Last year, the Texas Rangers signed Corey Seager and Marcus Semien for a combined half-a-billion dollars.
This worked out exactly as anyone with an inclination towards sabermetrics would have expected. Corey Seager had a good season, and Marcus Semien had a good season. Between them, they tallied about 10 WAR, or 44 Win Shares, depending on which metric you prefer. They were paid to be good players, and they were good players in 2022.
And the Rangers, a bad team prior to the arrival of Seager and Semien, were slightly less bad. They improved from 60 wins to 68 wins.
Which is exactly what anyone with a lean towards analytics would expect to happen. Free agents can improve your team, but they can’t improve your team that much. A good free agent can move the needle four or six wins.
I thought about that truth when I heard that the Rangers had signed free agent starter Jacob deGrom to a five-year, $185 million dollar contract early in the offseason. I thought about that truth because it leads to another truth in baseball: you can’t free agent your way into contention.
Lots of teams have tried this, of course. Since the outset of free agency, various teams have opened up the purse strings to hire a crop of free agents, on the hope that adding two or three star players would swing the fortunes of an entire team.
And it has never worked.
The players would perform as predicted (or they wouldn’t), and their efforts would move the needle three or five games (or not). Meanwhile, they’d age in the usual ways that we all age, and the contract would look worse. The team wouldn’t get significantly better, and blame would get dished to the most egregious offenders. Then the cycle would start over somewhere else.
It hasn’t ever worked. What the Rangers are doing - trying to build a contender out of free agents – hasn’t ever worked.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t work.
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My first impression – my first reaction when Jacob deGrom’s contract with the Rangers was announced a month ago – was that it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.
Jacob deGrom is probably the most effective starting pitcher in baseball. That’s a terrific positive: when he throws the baseball, there might not be a person who is better at getting hitters out on the planet.
The flipside is that he threw 64 innings last year, and 92 innings in 2021. He’s been injured, and he will turn 35 this summer. He is the epitome of high-risk, high reward: deGrom might win the Cy Young Award, and he might throw fewer innings than your average middle reliever.
There are many teams where it would make sense to roll the dice, many teams that contended (or nearly contended) in 2022, who were close enough to take a shot on getting a healthy deGrom. If you had told me that the Mets or Phillies or Cardinals or Padres had signed deGrom, I’d understand. All of those teams were good last year, and have an incentive to get better.
But the Rangers weren’t good in 2022.
The team’s best player last year - aside from Semien and Seager - was Martin Perez. Perez was fantastic, but his 2022 season (2.89 ERA, 136 ERA+) feels like a massive outlier from the rest of his career (4.71 ERA, 96 ERA+).
Nathanial Lowe was terrific last year, hitting .300 with some power. But his walk rate went from 12.5% to 7.4%, he was a lifetime .260 hitter coming into the year, and he’ll turn twenty-eight in July. Adolis Garcia led the team in RBI and stolen bases, but his on-base percentage was a paltry .300, and he struck out 183 times. He’ll turn twenty-nine before the season starts.
That isn’t a fantastic base of talent, and while the Rangers have some decent prospects in the low minors, they don’t have any prospects projected to be significant contributors in the coming years.
So it didn’t make sense. There are teams that could justify the risk of Jacob deGrom, and there are moves that a team like the Rangers ought to consider. But signing deGrom to the Rangers? It felt – immediately – like a move destined to fail.
I’ve been tossing the move around in my head without writing anything down, and then it came to me that I was thinking about the decision – and the broader question of building a team through free agency – within the context of older structures.
But baseball changed last year: not slightly, but radically.
And that change might justify the Rangers decision to roll the dice on deGrom.
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The big change, of course, is the structure of baseball’s playoffs.
The current baseball playoff has a three-game Wild Card round, followed by a five-game Division Series, followed by the traditional seven-game Championship Series and World Series.
This means that six teams in each league will reach the playoffs. And unlike previous seasons, no team will face a one-and-done situation.
This structure changes both the outlook for the Rangers going into 2023, and the value of having Jacob deGrom.
The Rangers are unlikely to be a better team than the Houston Astros, who have won the AL West in five of the last six seasons. But they don’t have to beat the Astros: the Rangers can finish second in their division, and have a decent chance net one of the three Wild Card slots. Their competition for second place are the Mariners and Angels, and I’d only count the Mariners as having a distinct roster advantage over the Rangers.
It is not outlandish to think of Texas as a Wild Card contender. Their record was poor last year, but their Pythagorean W-L record (77-85) was a hair better than the Angels (76-86). If things break well for them, second place isn’t impossible.
And once they’re in the playoffs, they’d have an ace. A healthy Jacob deGrom would probably contribute more to a deep run in the playoffs than any other player in baseball. Assuming a title run, deGrom could be penciled in for one start in the Wild Card Series, two in the Division Series, two in the Championship Series, and potentially three starts in the World Series: eight starts, in total.
So the change in baseball’s playoff structure makes the Rangers free agent spending spree more coherent: they don’t have a clear path to winning their division, but winning the division isn’t the advantage it once was. They certainly have a path to the Wild Card, and Jacob deGrom gives them a big edge if they reach playoff baseball.
I wonder, too, if that is the contributing factor to all of the big contracts handed out this offseason: that teams are realizing that the ‘windows of contention’ has expanded slightly. Netting a Wild Card used to mean a coin flip to get into a real series: now the Wild Card teams get to stretch a little more.
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Do I think these big contracts will work out for Texas?
No. I remain very skeptical that signing free agents to big contracts is a way for a losing team to turn into a winning team.
Why?
Because it is an impatient approach to a problem that is better served by patience. The best way to create a winning baseball team is to scout young players, work to develop them, encourage the best ones, give them a chance, and offer them a good contracts when they show themselves capable of holding their own . This is what the Rays did with Wander Franco, and what the Mariners did with Julio Rodriguez. This is what the Astros did with Alex Bregman and Yordan Alvarez. This is what the Braves did with Ronald Acuna and Ozzie Albies. And Matt Olson and Austin Riley. And Michael Harris and Spencer Strider. This is Atlanta’s SOP, to be honest.
The Rangers do not have anything like the base of talent that the Rays and Braves and Astros possess, and while I applaud the organization for spending money to make their team better, I can’t recall a team in recent memory that had a stretch of success driven primarily by the accomplishments of free agents.* You can have free agents that contribute mightily to the success of a team, but you have to have some homegrown talent chipping in.
Jacob deGrom is terrific, but he’s also thirty-four years old. Pedro Martinez and Felix Hernandez were already in their declines at that age; Johan Santana was finished. Scherzer and Kershaw and Greinke and Verlander have all pitched effectively at the age deGrom is at, but none of them had deGrom’s record of missed time. None of them were like deGrom, who is a max-effort pitcher with a narrow build.
Corey Seager is a reliably good player. Marcus Semien feels like he’s going to be another Adrian Beltre: one of those guys who has his best years in his thirties.
If all three were youngsters, I’d think the Rangers could fill in the gaps enough to make a contender. But they are all older: you have to anticipate declines. The Rangers are spending to chase a Wild Card: I think they’d have been better off trying to build a team.
David Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. He welcomes comments, questions and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com