-off former Marlins — like Marcell Ozuna, Christian Yelich, J.T. Realmuto, Zac Gallen, JJ Bleday and Pablo Lopez — you could cobble together 28.7 WAR/162 out of Miami’s debuts, which would at least be knocking on the door of a .500 record over a full season.5
Instead, the real-life Marlins are on pace for a shockingly low -5.1 WAR, which somehow ranks below the White Sox as the worst mark in all of MLB.
That 33.8-win projected shortfall between potential and reality is not only the biggest negative gap in baseball this season, but it is tracking to be the second-worst mark by any team in a season since the 1994 strike, ahead of only a 2001 Pirates squad that had to watch opponents get value out of Barry Bonds, Jon Lieber, Elmer Dessens, Moises Alou, Rick Reed, Tim Wakefield, Miguel Batista and Esteban Loaiza, among others.
Meanwhile, Milwaukee’s positive differential ranks third-best since the strike — even though it’s unlikely the Brewers will be able to surpass the 1999 Diamondbacks’ remarkable formula for expansion success, which involved turning the team into an instant contender with a bunch of veterans. (It’s also a little bit cheating to have Arizona on the list above, since a recent expansion team is limited in how many “homegrown” players it can even produce for a while.)6
Outside of those expansion-era D-Backs, we haven’t seen a team manufacture a contender from a weak pipeline of debut talent quite like the 2024 Brewers are tracking to do… and it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a team squander its homegrown core quite like the 2024 Marlins.
Filed under: Baseball
Using my JEFFBAGWELL version of WAR — aka the Joint Estimate Featuring FanGraphs and B-R Aggregated to Generate WAR, Equally Leveling Lists.
Peralta was originally signed by Seattle, but he made his major-league debut with Milwaukee.
That’s probably not completely fair, since only so many players can start on the mound or at a given position. But teams generally find a way to get productive bats and arms onto the field one way or another.
He had a funny podcast segment here about Marlins icon (?) Wes Helms’ ability to strike out in the clutch.
It’d be worth about 76 to 77 wins, if a replacement-level team wins 47.7 games in a full season.
By definition, every player in the expansion draft is going to be plucked from some other team to stock the initial roster.
What a fantastic approach and insights into a challenging topic...or as the professors used to say when I was in engineering school, "an elegant solution." I've long been a student of front offices and their strategies. I also (sadly) read all the "We Rank All MLB Front Offices" type pieces - which skew hard to pure opinion poorly supported by a handful of high-profile aberrant transactions.
This, on the other hand, strikes me as a very creative and effective proxy to put more rigor behind the opinions. The chart alone is pure gold. Could you do a similar analysis on the NFL front offices?
It also goes to something I heard Bill James say years ago, that great insights come from first asking great questions and then finding the data...not the other way around. This piece embodies first a great question - one that is becoming more of a focus in the media and the public - before it gets to the powerful data to answer the case.
As front offices increasingly cloak themselves in secrecy, mystique and arbitrary complexity, this pulls the curtain back to reveal the wizards - both the ones from Oz as well as the real ones. Great work.