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Free to Be... Bonds and El Tiante
2005-04-09 22:24
by Mike Carminati
Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.
—Abraham "Nunez" Lincoln

You call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling thought and not that you have escaped a yoke. Are you such a one as was permitted to escape a yoke? There are some who threw away their ultimate worth when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! But your eyes should announce to me brightly: free for what?
—Friedrich "Fat Freddie" Nietzsche

Free agency, we are told, was engendered by Curt Flood's staunchly refusing to report to the Phils, then seen as an unfriendly team towards African-American players, after an October 7, 1969 trade with the Cards. Flood's refusal led to the end of reserve-clause slavery, and eventually to Jay Bell's ludicrous contract with the Diamondbacks in their inaugural year.

Of course, there were free agents before Flood. They just couldn't declare themselves free on their own. They had to get the team to let them go, which wasn't always the best career move. In the primordial history of the game, players would sign one-year contracts and "revolve" to another at the end of the year. Or he would just "jump" one contract for another. As the reserve clause took hold and rival leagues signed agreements to honor each other's contracts, jumping became less of an issue. However, it would crop up every so often when a new rival league would appear, and one time—the Players' National League in 1890—the players actually organized the league themselves.

Anyway, Retrosheet has data on free agents and contract jumpers going back to the launching of the American League as a major league. Given the new tools that Studesand I developed for studying transactions, we can take a look at the best free agents of all time. So without further ado…

First, we'll look at the greatest free agent signings based upon performance with the new team. This is based on the Win Shares Above Baseline (WSAB) each player had with the new team. Also listed are the players' Win Shares with the new team and his previous career Win Shares and WSAB:

NameSeasonTeamTeam WSTeam WSABPrev Career WSPrev Career WSAB
Barry Bonds1993SFN463343201131
Greg Maddux1993ATL24618010169
Craig Biggio1996HOU22513517099
Randy Johnson1999ARI13810214888
Luis Tiant1971BOS1389610059
Larry Walker1995COL1879210353
Dave Winfield1981NYA1739117299
Bobby Grich1977CAL1718414793
Bernie Williams1999NYA1428215073
Paul Molitor1988MIL1318118294
John Hiller1972DET113743312
Alex Rodriguez2001TEX1037314896
Rickey Henderson1990OAK10669299189
Manny Ramirez2001BOS1096916797
Rafael Palmeiro1999TEX11666255137
Reggie Jackson1977NYA11464257165
Rich Gossage1978NYA94646643
Jamie Moyer1997SEA110636321
Darrell Evans1979SFN1126216686
Roberto Alomar1999CLE9262253143
Cecil Fielder1990DET12761120
Rafael Palmeiro1994BAL1106014577

Bonds is the best and he can only add to that. You probably noticed that there are a couple of players on the list from the before the dissolution of the reserve clause. Also, most of these players had substantial career before they became free agents except for Cecil Fielder, who, of course, took a circuitous loop through Japan. Finally, you'll note that Biggio and Williams are the only ones on the list who re-signed with their previous teams.

The list wouldn't be complete of we overlooked the contract jumpers of the past:

NameSeasonTeamTeam WSTeam WSABPrev Career WSPrev Career WSAB
Sam Crawford1903DET3832436329
Cy Young1901BOS247199353287
Rube Waddell1902PHA1651294122
Joe McGinnity1902NYG1651269274
Doc White1903CHA1921264331
Fielder Jones1901CHA2031238737
Jack Chesbro1903NYA1411056844
Danny Murphy1902PHA20710020
Topsy Hartsel1902PHA189993417
Bill Donovan1903DET154984833
Bobby Wallace1902SLA2039314173
Roger Bresnahan1902NYG1488490
Bill Bradley1901CLE16782216
Jimmy Collins1901BOS1347712262
Cy Seymour1902CIN112728354
Bill Dineen1902BOS100697652
Jimmy Williams1901BLA138684727
George Davis1904CHA11666282152
Chick Stahl1901BOS125658646
Tully Sparks1903PHI103632810

You may note that there are almost as many jumpers with the necessary 60 WSAB for their new teams in the three years of the NL-AL wars as there were free agents with the same amount over the last forty years of free agents.

