Now that we’re well into the 2025 season, it’s time to do our semi-annual check of our model’s correlation to the market this past offseason. Along the way, we’ll throw in a few observations in trade market trends.

Let’s get to the results. By our count, for the 2024/25 offseason:

• Number of trades: 81
• Number of trades accepted by our model: 77
• Acceptance rate: 95.1%
• Average variance (in absolute value terms): 2.5

So there were 81 trades, of which 77 fell into the bell curve of acceptable margins in our model, for a 95% success rate. The average miss was a difference in value of $2.5M. That’s slightly better than our model’s performance overall since August 2019 (which currently sports a 93.6% success rate, albeit with a slightly lower variance of 2.2). At a glance, it looks pretty consistent.

Now let’s break it down. Of those 81 accepted trades, 67 came in as either fair deals or minor overpays; 10 came in as either moderate or major overpays, and 4 were rejected by our model as too far off the mark.

In other words, 82% were fair or close to fair; another 12% were within reasonable range; and 5% were misses. That looks to us like a pretty strong correlation to the market, with most deals bunched up in the middle of the bell curve; a few more just inside of the bell curve, and four outliers.

 

The wins (the fair deals)

The hit parade of deals we got right includes India/Singer, Jake Burger, Garrett Crochet, Cody Bellinger, Josh Naylor, Jesus Luzardo, Taylor Rogers, Ryan Brasier, Jones/Freeman, and Anderson/Suarez. There were a whole bunch of smaller trades that fit nicely, with names like Cartaya, Brujan, Mervis, Sabol, Faedo, and Ruiz, plus a lot of DFA’d player-for-cash-consideration deals.

As you can see, there weren’t a lot of blockbusters over this past winter – the Crochet deal looks like the biggest win in that group, but the Bellinger trade was notable (albeit as a salary dump), and the others fell more into the service-able, sensible-for-each-team zone.

 

The “semi” wins (aka the ones that were reasonably close)

Notables here include Horwitz/Ortiz, Devin Williams, Jeffrey Springs, Trevino/Cruz, Gavin Lux, Myles Straw, and Ryan Pressly. 

There were some big names dealt here, none of which really surprised us or the model. The A’s overpaid a little bit for Springs, which tracks with the fact that quality starters were in high demand all winter, and they’d also overpaid in the free agent market for Luis Severino, just to get him to play in a minor-league park. 

The Reds overpaid a bit for Trevino, which tracks with the fact that the demand for even solid, light-hitting veteran catchers exceeded the supply. But things evened out for Cincinnati when they took advantage of the Dodgers’ roster crunch to grab Lux at a bit of a discount. The Blue Jays took on a questionable amount of negative value for Straw in their quest to land more international pool space for Roki Sasaki, only to lose out on him. And the Cubs took advantage (although not egregiously so) of the Astros’ lack of leverage when they telegraphed their need to dump Pressly’s salary.

 

The four misses

The offseason trade market started off with a bang when the Angels acquired Jorge Soler, taking on his full contract from the Braves in exchange for Griffin Canning, who Atlanta then non-tendered. Soler, of course, is a quality hitter, but as a DH-only with injury issues, his contract is underwater, which is why it was a bit surprising that the Angels took the whole thing.

It looks like the Rangers got a steal of a deal when they acquired reliever Robert Garcia (who has excellent stuff and five years of cheap control) for two years of good-not-great first baseman Nathaniel Lowe, who is getting expensive in salary terms. The Garcia deal, along with the Yankees’ acquisition of Fernando Cruz in the Trevino deal, suggests that savvy front offices are targeting relievers with good stuff, who are a bit under the radar, to turn them into higher-leverage assets.

The Cubs, in a somewhat desperate move to land a star, severely overpaid for one year of Kyle Tucker. The Astros got a much more valuable package on the whole, with Isaac Paredes (for three years), Cam Smith (for six years), and Hayden Wesneski (for four years). This allows Houston to extend its window of contention with both Paredes’ current offensive profile and Smith’s high-ceiling potential, with Wesneski as a back-end arm to support the rotation. None are as good as Tucker, mind you, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts here from a value perspective for Houston.

The head-scratcher of the offseason, however, was the Andres Gimenez trade. This came out as a huge overpay by Toronto, mostly because they took on the entire Gimenez contract (which our model showed as underwater by $33M at the time) AND gave up value on top of it in the form of Spencer Horwitz (who, pre-injury, was valued at a positive $28M), who was immediately flipped to Pittsburgh for Luis L. Ortiz. Mind you, Gimenez is the most talented player here, but we’re looking at it from a value perspective, and he and his below-average bat are just not worth the $96.5 million he’s owed over the next five years. (Yes, the defense is great, but the league doesn’t value 2B defense much; that’s become an offense-first position.)

The fact that the Guardians turned around and got reasonable value for Horwitz in Ortiz, a pitcher with five years of control with moldable talent, validates our model's assessment of the Gimenez deal here (as do some of the comments from the front office post-trade, which indicated they were delighted to find a taker for Gimenez’s contract). The cherry on top for Cleveland was the subsequent Myles Straw trade, in which Toronto took another bad contract off their hands. Clearly they’re taking advantage of an arbitrage opportunity here with a frequent partner. It suggests either that the Blue Jays’ front office has some work to do in their player valuation models, or is comfortable consistently overpaying in a quest to land productive players.

 

All in all…

So: it was a strong offseason for us, and a reasonable offseason for the market as a whole. There was one major outlier; a couple of explainable misses; and a whole bunch of fair deals throughout the winter months. Perhaps not the most intriguing offseason of trades, but a productive one all around.

For a blow-by-blow look at each trade, please refer to our Offseason Trade Roundup, compiled as always by Associate Editor Joshua Iversen.