A month ago, we were embroiled in the usual swirl of speculation, reporting and reaction that accelerates as the MLB trade deadline approaches. Then, just like that, it's over, back to the regularly scheduled pennant races. Thanks for tuning in.
For teams in contention, the trade deadline and the pennant races are intrinsically linked. The players you acquire at the former are supposed to help you with the latter. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
It'll be years before we can declare ultimate winners and losers on individual deals. What we can do is see which teams have gleaned the biggest impact -- so far -- from the deadline rush, and which teams are still looking for a return.
In the past, we've revisited our initial analysis to the deals by looking at how the playoff odds have changed over the subsequent month. We're doing that again, but we've added a look at the individuals involved in the deals by tallying up the win probability added for each player in their new organization, using the WPA model at TruMedia.
We've made two measures for each team: the post-trade WPA for each player the team added, as well as the WPA of any players sent away in the deals. Teams were then ranked by the net total of these two measurements.
One month ago, we thought we knew who won and lost the deadline, but given the early returns of what's actually transpired on the field, how well are those assessments holding up?
