Cubs: "The way to build a winning team is to assemble star position players through your farm system, and fill in the gaps that emerge in this process by signing a key Free Agent now and then, or occasionally by trading, but mostly through your own drafting and development process. With pitching, the opposite emphasis is needed: build your pitching staff through Free Agency and in-season purchases, and trade your young pitchers whenever you get the chance to acquire an equally good position player."

 Mets: "No, no, no. Build your pitching staff from within, mostly, and pick up position players where you can." 

 The Cubs’ logic (which I’m imputing to them, of course—I have no idea if they’ve articulated anything like this, or even if they agree with it) is that pitchers have ruinously short shelf-lives. You can’t count on a star pitcher’s arm to hold up much beyond his next start, so whatever happens, you’re always going to be on the hunt for available pitchers. Or else you’re going to come up disappointingly short much of the time. Position players, however, have longer careers, generally, and they can play at high levels at young ages, which makes their contracts affordable, without suffering injuries as often as pitchers do.  You can always move position players around the field if you have a logjam at one position (especially if you have Joe Maddon managing your team), while there’s not much you can do with an extra starting pitcher, or with one who isn’t playing well. You can ride him straight into the cellar, or you can drop him from your starting rotation, but sooner or later, probably sooner, you’re going to need to pick up another starting pitcher. And another. And another after that. So budget it into your long-range planning to sign Free Agent pitchers on a regular basis.

 The Mets’ logic, or lack thereof right now, says the opposite, that you want to develop a young pitching staff from within your organization, and sign or otherwise acquire veterans for your everyday lineup. Obviously, I’m picking on the Mets at a sore point in their club’s history, at the end of a season where their staff of brilliant young pitchers—Harvey, DeGrom, Matz, Wheeler, and to a much lesser degree Syndergaard—spent months on the DL, and I’m choosing a point in the Cubs’ history where they’ve succeeded through the early development of young regular players, Rizzo, Bryant, Soler, Baez, Contreras. (And Schwarber, of course, spent the whole season on the DL—but that’s a lot of young players developed in-house.)

 It’s not clear how I want to count players like Addison Russell (or Travis D’Arnaud) who were acquired in trades before they’d done much in the big leagues, but they could be classified as home-grown talent too. (I’m certainly classifying Syndergaard and Wheeler that way for the Mets, and Rizzo is another one who was picked up in a minor league deal when he was around 21 years old.) And there are plain exceptions built into this system, like the Mets’ best (and certainly healthiest) pitcher over the past few years being a 43-year-old who makes Mickey Lolich look like an aerobics instructor. But in the main, I’d say this dichotomy holds up in its broad outlines: young home-grown pitchers and free-agent veteran position players vs. veteran free-agent pitchers and young home-grown position players.

 So I thought maybe I’d do a quick-and-dirty study comparing the two groups to see if this is just piling on the hapless Metsies or if there’s something valid there. How about we pick an arbitrary year—1996, twenty years ago, when the entire careers of 99% of the players are now in the books—and see if there’s a significant difference between young pitchers’ and young position players’ value over the rest of their careers.

 The figure that was tossed around a lot during this past post-season was "The Cubs had 6 good young position-playing regulars 24 years old or younger," right? So let’s use 24 years old as our standard, and count up the position players and pitchers under 25 in 1996 who earned at least one WAR: 

I get 41 players under the age of 25 in 1996 who earned at least one WAR (10 AL position players, 9 AL pitchers. 10 NL position players, and 12 NL pitchers), giving us a pretty even split between leagues and pitchers/position players.  The position players in 1996 averaged 2.8 WAR, and the pitchers averaged 2.3 WAR.

 Going by the eyeball method alone, I’d say that the position players had substantially greater career values than the pitchers. Five to seven AL position players (A-Rod, Jeter, Ramirez, Delgado, I-Rod and arguably Green or Durham) went on to have substantial star careers, while only 2 pitchers (Radke and Pettitte) could be said to have done the same. In the NL, same thing: 6 or 7 position players with long stellar careers, and only 3 or 4 pitchers. But let’s run the career  WAR numbers and quantify my eyeball method:                     

So, to sum up these figures, the 20 position players averaged 37.69 WAR, and the 21 pitchers averaged 17.89 WAR over the courses of their careers.

 Now there may be something anomalous about 1996, a freaky number of position-playing Hall of Fame types under the age of 25 getting substantial playing time (Chipper and Jeter and A-Rod and I-Rod and Manny, all at the same time? Wow), or there may be something wrong with my quick and dirty methods here.  I used only those young players who had at least 1 WAR, to focus on players who were given substantial responsibilities at a young age, and to avoid having to calculate large numbers of young players who got very little playing time, some of whom had a negative WAR, which might have skewed my calculations. And I may have gotten lucky in finding a cut-off that yielded approximately the same number of pitchers and position players.   Certainly I could have been far more systematic, and included 1986, 1976 and several other years ending in -6, comparing the pitchers’ and position players’ WARs in a wider sampling. I might do that, providing no one wants to blow a shotgun-sized hole through my methods here. Or maybe you want to do that? Someone should.

