A few years back (2016 o be specific) I created network graphs displaying the history of trades made for each MLB franchise, using transactions data from the wonderful Retrosheet project. These graphs presented more than a few challenges in how to present the data but I wound up with what I consider to be a very interesting set of results, which you can find here. I also created some posts on the process at that time, found here and here.
Here’s a snapshot within a graph:
Six seasons have elapsed since I created those graphs, so I thought it was beyond time to update them, but this time with a twist. Last fall I came across a great dataset that captures an array of advanced sabermetric statistics which I hope to use on a regular basis. These statistics can be used to assess a player’s true value relative to his peers each season. What if I could incorporate those into the trade network updates to show the post-trade value of each player to their new team? Ideally, this will help to show the value of each trade and which team wound up getting the better part of the deal.
Of course this would involve adding a degree of complexity to the MySQL code for pulling the data and shaping it for use in creating network graphs. However, the end result could be very revealing and worthwhile. Today I’m at the start of the process, tinkering with SQL code to extract the data in a proper format. Here’s an example:
SELECT h.player_name, p.playerID, tr.season, tr.TransactionID, tr.TeamFrom, tr.TeamTo, ROUND(SUM(h.WAR162),1) as WAR
FROM historical_WAR_and_more h
INNER JOIN People p
ON h.key_bbref = p.bbrefID
INNER JOIN trades2021 tr
ON p.retroID = tr.Player
WHERE tr.season >= 1901 and h.year_ID > tr.season and h.team_ID = tr.TeamTo AND tr.Type = ‘T’
GROUP BY h.player_name, p.playerID, tr.season, tr.TransactionID, tr.TeamFrom, tr.TeamTo
In this case, I’m looking at the cumulative WAR (Wins Above Replacement) for each traded player with their new team. This could be a single season total or the sum of many years in some cases. Here are some results:
We now have post-trade results (starting if the season following the trade) as measured by WAR for each traded player. We see one fairly substantial figure – the second Aaron Harang trade which netted 16.9 WAR points for his new team, the Cincinnati Reds (CIN in the results). Given that a single season WAR above 3 or 4 is considered substantial, it’s clear that his new team probably benefited from a few of those high-value seasons. What we can’t see yet is what they gave away in their half of the trade.
Fortunately, we can access this using the TransactionID field, which provides all the information for each party within the trade. But we’ll save that for another day as I figure out the next progression of the code. As always, thanks for reading!