The Utility of “Going For It” in the Offseason

For fans of the 29 teams whose autumns aren’t highlighted by a World Series parade (in a normal year at least), the offseason is a time of equality, when every team is zero games back from a playoff spot and hope springs eternal. Front offices have four months to write checks and strike deals with the hope of blocking off the streets come November, or at least sell some tickets along the way. Baseball Twitter and internet forums everywhere are filled with catchphrases like “winning the offseason,” “making a splash,” and of course, “going for it.”

In a perfect world, every team would try its hardest and “go for it” every year, but in today’s MLB, no offseason is without a large swathe of teams sitting on their hands if not outright tanking. The merits of managing a team for the sake of the bottom line or stockpiling prospects for some future championship run can be debated ad nauseum, but the teams that deserve our attention are the ones who spend the winter months actively trying to improve their on-field products and win the whole damn thing.

But what exactly does it look like when a team decides to go for it? A simple look at which teams sign the most free agents could be a start, but a team who signs an army of relievers to minor league contracts shouldn’t be regarded as trying harder than a team that adds a pair of high-profile bats. New dollars committed might be a step closer, but one massive long term contract would skew the results and heavily outweigh a team signing multiple short-term deals.

The best way, then, to judge to what extent a team “went for it” in an offseason would be to look at the perceived short-term value of the players added via trade or free agency compared to those who departed by those same avenues.

Without having access to teams’ internal projections, the majority of us baseball fans look to a player’s recent performances to try to anticipate their output for the upcoming campaign. Simply looking at the previous year would likely paint an unfair picture, so some combination of the previous three seasons is going to give us the strongest correlation with the upcoming season’s performance.

After some optimization, I determined that for the offseasons from 2010-2019, I would use the combination 70% of WAR from the previous year, 20% from two years prior, and 10% from three years prior to get the strongest correlation (R-squared = 0.3755) with a player’s WAR the following season. This calculation is on the same scale as WAR, so it should give a comfortable starting place for forecasting by how much a team will improve.

We can take a look at how well this measure, which we’ll refer to as the perceived value of the player, lines up with how we view whether a team “went for it,” and eventually look at whether there’s a significant relationship between the perceived net value and whether the team improved the next season.

In order to analyze teams’ net perceived value over the course of an offseason, I collected Retrosheet’s transaction data, and for each player traded, signed, or granted free agency, I acquired his FanGraphs WAR for the season in question as well as the three preceding it. From this dataset we can calculate the net perceived value added (or lost) by each team in each offseason as well as the resulting difference in WAR the following season between the added players and those let go.

The top 10 teams of the previous decade by perceived value added are as follows:

Most Perceived Offseason Value Added
Team Season Net Value Added
Blue Jays 2013 14.52
Reds 2019 13.94
Mets 2019 12.50
White Sox 2015 11.60
Astros 2015 11.07
Red Sox 2015 9.88
Red Sox 2013 9.44
Mariners 2010 9.02
Brewers 2018 8.67
Red Sox 2016 8.08

The club topping this list is the 2013 Toronto Blue Jays. Coming off a disappointing 73-win campaign and entering the 20th anniversary of their 1993 championship, the Blue Jays wanted to win and they wanted to do it now. Their main means of doing so was two blockbuster trades as well as inking Melky Cabrera to a short-term deal. The first trade was a massive exchange of talent with the Marlins, which netted them Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, Mark Buerhle, and Emilio Bonifácio, who had combined to be worth around 8.5 wins the year prior.

The second trade may stand out a little more. In the ultimate “going for it” move, the Jays traded for the reigning NL Cy Young Award winner, the Mets’ R.A. Dickey. While not quite as crushing as the fact that the haul for Dickey included a prospect named Noah Syndergaard, Toronto’s ensuing 74-win season was rather disheartening given the autumn activity. I, for one, would hope for such a commitment of resources to result in something better than a one-win improvement and a last-place finish.

