Note: This roster reflects players who were still free agents by Feb. 10, 2019.
This Major League Baseball free agent class has been talked about for years.
Teams have been organizing their salaries in order to fall below the luxury tax leading up to this offseason in efforts to spend heavily and be penalized minimally. What makes this free agent class different from others is that this year has not one but two legit stars hitting free agency at the same time. Occasionally you’ll get one guy who is an all-star, but someone who is usually already in his prime, so that when his first lucrative contract is in its final years, he’s already declining.
But this year’s class was supposed to be different. Both Manny Machado and Bryce Harper were primed to reportedly receive contracts in excess of $250 million, with many expecting Machado to pull in more than $300 million and Harper potentially flirting with a $400 million deal. Besides those players, you also had a solid starting pitcher in Dallas Keuchel on the market, as well as Craig Kimbrel—who has the most saves in baseball history by the age of 30. And yet, with pitchers and catchers now reporting to spring training for the 2019 season, all four of those guys— plus plenty of others—remain unsigned. It’s a strange twist for a sport that used to have the highest-paid athletes in history just a few years ago.
On Feb. 7, The Athletic’s Chad Jennings published a story where he built a roster of the best available free agents. He concocted an entire batting order: Four bench players, a starting rotation and a bullpen to make up a 25-man roster. On paper, the majority of the names he included were well-known to even your average baseball fan. But dig just a bit deeper and one question, at least for me, loomed large: How good could this team of free agents be if it played an entire 162-game regular season together?
In the modern era of baseball, “wins above replacement,” or WAR, is one of the most commonly used metrics to calculate just how good or bad of a season a player is having. According to MLB.com, WAR “measures a player’s value in all facets of the game by deciphering how many more wins he’s worth than a replacement-level player [such as a readily-available fill-in or a minor league player].”
Using WAR, we calculated just how effective this group of free agents would be as a team. Will they be playoff-bound, cellar dwellers, or somewhere in between?
The Lineup:
Disclaimer: We used each player’s WAR based on their respective Baseball-Reference pages.
Starting 9:
- Marwin Gonzalez – 2B; 2.5 WAR
- Bryce Harper – RF; 1.3
- Manny Machado – 3B; 5.7
- Mike Moustakas – DH; 2.5
- Adam Jones – CF; 0.2
- Carlos Gonzalez – LF; 0.4
- Lucas Duda – 1B; 0.4
- Jose Igleseias – SS; 2.2
- Martin Maldonado – C; 0.5
Bench:
- Matt Wieters – C; 0.6
- Josh Harrison – INF; 0.3
- Derek Dietrich – Utility; 0.4
- Cameron Maybin – OF; 1.2
Starting Rotation:
- Dallas Keuchel – 2.6
- Gio Gonzalez – 1.8
- Clay Buchholz – 3.0
- Ervin Santana – -0.6
- James Shields – 1.4
Bullpen:
- Craig Kimbrel – 2.3
- Bud Norris – 0.0
- Tony Sipp – 1.3
- Adam Warren – 1.1
- Sergio Romo – 0.4
- Alex Wilson – 1.2
- A.J. Ramos — 0.5
One thing worth noting about WAR is that there isn’t an exact formula to how it translates to wins.
A team’s combined WAR doesn’t necessarily equal its actual win total, nor is it an exact percentage, but it is one of the most reliable metrics used to determine how valuable a player to his team’s success. There are multiple advanced metric sites that equate a 0.0 WAR to equaling anywhere from 48 wins to 52 wins. We’ll use Baseball-Reference, which equates a 0.0 WAR team to having a .294 winning percentage, which falls right around 48 wins over the course of a 162-game season. Then, take into account each of the team’s positional WARs and pitching WARs and add it to that roughly .294 winning percentage to figure out about where the team would settle in terms of total wins.
It’s important to note that Jennings constructed the lineup with several different things in mind. First, by including a guy like Adam Jones on this team, who is on the backend of his career, he was accounting for Jones’ ability to still be an everyday player, rather than put in someone else – like Billy Hamilton or A.J. Pollock – who are younger, but have struggled to prove that they’re everyday players. Second, he included Jose Iglesias as his shortstop so that he could slot Machado in at third base, which frees up Mike Moustakas to play both corner positions, as well the designated hitter slot. Lastly, he rostered Lucas Duda and Carlos Gonzalez – a pair of guys who have shown the ability to hit for power in the past – as options to provide some pop in the middle of the order behind guys like Harper, Machado and Moustakas.
Final Prediction:
The final calculation to how this team of free agents would fare in a regular season looks something like this:
.294*162 = 47.6 + 32.2 = 79.8 wins (rounded up to 80 total wins)
So, based on the Baseball-Reference formula for WAR, the team of free agents would be expected to win somewhere around 80 games, or just about half of the season total. For comparison purposes, in 2018, the New York Yankees and Oakland Athletics played in the American League Wild Card Game with 101 wins and 97 wins, respectively, while the Chicago Cubs and Colorado Rockies played in the National League Wild Card Game with 95 and 91 wins, respectively.
Team flaws:
So yes, on paper, this looks like a pretty good team based on name recognition. There are two all-star-caliber players at the top of the order who are both just 26 years old, a rotation full of former all-stars and a closer who is on pace to set the all-time saves record.
But, there are flaws. Let’s start with the starting lineup and bench guys. It’s an extremely top-heavy lineup, that starts to flame out offensively after Gonzalez in the six-spot. There’s a lot of boom or bust in the order, which can create issues when trying to string together a few hits in a row and can also kill a rally with an untimely strikeout. And the bench likely isn’t adding a whole lot over the course of a season, save for a big hit in a key spot here or there.
With the rotation, yes, each guy has been an all-star, but durability is also an issue. Keuchel is the sure-fire ace, but prior to last season, he missed upwards of 10 starts in each of the prior two years due to injury. James Shields has reached 200-plus innings in 10 of his 13 seasons, but at what cost? He has a career ERA (earned run average) of 4.01 and hasn’t won double-digit games since 2015. Gio Gonzalez is the anti-Shields, having reached 200-plus innings just three times in his 11 years, but does have a respectable 3.69 ERA and 127-97 career record—an average of 11.5 wins per season. Clay Buchholz was good last year, but did so pitching in fewer than 100 innings, while Ervin Santana made just five starts in 2018.
Those numbers are going to put a lot of strain on an otherwise average-at-best bullpen. Indeed, Kimbrel highlights this group and is about as reliable as they come (when not in the playoffs), but getting to him is the issue. Adam Warren can give you distance if you need multiple innings chewed up, Tony Sipp is your lefty specialist and Bud Norris has a history of being a setup man, but it’s a relatively thin group after the top-tier relievers have already been signed by other teams.
So, this roster of unsigned guys provides the occasional bit of excitement and certainly some star-power that will likely sell tickets. But, when the shine is gone and we’re in the dog days of August, this team is nothing more than a middle-of-the-pack ball club. Sure, it may flirt with a wild card spot for much of the season, but in the end, the numbers say that this free agent super squad falls well short of the postseason.
Photo: Manny Machado via Keith Allison on Flickr.