 Because this little study seems to indicate that, so far, it’s a no-brainer, maybe as much as Bill’s original argument about the HRs vs. the SBs: young position players are a far better bet than young pitchers to put in substantial star careers. Though their values in 1996 differed by a relatively small amount (batters: 2.8 WAR, pitchers: 2.3 WAR) the difference over their careers is more than double, suggesting as a matter of policy, most teams should be swapping out their young pitching any time they get a tempting offer.

 So did the Mets err in judgment? After all, if you have a young Matt Harvey, or a young Jacob DeGrom, or a young Noah Syndergaard, or a young Steven Matz, or a young Zack Wheeler, much less all five of them, what are you supposed to do? Sniff your nose at ‘em and send ‘em to the bullpen, or swap them out, while you sign veteran free-agent pitchers to zillionaire contracts?

 Well, yes. From this cursory examination, these pitchers have, at their brief peaks, had a lot of value on the trade market. When they’re healthy, and pitching brilliantly, maybe instead of pitching them until their arms fell off, the Mets should have considered how valuable their young pitching would seem to other teams.

 I can’t begin to describe how strongly Mets fans oppose swapping out young pitching, at least to judge from the phone calls I endure on WFAN as I drive to and from work: "heresy" doesn’t begin to describe the denunciations I hear when it’s suggested that Harvey, when he’s hot and healthy, could be traded for a young position player, or three young position-playing prospects, or anything of the kind. "He’s a jewel, a gem, a stah!" Yes, but his career is hanging on a tendon, and if you can get a position player of roughly comparable value in exchange for him, it seems to me you’ve got to do it.

 But maybe this isn’t much of an exploitable market?.  After all, if I can come to this conclusion noodling around in BBREF for a few hours, isn’t every team in baseball already aware of this market inequity?

 Sure. But there are periods during the season, at the trading deadline or whenever a good team’s rotation has been decimated, that contenders (or contender-wannabes) will gladly make deals they know to be dumb in the long run but necessary to get them through the next few months. Is there a contending team having pitching problems in June that’s going to hang onto their best AAA prospects if they’re offered a healthy Matt Harvey or Jacob DeGrom in exchange? How about Harvey AND DeGrom? Wouldn’t two (or three!) hot young arms tempt a pitching-weak contender to surrender their entire farm systems? Of course, no team has enough value in their farm system to compensate the Mets for three young pitching stars in one deal, but my point is that if a team such as I’m describing does have great position-playing prospects, a team like the Mets can offer them enough pitching value to pry it away from them at the right moment, and that’s probably the right move, hard as it is for a pitching-loving fan to tolerate.

 Since the greatest Mets’ teams have been built on home-grown pitching in the past (Seaver/Koosman/ Ryan/McGraw/Matlack, and Gooden/Darling/Fernandez/Orosco/McDowell) , Mets fans have deep in their bone marrow the sentimental notion that this is the only way to go, so it’s an especially tough sell around these parts. (And yes, I know that Darling and Fernandez and Orosco were acquired in trades, early on.) But if there’s any validity at all to this method, pitching-rich organizations like the Mets aren’t taking adequate advantage of their greatest commodity, the trade value of young (and attractively cheap) pitching in putting together a championship roster.

 Of course, I could be all wet here—if anyone would care to hand me a towel (or to turn the shower up full-blast) by duplicating this study for 1986 or any other years and see if this pattern holds up, that would be great. I often think we don’t do enough crowd-sourcing studies around here, and this one’s fairly easy, if fairly time-consuming. (The method is reasonably obvious, but I’ll be glad to explain it further to anyone who wants to try. And if you need formatting help, just email your raw data to stevengoldleaf@gmail.com, and I’ll try to put it into tables for you, now that I’ve sort of figured out how to do that.)  Besides which, apart from the tedium, this was a fun study to do. I hadn’t realized how much of 1996 I had forgotten, or never knew, until I reviewed the names of all the young players.

 The most surprising part was discovering how little I knew or remembered about the great young pitchers: some, like Terry Adams or Terrell Wade or Scott Karl, I just drew a total blank on. No memories at all, nothing. Others I remember getting all excited about their great potential, which just fizzled out: Ismael Valdez, for one. And because so many of these guys ended up playing for the Mets (Castillo, Delgado, Pedro, Wagner, Hampton, Estes, Green and several others), I got to look at their early careers and reminisce about their development in a way I don’t often do. I hadn’t quite realized how great a staff the Dodgers seemed to have going for them in 1996 and how none of their parachutes opened. (One of Bill’s more colorful phrases that has stuck with me over the decades: "Parachute didn’t open" as a devastating summation of a failed career.)  I’m sure you’ll have memories of some players of your own if you want to try your hand at such a study. I’ll certainly be interested in what you can turn up.