Unfortunately, there are some other similar tales on this list. The 2019 offseason for the Cincinnati Reds was highlighted by the ill-fated Homer Bailey trade with the Dodgers, which most notably netted them Alex Wood, Yasiel Puig, and Matt Kemp. Wood didn’t pitch until July, Kemp was cut in April, and Puig was traded after inducing a brawl. Despite the eight-win improvement, nobody in Cincinnati can look upon that trade as a beneficial short- or long-term play.

Of course, sometimes making a significant offseason push yields tremendous results, with the most notable example in the table above being the 2013 Boston Red Sox, who exploded from a 69-win last-place finish the year prior to a 97-win World Series run. That entire dramatic turnaround can’t solely be attributed to the offseason acquisitions of Shane Victorino, Mike Napoli, and Stephen Drew, but those additions were indicative of a front office that saw an opportunity for contention and seized it.

The 2018 Brewers actually had the strongest offseason in this sample in terms of the difference between the WAR of the players acquired and that of the players that departed. Their measure of 18.6 WAR in this metric lapped the field, and was heavily influenced by the acquisition of Christian Yelich the winter preceding his MVP campaign.

That gives us a look at how the most aggressive teams fared, but what about the overall tendencies? The graph below plots each team’s win totals from each season straddling the offseasons in question, with the color of the point indicating how much perceived value they added or subtracted in that offseason. Teams above the solid line improved their win totals from one year to the next while teams below it regressed in the win column. The dashed lines indicate improvements and regressions of five wins, respectively.

Taken as a whole, “going for it” works more often than not, at least in terms of increasing win totals. As always, there are glaring exceptions to this. In this graph, the most notable outliers are the bright red point at (80,90) representing the 2018 Rays, and the green point at (85,61) representing the 2010 Mariners, who you may recall from the above table.

Success despite a perceived lack of trying to win has become somewhat expected from Tampa, but even compared to expected results, that 2010 season was something else for the Mariners. Looking to make a push following an 85-win campaign, the Mariners traded for 2008 AL Cy winner Cliff Lee and signed Chone Figgins in free agency. On top of that, Felix Hernandez pitched phenomenally that season, winning his own Cy Young Award. However, the Mariners won a mere 61 games while being handicapped by an offense that only scored 513 runs, the lowest total in a full season since the 1970s. If this was “going for it,” it was an abject failure.

The game will always have its Rays and its Mariners, but recent evidence shows that an offseason push does come with short-term on-field benefits. I placed the teams plotted above into admittedly arbitrary buckets to confirm what we expect and hope to see: acquiring more talent in the winter tends to result in more wins come spring.

Results of Perceived Added Offseason Value
Perceived Value Number of Teams Mean Win Improvement
6+ wins 28 7.92
2 to 6 wins 65 4.91
-2 to 2 wins 100 -0.18
-6-to -2 wins 61 -4.70
< -6 wins 36 -6.17

Of course, before you angrily tweet at your favorite team’s social media intern, it’s important to remember that context does matter. Not every team stands to gain something by winning seven more games next season (see Pirates, Pittsburgh), and sometimes the short-term benefits of a player will pale in comparison to the talent lost in the translation (see Shields, James).

But for a significant portion of teams, the benefits are there for the reaping. Maybe it’s easy for me to say as a non-billionaire who doesn’t own a team, but baseball is entertainment, and the consumer does care about that end product. The bottom line and that unpolished 19-year-old are important parts of the business, but the value is there for the owner who’s willing to “go for it” and put talent on the field today.





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Bill Deeremember
3 years ago

Good article. Here is my look at which team added and lost games over the off season.
Team
Yankees 8.8
Phillies 4.3
Blue Jays 4.1
Padres 3.9
Dodgers 3.1
Cardinals 2.4
Twins 2.4
Mets 2.0
Nationals 2.0
Mariners 1.3
Braves 1.2
White Sox 0.9
Rangers 0.9
Astros 0.8
Red Sox 0.5
Tigers 0.4
Royals 0.2
Brewers -0.8
Marlins -0.8
Diamondbacks -1.2
Giants -1.4
Orioles -1.8
Rays -2.4
Rockies -2.6
Athletics -2.7
Angels -2.9
Cubs -3.4
Reds -3.9
Indians -6.3
Pirates -8.9