The Marlins, the Mets and Baseball’s Top Revolving-Door Teams
Which MLB franchises have been home to the most transient stars?
Sometimes, certain topics just keep coming up. When I wrote about the MLB teams who did the most with the least homegrown talent — and vice-versa — last week, I highlighted that the Miami Marlins own the biggest gap between how many Wins Above Replacement their original players are producing this season and how many WAR the team is currently getting from its actual roster.
(Let’s just say that Miami would be quite a bit better off if it had held onto Marcell Ozuna, Zac Gallen, Christian Yelich, J.T. Realmuto, Pablo Lopez, Giancarlo Stanton, etc.)
The Marlins don’t have any of those players, of course, because instead of paying them,1 the team traded them as part of a longstanding habit of dealing away whole rosters worth of contending talent. So it was a pleasant coincidence this weekend when I saw that one of my favorite MLB YouTubers, Jolly Olive, did a video about the Marlins’ extensive trade history as a franchise:
Indeed, the Marlins have seen an impressive array of big names come in and out of the clubhouse door over the years — most of whom did a lot more for other franchises than they ever did in South Florida. This, in turn, got me thinking: Which team has churned through the most transitory set of stars?
Here’s my methodology: First, I converted each player’s WAR to their equivalent Win Shares,2 so we can use percentages of career value without worrying about negative wins. Then, for each player-season, I calculated their career Win Shares with that franchise and overall, computing the percentage of lifetime value the player created for the team he was on in a given season. Finally, for each team I calculated a weighted average of that percentage, with each player’s Win Shares from that year as the weights.
Within the post-collusion free agency era (since 1990), the smallest share in any team-season is 27.7% for the 1997 Florida Marlins — meaning the average member of that World-Series winning team, weighted by his contributions that season, produced only 27.7% of his career value for the Marlins organization. Here are the lowest percentages among both all teams and champions during that period:
The Marlins have quite a few entries on the list, including two of the three most nomadic championship rosters (in 1997 and then again in 2003). The rest are an interesting mix of other recent expansion clubs, veteran-laden squads who amassed players from around the league, or — in the case of the 2001 Diamondbacks — both!
This doesn’t necessarily mean the Marlins are the most transient franchise in their talent overall, however. To find that, we need to take one additional step and calculate the weighted average of our seasonal values for each team by the Win Shares produced by each player across the entire span of seasons since 1990. After we do that, here are the leaders by franchise:
Perhaps surprisingly, the Marlins are not No. 1 in our overall ranking, checking in with their average Win Share being created by a player who produced 53.4% of his career value for Florida/Miami. Both the Toronto Blue Jays, at 53.3%, and the New York Mets, at a mere 51.4%, are lower.
The Mets caught me a bit by surprise here, but many of their greatest players since 1990 have done less than half of their career damage in Queens, including:
Carlos Beltran - 352 career Win Shares, 40.3% w/ the Mets
Mike Piazza - 303 career Win Shares, 45.3% w/ the Mets
Tom Glavine - 426 career Win Shares, 21.0% w/ the Mets
John Olerud - 292 career Win Shares, 29.0% w/ the Mets
Johan Santana - 231 career Win Shares, 32.4% w/ the Mets
Francisco Lindor - 203 career Win Shares, 36.6% w/ the Mets
Steve Trachsel - 177 career Win Shares, 40.4% w/ the Mets
Curtis Granderson - 251 career Win Shares, 26.3% w/ the Mets
David Cone - 291 career Win Shares, 38.7% w/ the Mets
R.A. Dickey - 148 career Win Shares, 42.5% w/ the Mets
Robin Ventura - 278 career Win Shares, 22.2% w/ the Mets
Zack Wheeler - 146 career Win Shares, 40.8% w/ the Mets
Bret Saberhagen - 272 career Win Shares, 20.8% w/ the Mets
Bobby Bonilla - 209 career Win Shares, 26.4% w/ the Mets
Angel Pagan - 118 career Win Shares, 44.2% w/ the Mets
Jeff Kent - 299 career Win Shares, 16.9% w/ the Mets
Bernard Gilkey - 131 career Win Shares, 38.1% w/ the Mets
Cliff Floyd - 163 career Win Shares, 30.0% w/ the Mets
… OK, you get the idea. Some of these names are pretty surprising — Piazza had slightly more value as a Dodger than as a Met, for instance3 — while others speak to the team’s tendency to chase after big-name veterans or let useful younger players slip through its fingers. Who knew that, at least by this measure, the Mets are out-Marlin-ing the Marlins themselves?
But don’t worry, the 1997 Marlins remain a monument to hit-and-run team-building. Not only were they the biggest revolving-door champion of the recent era, but they were the most revolving-door team, full stop. Shopping for a World Series means your stars don’t ever stick around for long, which means you see them produce a lot of value for somebody else’s franchise — but it also means you got to experience a special run with them.
Fans of more recent fire-sale Marlin squads didn’t even get to do that much. But when a team churns through this much talent, chances are it will hit on another winning group again, sooner or later.
Filed under: Baseball, Statgeekery
Just that group I listed is owed more than $118 million in salary this season. Though it’s also worth noting that Gallen’s trade — for Jazz Chisholm — wasn’t as much a salary dump as a prospect-for-prospect trade (that Arizona won over Miami in a landslide).
This is relatively easy: To get Win Shares per 162 team games, just take the pct_PT category from my WAR data, divide by 100 to turn it into a decimal value, and multiply by 47.7 (the number of wins for a replacement-level team over a full season). Add that to a player’s WAR/162, zeroing out any negative values. Then divide each individual’s value by his team’s total, and multiply that by 3 times the team’s actual wins per 162 games. (Hey, I said “relatively”…)
And he had zero Win Shares in his brief time as a Marlin.
Super insightful as always. My favorite read, bar none.
Not to add to your "to do" list, but I would be very interested in understanding any correlation between roster churn and winning percentage over some period of time from this methodology. What churn is healthy or expected given the data, and what churn level suggests future problems?
High roster churn would seem to be a proxy for trouble because it is only a part of effective roster construction. This includes the Draft, free agent signing, and extensions of longer termed players. Does higher roster churn suggest that those other avenues are not delivering at the levels needed? Perhaps.
It's always been interesting to me that the media seems to universally applaud the prospect "haul" in exchange for established organic talent as synonymous with effective future team building. Yet, there is precious little retrospective analysis of whether that lock step applause is actually merited over time.
Just yesterday, I read where Skip Schumaker, manager of the Marlins, gave a brutal press conference after another ineffective Sixto Sanchez start - saying he is no longer a top prospect and needs to start delivering now. I immediately recalled four years ago how many in the press gave the Marlins high marks for "stealing" the best pitching prospect in the Phillies' system for only - you know - J.T. Realmuto.
Even more specifically, I would be interested in looking at the A's and the entire "Moneyball" mythos that is so prevalent today. I suspect the A's churn rate is even higher for the period 2000 to date when the whole supposed Moneyball approach started.
Does their level of churn over the past 23 years when looking at winning percentage suggest optimization or desperation with regard to this strategy? Thanks again for adding to my daily life!