MLB Free Agent Fallacy
Though the baseball season ended months ago, fans are as locked in on their franchises as ever. Believing that their club’s next World Series Championship is currently being fought for, in the endless slog that is the offseason. Rosters are polished, trades are made, rumors fly, and free agents are signed. Yes, free agents. The defining piece of any teams offseason — the acquisition of a top name free agent to build their team around for years to come. When a franchise signs that big name bat or arm, fans buy season tickets and jerseys, confident in their teams upcoming success. When they lose out on a big-time free agent, fans are outraged, often believing their team is doomed.
Every offseason, fans fixate on these open market players and take to twitter to demand their management snag one of these coveted stars. But why? It is time this false narrative, the importance of MLB free agency, is cured. Free agency is not the end all and be all of your franchise, but rather the finishing touch.
To truly realize the insignificance of free agency, it is first important to discuss how pennant chasing teams are built. The foundation of any team is homegrown players. Most commonly acquired through the MLB Draft, these players are inherently young and controllable for numerous years. An analysis done by Alex Speier of the Boston Globe found that players mathematical “primes” occur around age 26, the lowest this number has ever been. Speier notes that the PED era contributes to the seeming rapid decline of the “prime age,” but his research also exemplifies that to own players for their prime years franchise’s must acquire them before they hit free agency. Though these players don’t often make up the majority of a teams roster, they are almost always at the core — your Francisco Lindors, Mookie Betts, or Kris Bryants.
Another important aspect of any franchise are players acquired via trade. Trades are the unknown portion of a teams assembly, often making or breaking a teams long and short-term success. Trades can take many forms, with varying skill levels going each way. This leads to the effect on one’s team taking multiple forms, giving you several competent Major League players of varying ages. Sometimes, a franchise can even yield a core player such as Josh Donaldson or Anthony Rizzo.
Finally, the free agents. Rarely can a team’s success be credited to the performance of core free agent pieces, like Max Scherzer and Daniel Murphy for the Nationals. Making up often the smallest portion of your team, free agents are more likely to weigh you down, both literally and figuratively. The age in which one can hit free agency amongst other aspects leads to these player’s rarely having the desired effect upon your team for more than a season or two.
A mixture of all aspects of acquisitions is needed to create a winning team, but the importance placed by the fans upon the “free agent” undermines the true method of building a perennial winner — through proper drafting and responsible trades.
Debatably, an even larger reason that the stress put upon success in the open market is unwarranted is the often unaddressed fact that free agent signings are almost always destined to fail. There are instances of success in free agency. But for every Mark Trumbo, there are dozens of James Shields’.
Due to the MLB’s collective bargaining agreement, free agency is the first and only opportunity for players to finally have leverage in discussions of salary. This leads prices to be driven to astronomical heights, when more often than not a minor overpay is seen as a win by the franchise. The systems enables Albert Pujols to make $24 million/year, while simultaneously, reigning NL MVP Kris Bryant makes a lowly $625,000.
We have gotten to an age where Major League franchises are run by competent individuals who are no longer paying for past experience. The owner’s and GM’s of the MLB are becoming anxious paying for nearing the end of their careers. This transition in the modern game has heightened the importance of young talent acquisition to build a successful team, and may signal the end of our free agent happy fanbases.
Obviously there is no clear cut method to building a winner, evidenced by the many varieties of World Series winners over the past decade or so. The Giants and Cardinals rode homegrown heavy rosters to a combined 4 championships over the past decade, while the Red Sox struck gold with over-performing mid-tier free agents that carried them to the 2013 pennant. Like everything in sports, there is an undefined randomness that makes baseball so amazing. Yet it is all the more important for franchises to embrace the controllable, and that we start to move away from our love of free agency. Baseball is becoming a young man’s game, with budding stars carrying franchises and ending century-long draughts. The days of the 35 year-old positionless slugger are dwindling. The game and its front offices are starting to realize the vitality of franchise building, not free agent buying. It is important for the fans to begin doing the same.
