After the Yankees made their blockbuster move last offseason acquiring Juan Soto from the San Diego Padres in exchange for Michael King, Drew Thorpe, and a few other pieces, it felt like it would be a necessity for the Yankees to re-sign him, especially considering the Yankees lackluster offensive performance in 2022, culminating in a missed playoff appearance. But surprisingly when Juan Soto decided to head to Queens and join the cross-town rival New York Mets on a revolutionary, market-resetting fifteen year, seven-hundred and sixty-five million dollar deal, Yankees fans oddly found themselves a little more relieved than would have seemed possible given their “please stay, Soto!” chants at the backend of the year.
Yankees universe ultimately realized that it would have been to the detriment of the team if they had chosen to keep Soto. Originally, Soto was expected to sign a contract somewhere in the range of five hundred to six hundred million dollars, which would have given the Yankees the opportunity to add some pieces around him. Unfortunately, the expansive pockets of Steve Cohen played a massive role in the Soto sweepstakes, pushing the offers for Soto into the seven hundred million dollar range. After Soto had signed with the Mets, it was reported that Soto had been offered a very similar sixteen year, seven hundred and sixty million dollar contract. Many Yankees fans felt like they had dodged a bullet in a few ways given the enormity of the contract. For one thing, handing out such a large contract would have significantly handicapped the Yankees from building the rest of a team which had clearly been corrupt as revealed in their World Series performance. But also, given that the deal that the Yankees made to Soto was very similar to the Mets deal, it created an optic that Soto simply didn’t care about donning the pinstripes as much as he cared about the money. Like clockwork, Soto suddenly was no longer beloved in Yankees land.
Instead, fans along with the organization have seemed to quickly forget about Juan Soto, immediately pivoting to other exciting pieces on the free agent market, and on the trading block. Already this offseason, the Yankees have signed free agent Max Fried on an eight year, two-hundred and eighteen million dollar deal solidifying the Yankees (in a lot of people’s eyes) as having the best projected starting rotation in baseball. The Yankees then made a sneaky trade with the Milwaukee Brewers, sending Nestor Cortes to the Brew Crew in exchange for Devin Williams, who has proven to be one of the best closers in all of baseball over the past three seasons. And just two days ago, the Yankees managed to complete a lopsided deal with a money hungry Chicago Cubs team, picking up Cody Bellinger for Cody Poteet. In retrospect, if you were to break down this offseason in a nutshell thus far, the Yankees (for less money) have acquired Max Fried, Devin Williams, and Cody Bellinger in exchange for Juan Soto.
At a glance, it would appear that the Yankees have become a better team as a result of Soto leaving, though many of the new aged fans and sabermetric gurus have contended that the Yankees are still actually worse, citing one key statistic—WAR. Juan Soto had a 7.9 WAR last season, ranking him sixth in the league. Fried, Williams, and Bellinger had a combined WAR of 7.1. Many people trust that WAR is the statistic to quantify how good a player is compared to other players because they are told that it is the best statistic for that purpose, but most of those same people would never be able to tell you what goes into quantifying WAR.
WAR is a combination of batting, baserunning, fielding, and pitching statistics. Playing more increases a player’s WAR as playing more obviously contributes to more wins for a team in the long run as long as they are not to the detriment of the team. It is not worth getting into the weeds when considering whether the Yankees will be better off without Juan Soto because most of his WAR comes from hitting alone. Bellinger is a better fielder, and baserunner than Juan Soto, so there is no need to go into advanced sabermetrics on the matter. Of course, the Yankees have also improved their pitching. In three phases of the game the Yankees have improved without Soto, and by signing Fried, Bellinger, and Williams. However, when it comes to the overall value of a player, hitting always seems to take the cake as holding the most weight.
WAR reflects this as it is biased towards position players, and that is mostly due to hitting statistics. Simply put, the highest pitching WAR ever recorded over the course of a season (after the dead-ball era) was 12.2 by Dwight Gooden in 1985 while the highest for a position player was Babe Ruth’s 14.1 in 1923. So when it comes to the 2024 Yankees offseason, Soto’s WAR in comparison to the overall WAR of the three players that they acquired are not compatible with each other because two of the players that the Yankees have signed are pitchers. The downfall of WAR is that it is not apparent that hitting is more valuable to a team than pitching. Teams have come up short in the playoffs because they didn’t have enough pitching, and teams have come up short in the playoffs because they didn’t have enough hitting. WAR takes into account a player’s value over one hundred and sixty-two games, so it makes sense that a pitcher’s WAR would be less than an everyday player’s WAR in the regular season given that position players play about four to five times the amount of games that pitchers do, but in the postseason where it is so much harder to hit and where teams will ride their top two/three starting pitchers, the value of those starting pitchers will possibly be more important than the everyday players. It appears that when it comes to the value of a team, specifically when it matters most, pitching and hitting fall on equal levels, therefore the fact that WAR is position player (and offensively) biased seems to make it a fraudulent statistic.
