What’s The Better Value To a Team: Long-Term Contracts to Elite Hitters or Elite Pitchers?
Photo Credit: Meg Oliphant/Getty Images
2024’s free agency started with a bang as the Los Angeles Dodgers signed two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani to a 10-year deal, followed by signing Ohtani’s Japanese countryman Yoshinobu Yamamoto to a 12-year deal. As the remaining free agents reach deals over the coming weeks, I will take a look a what the relative value of signing an elite hitter to a long-term contract is versus the relative value of signing an elite starting pitcher to a long-term contract.
My dataset consists of the top 30 individual seasons since 2000, ranked by WAR, for each of batters and pitchers, and the ten seasons that follow that elite season for those individual players. To qualify for the list, a player must have had the opportunity to play ten full seasons after his elite season or he must have retired. For example, Mike Trout’s 2012 season qualifies, since he has played for ten seasons after it, but his 2018 seasons does not qualify yet, as the ten years that follow are incomplete.
Analyzing the dataset, I found some interesting trends:
Elite batters hit their prime at 28.6 years of age while elite pitchers hit their prime at 29.9 years of age. That 1.3-year age difference certainly plays a large role in ten-year performance after the elite season.
Batters have averaged 9.3 WAR in their elite seasons, while pitchers have averaged 8.3 WAR, so the elite batter has 1 additional WAR of impact in his top season.
Figure 1 below shows batter WAR and pitcher WAR over 11 seasons, with season 1 being the player’s elite season.
Figure 1: Batter WAR and Pitcher WAR over 11 seasons. with season 1 being the elite season and 2-11 the 10 seasons that follow
As we can see in the graph, there exists a large performance gap between elite batters and elite pitchers in the six seasons that follow the elite season. In those six seasons, the batters outperform the pitchers by 2.2 WAR on average. The performance gap is largest from season three to season five, in which the batters outperform the pitchers by 2.6 WAR on average.
A long-term contract for an elite pitcher is likely to become a bad contract by season four (age 33), when the pitcher’s WAR drops to 2.7. However, a long-term contract is not likely to become burdensome for an elite hitter until season eight (age 36), when the batter’s WAR drops to 2.8.
Conclusion
Although elite starting pitchers are very attractive propositions through trade deadline rentals and short-term contracts, elite batters are much more attractive over long-term deals.
