The Cubs and Blue Jays "Won" the Offseason — But Will It Mean Anything?
MLB’s busiest teams look great on paper... but history suggests the regular season will have the final say.
Opening Day of the 2025 MLB season is right around the corner, and soon enough we will get fresh new stats to (over-) analyze early in the season. But for now, we can either dive deep into Spring Training stats — which tell us a small amount, though not much — or pore over what happened over the offseason, trying to get a read on which teams added or lost the most talent on paper.
For the latter purpose, one thing I do every spring is compile a final-ish1 list of offseason additions and subtractions (most of the heavy lifting is admittedly done by the indispensable Roster Resource), along with how many net Wins Above Replacement (WAR)2 were transferred to or from each team in the process.
Last year, I only looked at net WAR gained/lost from the previous season when judging offseason progress, but I think it’s important to take a longer-term view of each player’s production as well. So to that end, I also added up the 2022 and 2023 WAR for each player on the move (in addition to 2024), creating a weighted 3-year version of WAR3 that we can also add or subtract for an alternative view of net offseason gains/losses.
By either measure, the Chicago Cubs and Toronto Blue Jays were far out ahead of the pack in terms of net value added over the offseason. Chicago obviously picked up ex-Astros OF Kyle Tucker, one of the most prized offseason pickups of any team — just avert your eyes from his horrid spring stats — while the Jays somehow worked around all the trade rumors involving Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette to add Andrés Giménez, Anthony Santander, Jeff Hoffman, Max Scherzer and others in perhaps a last-ditch attempt to salvage their once-immense potential.
Perhaps surprisingly, the New York Mets and Los Angeles Dodgers don’t rate higher despite respectively adding Juan Soto and Blake Snell/Roki Sasaki/Tanner Scott/etc. For L.A., this method is underrating them because Sasaki has no prior WAR — he’s projected for 3.0 in FanGraphs’ depth charts — and the team also bid farewell to Jack Flaherty and Kevin Kiermaier, rentals though both were. New York was also dinged for its list of losses (Jose Quintana, Jose Iglesias, J.D. Martinez, Luis Severino, Harrison Bader), which offset the additions of Soto, Jose Siri, Clay Holmes and co.
Instead, the Detroit Tigers, Cincinnati Reds, Sacramento The Athletics, Cleveland Guardians and L.A. Angels had the next-most net WAR added, acquiring names like Brady Singer (CIN), Flaherty (DET), Carlos Santana (CLE), Gleyber Torres (DET), Yusei Kikuchi (LAA) and Luis Severino and Jeffrey Springs (ATH) since last season. It’s especially interesting to see Detroit and Cleveland on that list after the improved seasons each had in 2024, given how the various projections are somewhat lukewarm on their chances in 2025.
At the other end of things, we have the San Diego Padres coming in as the biggest offseason loser for the second consecutive season, this time due to losing a handful of useful players (Ha-Seong Kim, Scott, Jurickson Profar, Martín Pérez, Kyle Higashioka, Donovan Solano) while only really adding Nick Pivetta, Jason Heyward, Connor Joe and Mr. OMG himself, Jose Iglesias. Of course, the Padres followed what was supposed to be a terrible offseason last year with 93 wins — an 11-win gain — and a trip to the playoffs, so grain of salt and all that. (More on this later.)
The Atlanta Braves and St. Louis Cardinals also ranked among the worst offseasons, with the losses of name-brand players like Max Fried and Charlie Morton (ATL) and Paul Goldschmidt and Kyle Gibson (STL), without much in the way of additions aside from Profar landing with the Braves. And the next clump of lost-value teams included the New York Yankees — bye-bye Soto — Baltimore Orioles, Seattle Mariners, Milwaukee Brewers, Minnesota Twins and Houston Astros, each of whom made the playoffs except Seattle (because of course not) and Minnesota.
And yet, each of those teams is also expected to finish above .500 and be favored to make the playoffs (with the exception of Milwaukee, but they’re still the defending NL Central champs from a year ago). This indicates that maybe all of the hot-stove moving and shaking will amount to less than we tend to think, something my research has also suggested in the past:
Just last season, a team’s net offseason WAR explained only 6 percent of the variation in its win change from 2023 to 2024, which was in line with that previous research. Some teams added a lot and improved (Royals), some lost a lot and improved (Padres), some added and got worse (D-backs, Braves, Giants) and some subtracted and got worse (Marlins, Jays). There just wasn’t much predictive power to how all of the offseason roster-shuffling actually influenced the standings in the end:
Perhaps that will prove true again in 2025, with the Jays and Cubs failing to cash in on their potential again, the Padres defying the data, and the rest of the league seeing their newcomers fizzle or filling in their roster gaps just fine. Or maybe this will finally be the year where offseason winners translate their gains into on-field victories, too. Either way, Opening Day will begin the process of sorting out what actually mattered from all the winter maneuvering — and it can’t come soon enough.
Filed under: Baseball
There are only a few potential impact free agents who remain unsigned at this stage of the spring — such as SPs Kyle Gibson and Patrick Corbin, IF Whit Merrifield, OF Alex Verdugo, DH J.D. Martinez and RP David Robertson.
Using my JEFFBAGWELL version of the stat, also known as the Joint Estimate Featuring FanGraphs and B-R Aggregated to Generate WAR, Equally Leveling Lists.
In accordance with Tom Tango’s WARcels, the weights are 6-3-1 for the previous three seasons.