Second-year free agents see big decline
Only relievers seem to defy troubling trend
It’s exciting when your favorite team signs a star player to a big free agent contract, but by the second year of deals, most players suffer a significant decline.
One of the Boston Red Sox’s recent big free agent signings, Pablo Sandoval, is a perfect poster child for this phenomenon. He has appeared in three games in the 2016 season after losing the starting third-base job to Travis Shaw in spring training and succumbing to shoulder troubles. He’s in the second year of a fiveyear, $95 million deal with Boston.
Hanley Ramirez, also now in his second year with the Red Sox, has surprised the Fenway Faithful with solid defense at first base this season. But buzz has begun about where Ramirez’s hitting power has gone, as his slugging percentage has fallen to .412 vs. a career high of .638 in 2013. These patterns warranted closer inquiry. Is this type of decline common to major league players, particularly after free agency? The answer appears to be yes. Take a cross section of the last two multiyear free agent contracts for each major league team, in which Year 2 has been completed, over a five-year period. This eliminates free agent contracts signed in 2015 and 2016 and excludes small-market teams such as the Tampa Bay Rays and Cincinnati Reds, who generally sign free agents to one-year deals. This yields a total of 51 players signed between 2009 and 2014.
The average Wins Above Replacement (WAR) for this group, which comprises both position players and pitchers, declined 32% from Year 1 to Year 2 of the contract, from about 2.03 to 1.38.
This includes outliers in decline among position players such as Jhonny Peralta, who went from a 5.7 WAR in 2014 after signing a four-year, $53 million deal with the St. Louis Cardinals to 1.8 in 2015, though he played only two fewer games in 2015. And it also includes outliers in improvement such as Adrian Beltre, who went from an already impressive 5.8 WAR in 2011 for the Texas Rangers to a stellar 7.2 WAR in 2012. (The 2011 season would have been Beltre’s second year with the Red Sox, for whom he’d delivered a WAR of 7.8 after Boston signed him to a one-year, $10 million free agent contract in 2010.)
Position players in the second years of free agent contracts played 15% fewer games than in Year 1, an average of 110 vs. 129. Hits also declined from an average of 122 to an average of 100, and home runs and RBI followed suit, dropping from an average a little under 16 to a little over 14, and from 62 to 51, respectively.
Starting pitchers threw fewer innings (179 compared to 146, on average) with a higher ERA (4.27 in Year 2 to Year 1’s 3.84) and WHIP (1.35 in Year 2 vs. 1.27 in Year 1) in Year 2. WAR per 162 innings, a more balanced comparison with position players, declined 21% from 1.7 in Year 1 to 1.35 in Year 2.
The biggest offenders among starting pitchers included Anibal Sanchez, whose WAR dropped from 6.3 to 2.4 after he signed a five-year, $80 million deal with the Detroit Tigers for 2013. Sanchez also pitched 56 fewer innings in 2014, at 126 compared with 2013’s 182. At the other end of the spectrum, Ubaldo Jimenez improved his WAR from -0.5 in his first year of a four-year $50 million deal with the Baltimore Orioles in 2014 to 2.6 in 2015. Still, the overall trend was one of precipitous declines like that of Matt Garza, whose WAR went from 1.4 to -1.7 after he signed a $50 million deal with the Milwaukee Brewers in 2014.
Relief pitchers provided an exception to the numeric decline, increasing average WAR by 56%, from 0.41 to 0.64. Relievers also saw improvements in average ERA from year to year (from 3.20 to 3.15) and an increase of 55% in WAR over 162 innings (from 1.24 to 1.92). This is a persuasive argument to focus on signing free agent relief pitchers, with one caveat: They accounted for just eight of the contracts evaluated here.
For MLB fans, this does not bode well for the most recent big free agent signings, which include Zack Greinke with the Arizona Diamondbacks and Johnny Cueto with the San Francisco Giants, each of whom is in Year 1 in 2016. And if historical trends are any indication, Chicago Cubs fans had better hope that this year’s team — stocked with a league-leading six free agents signed to multiyear deals in 2015 and 2016 — can find a way to finally win it all.
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