Thursday, August 9, 2012

Which Way Did The Talent Go?

Somewhere back in free agency, someone posted on the world chat that there seemed to be a lot of talent moving to the NL...

Had a slow hour for lunch today, so decided to check that out.

For each of the Type A and B free agent moves and trades (I just assigned A and B to the traded players based on their overalls), I just counted how many moved from one division to another division.

But I also figured that the Type A's have a lot more impact than the B's.  And there are some Type A's that are the real difference-makers.  So I assigned points for 3 categories:

                    Type B's got 1 point
                    Type A's got 2 points
                    Type "Super A's" got 4 points (Smalley, Andujar, Young, Santiago, Gutierrez)

So when you add up all the comings and goings, what do you get?

AL South   +6
NL West    +4
AL North   +3
AL East     +1
NL South   -2
AL West    -3
NL North  -3
NL East     -6

Overall, AL is +7 and NL is -7.

With points assigned like this, the effect of the Super A's is huge.  Take those out and it flips to NL +5, AL -5.  The NL East all by itself (which lost 4 of the Super A's) goes from -6 to +6.

So for the poster mentioned above, you were right...for numbers of players changing leagues, the NL was winning.  But for real impact, AL got the edge this year.

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