It’s obvious now that the Angels’ unfortunate decision to go for it at the trade deadline backfired. In addition to pulling Shohei Ohtani off the trade market, they doubled down and quickly became buyers in an attempt to make the playoffs. In a dizzying week, they acquired Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez, C.J. Cron, Randal Grichuk, and Dominic Leone, paying premiums (based on our modeling) on every transaction. Then, one month later, they reversed course. Once clearly out of...

Now that the deadline has passed, what did we notice? First, let’s check how our model did (note that we’re counting every trade in the true deadline period, starting with Aroldis Chapman to the Rangers): Number of trades: 57 Trades accepted: 52 Acceptance rate: 91.2% Variance: 2.6 Wins: 46 Our model nailed the two biggest trades of the season, Scherzer and Verlander. It also got most of the medium-sized and smaller deals right: Civale, Montgomery, Flaherty, Candelario, Barlow,...

You might have noticed that Nolan Arenado’s value estimate on our site has changed a little recently. That’s normal, due to the variables of performance and time. But there’s another reason it changed: we investigated the details in his contract, and made a correction. This is important, because it affects his overall surplus value – and the amount of money a team that traded for him would owe him. On the surface, Arenado is owed the following – and this is what...

We’re in a pitching crisis, folks. The list of starters who are on the IL could fill an all-star roster, and then some. Heck, the Rays – still one of the best teams in baseball, if not the best – are down to only two who are proven, capable, and healthy (Shane McLanahan and Zack Eflin, and even Eflin is a stretch given his recent knee issues). Among other contending teams, the Astros, Yankees, and Braves are down to three. The Mariners, Mets, Brewers, Cardinals, and...

We are getting ready to launch a new version of baseballtradevalues.com. The new site will be significantly faster and more intuitive. We know it’s a pain point to wait for pages or search results to load, so that’s getting fixed. The current site was built four years ago, and after tens of thousands of trade proposals and updates, it’s outgrown its original platform. So it’s moving to a new one, which is built for speed and scalability. We will also be offering,...

Now that the offseason is (more or less) over, it’s time for our semi-annual scorecard. How’d we do? Here’s what our trade log says, counting all trades that started with the early November 2022 swap that sent Sam Hilliard to Atlanta: Total trades: 64 Total accepted by our model: 58 Acceptance rate: 90.6% Average margin of error: 2.6   So our model got over 90% of all trades right. Its margin of error was a little higher than our historic average of 1.9. Now...

grover contributed to this article. After riding their talented core of players to three straight postseasons, from 2018-2020, the Oakland A’s missed the playoffs in 2021, and the writing was on the wall. Most of their players were getting expensive and running low on years of control, and their farm had been decimated by trades to try to goose the MLB team to deeper runs in those years. It was clear to the baseball industry that a selloff was coming. And it came. In the offseason of...

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: “They shouldn’t trade him now. He’ll be worth more at the deadline.” But is that really true? Or just a popular misconception? Let’s dig into some numbers to find out. We’ll look at a few scenarios – rentals (those players with only one year of control left), those with multiple years of control, all using current run-rate projections. We’ll also separate position players and pitchers. Rentals First...

As you can see on our Highest/Lowest list, we rank all players by their surplus value, both top-down and bottom-up (if you flip the area by the Median label, and reverse-sort). The latter shows what are, essentially, the most underwater contracts in baseball.  Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean these are bad contracts, because win-now teams may not mind overpaying for good players (and we're seeing that continue a bit this offseason). It just means that these are all players...

Here at BTV, fans may be surprised when they see that Sean Murphy’s median trade value is $51.3M.  Why so high? We get that question a lot. We also see a lot of trade proposals on our site that disagree with it, and more on Twitter as well. Clearly there’s a disparity here between what the numbers say and what people think. So let’s figure out why that is. What the numbers say Murphy put up 5.1 fWAR in 2022, on one of the worst teams in baseball. That’s somewhere...