{"id":20878,"date":"2025-07-25T10:28:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T10:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/20878\/"},"modified":"2025-07-25T10:28:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T10:28:08","slug":"we-love-the-mlb-trade-deadline-but-is-it-overrated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/20878\/","title":{"rendered":"We Love the MLB Trade Deadline \u2014 But Is It Overrated?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Not every deadline pickup makes as much of a difference as CC Sabathia did in 2008. (Darren Hauck\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

(Note: I\u2019d love your feedback! Fill out this short survey<\/a> to help shape the future of the Substack.)<\/p>\n

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Baseball\u2019s trade deadline (July 31 at 6 p.m. ET) is officially less than a week away, and that means it\u2019s time to debate the buyers and sellers, scouring the Big Board<\/a> for pickups that fit with contenders\u2019 biggest needs. The Athletic calls it<\/a> \u201cthe best week of the regular season\u201d, and they\u2019re not wrong. Other than Opening Week, no other point on the MLB calendar \u2014 before October, that is \u2014 delivers more excitement and promise than the next handful of days.<\/p>\n

I am far from immune to all the rumor-mill enthusiasm. Quite to the contrary: I did an all-day live blog on Deadline Day last year<\/a> \u2014 tracking Wins Above Replacement<\/a> added and subtracted for each team in as close to real-time as I could \u2014 and the Doyle Number<\/a>, a throwback to my old FiveThirtyEight days<\/a>, is an annual staple of my deadline-week calculations dating back a full decade.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the Doyle Number? I explain it more here<\/a>, but it\u2019s a metric designed to help MLB teams decide whether they should buy or sell talent at the trade deadline. It estimates the amount of long-term value a team should be willing to give up (over the next six years) in exchange for gaining 1 extra win this season, if their goal is to maximize total overall World Series wins. Teams above 1.0 \u2014 where current wins are worth more than future ones \u2014 should probably consider buying; teams below 1.0 should probably sell.<\/p>\n

Just for fun, here\u2019s a table of this year\u2019s Doyle values (as of Thursday):<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

So clearly a lot of thought and planning has to go into every single deadline move. And sometimes, the trade deadline can have a huge impact if a freshly acquired star goes on a tear with his new team.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what happened when Hall of Famer CC Sabathia<\/a> joined the Brewers in July 2008<\/a>. Traded from Cleveland, Sabathia made 17 starts for Milwaukee and carried the club down the stretch, going 11-2 with a 1.65 ERA and a sparkling 5.1 strikeout-to-walk ratio. He racked up 5.5 WAR \u2014 more than any other Brewer that year, despite playing only a half-season in Milwaukee \u2014 and helped snap the team\u2019s 26-year playoff drought<\/a>. Sabathia even finished sixth in NL MVP voting<\/a>, the highest of any pitcher, despite making more starts in the AL than he did in the NL.<\/p>\n

That gave Sabathia the most WAR for a midseason acquisition since 1986, when MLB standardized the trade deadline to July 31<\/a> \u2014 using a definition that includes only players who joined a new team after the season began and played fewer than 50 percent of its games with that team:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

For those players and their new squads, the deadline was far from overrated. But after doing this exercise for hockey\u2019s trade deadline<\/a>, tracking how a team\u2019s net talent acquired at the deadline predicts its performance over the stretch run and beyond \u2014 it doesn\u2019t, at least not really \u2014 I realized I hadn\u2019t done the same thing for baseball, instead just acting like the deadline was of more importance in MLB than the NHL.<\/p>\n

At that point, I knew I had to do a version of the same methodology, looking at baseball. So I took each team\u2019s net WAR added minus from the players who qualified for our CC-led list above, and looked at how it correlated with a team\u2019s change in Elo rating from July 31 onward in each full regular season since 1986:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The correlation ended up being just 0.208, which was actually even lower than the NHL\u2019s 0.247 mark when I looked at it back in 2024. There is certainly some small positive effect to loading up, but for each net WAR added via deadline (or deadline-adjacent) moves, a team\u2019s Elo rating improves by 2 points. To get enough Elo to close the 13-point gap between, say, this year\u2019s Brewers and Cubs<\/a> \u2014 just as an example \u2014 you\u2019d need to add 6 net WAR, which was more than 99.8 percent of teams in our sample. (Remember, Sabathia \u2014 the GOAT of in-season pickups \u2014 only had 5.5 for the \u201808 Brewers.)<\/p>\n

There usually just isn\u2019t enough star power on offer to make a huge dent, and it\u2019s difficult to predict which players will have that transformative quality anyway.<\/p>\n

Now, maybe you might be thinking \u2014 as I did \u2014 that many of these moves are really about the playoffs anyway, not the end of the regular season. But World Series winners in our sample actually added less net WAR at the deadline on average (+0.93) than playoff teams who didn\u2019t win the championship (+1.01). And in a logistic regression attempting to predict a playoff team\u2019s odds of winning the World Series based on two factors \u2014 pre-deadline Elo and net WAR added at the deadline itself \u2014 the former was a legitimate predictor, while the latter was actually irrelevant at best and negative (its coefficient was -0.029) at worst.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that\u2019s because true contenders need less help at the deadline than fringe playoff squads to begin with, so the big swings are taken by worse teams. But if that\u2019s true, it doesn\u2019t exactly help make the case for the deadline\u2019s importance when the most significant deals are desperate moves by teams on the playoff bubble, rather than the final pieces of a championship puzzle.<\/p>\n

But still, even if the deadline isn\u2019t the seismic needle-mover we like to imagine, the trades do matter on some level \u2014 not because they alter the complexion of a pennant race as much they represent the uncertainty and excitement of the stretch run and the postseason push. They provide a jolt of much-needed possibility in these dog days of summer. And judging from the huge divide between potential buyers and sellers in our Doyle chart, plus the wide-open state of this year\u2019s contenders<\/a> in general, we could be due for a flurry of activity next Thursday.<\/p>\n

Will all \u2014 or even most \u2014 of it end up mattering? No. But the chance to snag the next Sabathia, however slim, makes the frenzied ritual feel worth it.<\/p>\n

Filed under: Baseball<\/a>, Statgeekery<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not every deadline pickup makes as much of a difference as CC Sabathia did in 2008. (Darren Hauck\/Getty…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20879,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85],"class_list":["post-20878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}