Who Should Buy — And Sell — At the 2024 MLB Trade Deadline?

The Doyle Number is so back, baby.

With both Julio Rodriguez and J.P. Crawford nursing injuries and their playoff odds around a coin flip, the Seattle Mariners have some big decisions to make over the next week. (Orlando Ramirez/Getty Images)

One of my favorite kinda-silly, kinda-useful FiveThirtyEight sports inventions was the Doyle Number, which

Nate Silver

and I made to measure whether a team should buy or sell talent at the MLB trade deadline. Named for ill-fated Detroit Tigers pitcher Doyle Alexander, a veteran who was traded from the Atlanta Braves for prospect (and future Hall of Famer) John Smoltz in 1987,¹ the Doyle Number represents a team’s trade-off between buying talent to win this season versus selling it to win in the future.

A Doyle Number above 1 generally means — and there are exceptions, which I will get into later — that a team should value current wins over future ones, if it wants to maximize its total World Series won over both this season and the following six years. I’ll go ahead and spoil the current No. 1, the Philadelphia Phillies, to note that their 2.11 Doyle Number means they should be willing to give up more than 2 wins of talent over the next six seasons for every win of talent they add this year. Flags fly forever, and winning the World Series would be worth the price they need to pay.

At the other end of the spectrum, a very low Doyle Number means it’s completely pointless to add talent for this season at the expense of the future, because it would be in service of a lost cause. The miserable Chicago White Sox, who rank last in the Elo ratings, have a Doyle of zero — there is literally no amount of talent that could save them this year. Better pack it in and try again next season.

But the really fascinating cases come in between those two polar opposites. Here’s a rundown of all the Doyle Numbers as of Tuesday, July 23 — one week before the July 30 trade deadline:

(One other quick note before we talk about specific teams: I made some slight improvements to the Doyle system this year, including refreshing the way it handles teams’ odds of making the Division Series — after the playoffs expanded a few years ago — and I also changed the future model to account for a team’s age, payroll and farm-system quality in addition to its talent base, which is still estimated using Elo.)

From here, let’s break the teams into tiers and look at their decision process over the next week:

Tier 1: Clear buyers

For all of the top seven teams — the Phillies, Braves, Dodgers, Guardians, Orioles, Yankees and Brewers — there isn’t really any scenario under which they shouldn’t try to load up on talent at the deadline… it’s just a question of degree.

Doyle doesn’t take into account injuries, so it doesn’t know that Atlanta just saw Ozzie Albies and Max Fried be added to a list that already has them losing the sixth-most value to IL trips of any team so far this year. But the Braves still have enough talent and high enough playoff odds to make a World Series push necessary this year, especially since they are MLB’s second-oldest team with its seventh-highest payroll.

The Guardians also stand out to me as a team in the opposite kind of situation: They’re the youngest in baseball, with the lowest Elo rating of any team in this grouping. But even so, Jose Ramirez isn’t getting any younger; the time to strike is now. Based on our research about the lack of diminishing returns between total talent and World Series odds (conditional on making the Division Series), Cleveland could benefit as much or more than any other team by simply beefing up their Wins Above Replacement at the deadline.

Tier 2: Could go either way

This group contains the really interesting teams to watch over the next week. In the chart above, I’ve broken out the implied amount of surplus value that a team would get from either buying or selling a certain amount of current talent, based on what maximizes total championships won both this year and over the next six years.

(For example, the Astros would get the equivalent of nearly 12 extra wins of total surplus value if they traded for 8 wins this season, just based on how much more those wins would be worth to their championship odds in 2024. But, because Doyle Number can actually vary based on how much you buy/sell, the Astros would also get surplus value from selling 8 wins this year and reloading for the future.)

All of the teams in this tier have certain scenarios where they would come out ahead by either buying or selling, depending on what type of deals they can put together over the next week — as well as how the team plays. (Even though we’ve seen teams talk themselves into really silly moves based on results from the weeks leading up to the deadline.) And the suddenly injury-plagued Mariners stand out as the team here that would gain from literally doing anything, whether buying or selling.

This is also an eclectic group of clubs, varying from younger ones who are arguably ahead of schedule (Royals, Red Sox) to more expensive, veteran-laden ones who need to make the most of the moment (Astros, Padres), and everything in between. While some make less sense as sellers than others — I can’t see the Twins not adding talent, for instance, despite their own mounting injury problems — all of the teams in this tier will figure significantly into what happens over the next week.

Tier 3: Possible sellers… or at least, they should be

And then we move into the rest of the teams on the Doyle ranking. It might be surprising that there isn’t a realistic case of surplus value from buying for teams like the Mets and Cardinals, who are firmly in the playoff mix (albeit with odds of about 40 percent apiece) — or even the Pirates, Rangers, Rays, Tigers, Reds, Cubs and Giants, clubs with lower playoff odds but who nonetheless are within shouting distance of the last wild card spots in their leagues.

But, remember, Doyle isn’t focused on merely making the playoffs as much as it is concerned with maximizing total championships in the long run. Adding talent under a plan of sneaking into the wild card and hoping for the best might work sometimes — look at the Padres and Phillies in 2022, whose big additions at the deadline led to an NLCS collision course six weeks later. But even though we’ve seen recent cases of wild-card teams pulling LDS upsets over top seeds, the odds still say such runs are unlikely, and not worth mortgaging the future for.

Of course, the expanded wild card format has caused more teams to feel like they are in the mix, which is good for deadline-week excitement. So I have no doubt some of these teams will try to load up to some degree or another over the next seven days, Doyle be damned.

Tier 4: Clear sellers

Finally, there is a clear break in Doyle Numbers before we reach the bottom of the list, with the Nationals, Blue Jays, Angels, Athletics, Marlins, Rockies and White Sox rounding out the ranks.

Most of those teams were either expected to be in this position since Spring Training, or signaled their intentions to play for the future early on. But it remains disappointing to see Toronto in this group after what was supposed to be another era of competitive Blue Jays teams just a few years ago. Instead, the decisions they make around their expiring contracts — and even Vladimir Guerrero Jr. or Bo Bichette (whose recent injury complicates things even further) — will have huge implications on the trade market and the World Series picture going forward.

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The same goes for all the other names who might be on the move over the next week. Tools like the Doyle Number can be a guide for judging buyers and sellers, but ultimately the trade market comes down to who can make a deal work, and what they’re willing to do to have that happen. All we as fans and analysts can do from here is watch the show unfold.

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Filed under: Baseball

1. Technically, this trade happened after the regular trade deadline, during the waiver period that used to exist prior to 2019. But Nate is a Tigers fan and I grew up in Atlanta, so Alexander was the namesake we went with!