When players get better at the game, sometimes it’s bad for the game. The biggest players in Major League Baseball — the owners — are getting very good right now.
For the second consecutive winter, baseball’s free-agent market is swooning. Marquee sluggers like Mannie Machado and Bryce Harper were still unsigned as we went to press, and not because they’re dragging along owners in a fierce bidding war. The market for baseball talent is cooling off all around.
Analytics is the first factor, and it’s bad for most players. Baseball has always been about statistics, but there was as much art as science to determining the value of a ballplayer. Advanced analytics now allow owners to calculate with decent certainty how many wins a given player will add to your team. (Machado is averaging around 3 Wins Above Replacement [WAR] over the past three years, while Harper has ranged from 10 to less than 2.)
More precise knowledge of which players are creating, and will create, value is good news for a few gamers who now look very productive. But it also takes the guesswork — and thus the furious bidding — out of the market. Sure, an owner would like Jake Arrietta’s arm in his rotation, but at a WAR of about 3.0 in recent years, and a market price of $5 million per WAR for a starter, the owner knows his value, just like you know the value of a barrel of oil.
Wins are wins, and so players are now baskets of commodities.
The second realization by owners is bad news for both players and fans: The value of “rebuilding.” The Chicago Cubs spent 2011 to 2015 rebuilding — spending their money on prospects and all sorts of things besides winning baseball games. They finished last or second-to-last in their division all five years. Then they made the playoffs in 2015, and then won the World Series in 2016.
The Astros played the same trick and then won the Series in 2017. The Miami Marlins are very obviously doing it now, but so are a handful of other teams.
You save money in the rebuilding years and then cash out huge in your championship run and the following year. It’s much more profitable than trying to compete every year.
The profitability of rebuilding is becoming so evident that more and more teams are doing it. If a third of the league is rebuilding in any year, it leaves the divisions less competitive, and it makes it fairly likely your team isn’t even trying to win the game.
Or at least, that someone’s playing a different game.
