MLB Teams who aren't aggressive at the deadline are letting their fans down

In this article, I investigate what teams are really getting when being aggressive during the MLB trade deadline.

The 2022 MLB final four teams have proven to be evidence to the success that comes with aggressiveness at the trade deadline. The teams that got aggressive were rewarded, and those who were not disappointed.

I wanted to do a mostly quantitative investigation of the aggressive teams of the 2022 trade deadline. I scored each team with at least a 40% chance to make the postseason with a score from 1-15 (1= passive, 15= aggressive), because there were 15 teams. I compared their odds of making the postseason and following rounds then to what ended up happening. Here’s what I gathered.

As you can see, being aggressive helps! Pretty obvious, but I wanted to go more in depth. I then went to R, a programming language, to statistically analyze how teams exceeded expectations or failed to live up to them. As you can expect, it’s pretty obvious that being aggressive works in the short term.

For my first graph, I compared the deadline “scores” I gave the team to the percent change that they would make the final four teams. I’ve already explained the x-axis score, and the y-axis is simply the difference between their chances of making the conference finals on July 31, before the deadline, and their chances of making the conference finals on October 6th, when the regular season ended. The correlation value wasn’t great, at a 0.3727681 (1 is good and 0 is horrendous), but it indicated some correlation with being aggressive and regular-season success.

Now, the real fuel behind my argument is how aggressiveness affected playoff results.I measured the percentile result of each team compared to July 31st’s projections, seeing how far they got in the postseason and what the predicted chance of that happening was. For this, I subtracted the average percent chance between them reaching where they got and them reaching a round farther, to have more accurate stats. For example, the Mets had about a 6th percentile result, while the Cardinals had about a 69th percentile result. The correlation for this graph was 0.5587597, showing that aggressiveness at the deadline has a much bigger impact on playoff performance and pays off more in October.

You’ve seen the stats now. You’re probably wondering why you needed some teenager on the internet to tell you that trading prospects for proven players results in winning; but the same teams that are doing this now were doing this four years ago. The teams that bought in 2018 aren’t totally regretting it now, they’re totally fine because the guys that they gave up only had a chance to become stars in the MLB, and whatever happens in the future isn’t nearly as predictable as what happens in that direct season.

There are obviously some flaws, and my judgments shouldn’t be the only basis of any opinion, but would you rather have a 15% chance to win the world series for 4 seasons and a 5% chance for the last two, or a 10% chance to win the World Series for 6 years? It just takes simple math to pick the first choice, and that’s why teams who aren’t aggressive at the deadline are letting their fans down.