WAR on the Move: Gaining and Losing Via Trade

Not only is it pretty, but informative—two goals for any visualization.

My initial thought about something like this is that teams with positive WAR should be playoff teams that typically trade for stars to make a push for a championship. Teams trading away stars get prospects/younger players in return, so the short term WAR net is negative for them. However, no pattern jumps out at me at first glance.

How did you compile WAR? Did you take all WAR from 2006 up to 2010 for each player? Did you average it? Was it just for the year they were traded?

By chance…what is the impact of the Brewers two recent trades involving Shaun Marcum and Zack Greinke? Or is that something you cant determine until after the season?

Essentially the TIgers entire net gain is from Miguel Cabrera beasting for Motown and Andrew Miller sucking while Cam Maybin still develops (who I still have never liked as a prospect – ground ball heavy hitter which means not likely to develop the power everyone predicted.)

You have them receiving 1.3 WAR from Jason Marquis, for instance, while Baseball Reference has him providing 3 WAR with . You also don’t have Carlos Gonzalez listed at all as part of the Holliday trade, which kind of is going to skew that one to the A’s favor. The Dec 2006 Jason Jennings/Miguel Ascencio for Willy Taveras/Jason Hirsh and Taylor Buchholz trade isn’t included either.

I could tell you did a ton of work with this, but there’s some key trades missing. Just looking at the Mariners it doesn’t look like you’ve included the three-way trade with the Mets and Indians involving JJ Putz and Franklin Gutierrez. You’ve left out both Cliff Lee trades as well. Are you filtering the data to remove these trades for some reason?

Additional Mariners trades:
Milton Bradley for Carlos Silva
Ryan Langerhans for Mike Morse

I suggest using the baseball-reference transactions screen if ESPN didn’t pick these up.
Link

Your presentation is awesome — little chart junk, lots of data in a very easily understandable way.

However, your methodology is a bit lacking I think.

For instance, Teixeira was traded to Atlanta in July 2007. His contract ended in 2007. Atlanta traded for 3 months of Teixeira, and paid 4.5 million (give or take) for those remaining 2.3 WAR. The 2008 contract was totally independent from the trade, and I think punishing Teixeira for that (let alone his time for the Yankees!) is a bit off.

Ideally, we’d turn this all into a discussion of dollars. How many dollars did each team trade away, and how many did they receive? To get the dollars that each team traded/received you have to convert their WAR into dollars, and subtract their salary. That way, we can also take the prospects that each team received, and use Victor Wang’s values on prospects to estimate their impact (even though they haven’t had an impact on the MLB team yet):
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-bright-side-of-losing-santana/

I think that though it’s a lot more work, it would get much better results. Are you willing to share your data? I would love to take a crack at it if you have.

Awesome job, and love that it’s toggle-able. How did you build it? Did you lay it all out by hand in Flash or are you some sort of Flex wizard that can drive this from a CSV? If the latter, I could see you repurposing this for a lot of uses. Great work, Chris!

If someone loses WAR in a trade, then someone is gaining it. Further, just to use an easy example, Teixeira: he was going to FA no matter what (with Boras as his agent) Texas shouldn’t get a debit for his time with the Yankees, which is pure FA contract. If he had stayed with Texas, they would have had the same exact opportunity to sign him as they did after they traded him.

The problem with it not being a zero sum, is it makes it look like a smart strategy is doing nothing (like the Giants did) and ending up 10th by doing nothing.

Also, I must be missing something, but the excel table doesn’t match up with the table here. For example, here Colorado is -2.8 and in the table +3.5.

but there are some serious flaws, both in terms of approach and completeness. The Rangers, for example, don’t appear to have acquired Josh Hamilton?

You shouldn’t be penalizing teams for what the players do for other teams after going through free agency. Texas controlled Teixeira through the 2009 season. They traded him July 2007. That is the window they should be judged upon, because at the time of the trade they had no means to maintain Tex beyond 2009. They would have had to compete with 29 other teams to land his services in 2010.

You’re trying to measure the opportunity lost by Texas for trading Teixeira. After 2009 29 teams theoretically “lost out” on having Tex produce for them in 2010 but no one would suggest you penalize the non-Texas sweepstakes losers for missing out.

when Carter made his MLB debut in 2010?

If a team trades a player with 1 year left of team control, they should be penalized for that 1 year. If they trade a player with 3 years control, they should get penalized for those 3 years. And if they, say, resign a player at a later date after trading him, that should not count.

Also, how are draft picks received as compensation figured?

This is beautiful. I started a similar project once and gave up in the face of all the work you put in. Bravo!!!