Here's quick rundown by season of all free agents and jumpers. You'll note that there is a second wave of jumping during the major-league war with the Federal League 191-15. Also note how the number of free agents has been climbing especially in the last decade. (Retrosheet only has transaction data through 2002):

SeasonType#Post Career WS _Post WS/player WSAB Post Career Post WSAB/player
1901J 544207 78 207238
1902J 715882 83 281040
1903J 312016 65 100833
1904J 3175 58 9632
1914J 833001 36 132116
1915J 24683 28 24810
1916J 591909 32 68712
1940F 125 25 55
1946F 13 3 00
1948F 142 42 1919
1950F 11 1 00
1951F 641 7 142
1952F 933 4 00
1953F 435 9 103
1954F 12 2 00
1955F 928 3 101
1956F 12143 12 363
1957F 1053 5 121
1958F 625 4 41
1959F 10122 12 131
1960F 18121 7 473
1961F 17137 8 121
1962F 18273 15 965
1963F 1694 6 111
1964F 17190 11 523
1965F 2173 3 100
1966F 1433 2 20
1967F 1789 5 332
1968F 14105 8 60
1969F 19132 7 171
1970F 22190 9 613
1971F 25627 25 30012
1972F 26179 7 833
1973F 34205 6 331
1974F 25145 6 161
1975F 43342 8 1203
1976F 43240 6 281
1977F 691996 29 73311
1978F 1051676 16 4684
1979F 781279 16 4356
1980F 811135 14 2493
1981F 1071444 13 4254
1982F 1021183 12 3203
1983F 1141189 10 2562
1984F 1261356 11 2802
1985F 1561722 11 4643
1986F 1821737 10 4522
1987F 2452609 11 7353
1988F 2383787 16 11955
1989F 2102079 10 4662
1990F 2192568 12 7163
1991F 2883996 14 9753
1992F 3154037 13 9543
1993F 3936357 16 19595
1994F 3654536 12 10113
1995F 3985276 13 13984
1996F 3986504 16 19605
1997F 3834999 13 12943
1998F 4324448 10 9912
1999F 4634720 10 12033
2000F 4403220 7 6261
2001F 4263029 7 8142
2002F 3302559 8 6472
2003F 21 1 00

Next, we'll try to quantify the value of the free agent by joining the trade data with Doug Pappas's salary data.

Other entries in the Trade Series:

Mike: I'll Take Manhattan: Baseball's Most Lopsided Trades: Parts I, I (revised), II

A Quick One (Happy Mike)

Lee Even Stevens: Parts I, II—The Sexy Version

Cain and A-Rod—A Bling-Bling Rivalry: Parts I, II

Kansas City Blues: Parts I, II

Baseball's Most Lopsided Trades—The Revenge of Glenn Davis

Awe-Phil?: Parts I, II, III

Gone With the Draft

Organizational Skills, Part I, II

The Best of Drafts, The Worst of Drafts

Studes: The Best and Worst Teams of the Trade

Smoltz for Alexander

The Biggest Deals of All Time

Sources:

Sean Lahman's Baseball Database

Retrosheet's Transaction Data

Comments
2005-04-11 10:34:00
1.   mattapp
I probably should've asked you this farther back in the series, but why is it you have Nap Lajoie listed as a transaction and not as a contract jump?
2005-04-11 10:56:25
2.   Mike Carminati
Because his eventual team was the Indians (or rather the Naps). He didn't score high enough in his stint with the A's. This study is just looking at what the player did for his new team. It doesn't take into account orchestrated moves by the league president to keep the player's services by shifting him to another club. It hardly happens today.
2005-04-12 08:08:29
3.   Chris
It's notable that the top two guys on the list rejected Yankee dollars at the same time, during NY's brief Era of Despair, when NY was a must-to-avoid for the discerning free agent.

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