WAR also doesn’t seem to quantify success in the same way that human beings quantify success. It comes as a surprise that Babe Ruth’s 1923 season was the one in which he achieved the highest WAR given that the season that is typically deemed to be his best occurred in 1927 when he hit sixty home runs for a team eventually championed as “Murderer’s Row.” What is even more shocking is that the 1927 season didn’t even give Ruth the second highest WAR of his career. In 1921, he hit fifty-nine home runs and had a WAR of 12.8. At least there is an argument to be made that Ruth’s 1921 season was better than his 1927 season, but to have a statistic suggesting that Ruth’s best season was in 1923 is hogwash. What skews the scales of WAR when it comes to Ruth’s 1923 season is the amount of times that he got on base. He walked an incredible one-hundred and seventy times (the most in his career) and had an other-worldly .545 on base percentage (also, the highest in his career). But the problem with WAR in this regard is that it stands for wins above replacement. In other words, how many wins did Babe Ruth contribute to over the most average of players. In theory, (when it comes to hitting) the more times a player gets on base, the more runs the team should score as a result. However, Ruth actually produced fewer runs in 1923 (240) than he did in 1921 (286) or 1927 (263), meaning that as a hitter he was actually more valuable in the latter two years. The truth is that WAR doesn’t quantify outcome for a team, but rather represents a projection. Ruth meant more to the Yankees as a slugger than he did as a table setter and as an on base machine. Perhaps, Ruth could have scored more runs in his 1923 season than in his 1927 and 1921 seasons if there was a slugger on the team that produced to the level of Ruth. Unfortunately, nobody will ever know because Lou Gehrig only played thirteen games in 1923. But the bottom line is that WAR does not take into account what is best for the particular team that the player is playing for at the time. The accuracy of WAR is dependent upon what other players do around what a player’s projected WAR suggests. In other words, having more players with WARs that will add up to a superstar player’s WAR is more valuable than just having the superstar player because the true value of the superstar player goes down if there aren’t other key contributors in the lineup to either get on base or drive them in.
However, this doesn’t cover everything when it comes to whether or not the Yankees have gotten better as a result of Soto leaving. The truth of the matter is that Aaron Judge would have been hitting behind Soto, so the value of Soto’s WAR was mostly achieved last year, especially considering that Gleyber Torres was one of the best leadoff men in baseball towards the latter end of the season. But then, how accurate was Aaron Judge’s WAR last year? He had Soto hitting in front of him, so his RBI numbers certainly aligned with the value of his WAR, but then how many times was he scoring compared to what his projection suggested? Aaron Judge was responsible for producing two hundred and eight runs last season. He was responsible for driving in one hundred and forty-four of those runs, meaning that about sixty nine percent of the time Aaron Judge was the one who produced his value. In other words, Aaron Judge had a great setup piece in Juan Soto who he could drive in, but did not have much production and lineup protection behind him who could drive him in. The Yankees were not fully utilizing the value of Aaron Judge last season, leaving the Yankees room to maximize his value and cushion the blow of losing Soto.
The Yankees need either a two hole hitter or a four hole hitter to create that cushion. The signing of Cody Bellinger was an amazing move because he is a versatile hitter. He can hit in the two-hole in front of Judge, but he can also hit in the cleanup spot behind him. This allows the Yankees to become flexible and gives them the option to sign for either part of the lineup. Alex Bregman would be a great fit to put in the two spot. Christian Walker would be a great fit in the fourth spot. Pete Alonso wouldn’t be an awful fit for the Yankees to put in the clean up spot either, though he would be a bad move in the long run given the length of the contract that he wants, and the fact that he was a Met last year and it would seem like to a lot of Yankee fans that they basically traded away Juan Soto for the Met’s sloppy seconds. Whatever the case may be, the Yankees have plenty of options to support Judge in the lineup and maximize his value. Not to mention, acquiring a four hitter that is more productive gives more opportunities for a five-hole hitter to drive in runs as well. Though the numbers might not match up when comparing Soto’s WAR to two new pieces in the Yankees lineup, it would appear as though the Yankees would either equal or exceed the value of what Soto gave them last year.
Formula for finding number of runs produced by a player:
Runs + (RBIs - HRs)
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