A first look at the 2019 /r/Baseball Trade Deadline Game
Over the last few years of the /r/Baseball Trade Deadline Game, I’ve taken a look at the data produced by the game after it was completed — for example, my post-mortem analysis of the 2018 game. While I intend to do plenty of analysis when it’s over, this year I wanted to provide some quick insights along the way as well.
So far, I’ve been able to take a look at and visualize some of the registration numbers. At the time of writing, it’s 10 pm MST on July 9th, the second day of the game, and so far there are 1266 users registered. While this figure is down from last year’s 1549, there’s still plenty of time for people to register, and this number will grow throughout the remainder of the registration period, be sure to stay tuned for updates.
The first look I took was a breakdown of registered users by subreddit.
Not unexpectedly, the breakdown of registered users reflects true market size quite well. The Yankees have the most registered users at 112. The average number of users per sub is 42.2, the median is 35, and the standard deviation is quite huge at 24.7.
The next thing I took a look at was the number of No Trade Clauses (NTCs) for each subreddit — how many users do not wish to be traded to that specific team.
Interestingly, this also follows market size quite well. The Yankees are dominating here as well, with 244 NTCs requested, leading to more than a 2:1 ratio of NTCs to registered users. The Rockies appear to be the least hated team with just 2 NTCs so far, and 12 out of the 30 teams have less than 10 NTCs.
Another interesting check I did was to look at the timeline of user registration:
You can see that throughout the day the game announcement was posted there was the largest influx of registrations, with nearly 600 that day alone. After that, registrations were pretty steady until the first day of the game, when there was another notable uptick in registration rate that has persisted through the time of this writing.
While a full analysis of trades is certainly planned, since we’re 2 days into the game at this point, I just took a quick look at the timeline of trades so far:
There have been 183 trades, with 102 of those occurring on the first day, and in general, the rate of trades has been fairly constant during hours the game is ongoing.
It’s clear the 2019 game is well underway, and I’ll continue working to update with more visualizations as the week evolves.
