On The Win Curve and The Efficacy of Waiting Out the Market

The Twins have finally made some moves, but studies suggest reduced prices don’t necessarily equal good value

After mostly sitting out this offseason (no offense intended, Mickey Gasper), the last few weeks have represented a certifiable bonanza of free-agent acquisitions for the Twins. They have made not just one or two, but THREE free agent signings, outlaying nearly $ 10 million for players most of us had heard of previously.

Two of those — Byron Buxton’s insurance policy named Harrison Bader and old friend reliever Danny Coulombe — got guaranteed deals and roster spots, while the third (first baseman Ty France) appears to be entering Spring Training as the leader in the battle for first base reps.

While these additions are not the kind of forays into free agency that draw lots of attention and move the needle for most fans, they are eminently reasonable deals at reasonable price points that address needs on the Twins roster.

They also give me a reason to write about a couple of topics that I’ve been wanting to cover. Today, let’s look at the Twins’ recent flurry of activity through the concept of the win curve and some recently published analyses about the efficacy of waiting out free agency to get more favorable prices.

The Win Curve

The concept of the win curve is probably intuitive but may offend the purists.

Not all wins are equal.

Take the 2024 White Sox, who finished an MLB-worst 41-121, for example. Almost no additional value would have been obtained if they had gone 42-120 instead. They’d still have been far from playoff contention with that extra win. That extra win would do next to nothing in improving their standing with their fans or in convincing more of those fans to part with their money to come to the ballpark or spend on team merchandise.

That’s true on the opposite side of the spectrum, too. The World Series champion Dodgers got little marginal benefit by winning 98 games instead of 97. If they had won only 97, they’d still have been the top seed in the National League by a couple of games and they’d already reached a high level of fan interest.

This idea was put into the mainstream about 20 years ago by research from Nate Silver, Vince Gennaro, Phil Birnbaum, and others who estimated and illustrated the marginal value of each additional team win:

Source: The Hardball Times, Max Gruber 2017, LINK

What they found was that the wins that bump a team’s total from the lower-80s up toward 90 are more valuable than those on either tail of the curve. That makes sense because those are the wins that make the most difference in the team’s chances of qualifying for the playoffs and the competitive and financial benefits that come from being in the mix of doing so.

This foundational concept can then be applied to roster-building decisions. If you’re a team that is projected to be on either end of this distribution, you might not be very incentivized to make roster additions.

However, if you’re a team that projects to be in the middle part of that curve, with 80 to 85 wins and expectations of a shot at the playoffs, you should be more incentivized to add to your roster. You’d want to try to push your potential win total higher and strengthen your chances of actually reaching them.

Five teams made the postseason with win totals in the 80s last season, with the fewest being the 86 wins of the Tigers and Royals. Four teams pulled that off the previous season, with the fewest being the 84 wins by the Marlins and Diamondbacks.

Those Diamondbacks, you might recall, went on to the World Series, becoming just the most recent example of how MLB’s playoff format gives underdogs more of a fighting chance than other sports. In baseball, it’s a viable strategy to aim to get into the tournament and see what happens.

Let’s bring this back to the 2025 Twins.

FanGraphs’ pre-season projections, depending on the method you like, have them pegged as an 83 to 85-win team with roughly a coin-flip’s chances of making the playoffs. Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA projections are slightly more optimistic with 86 wins.

It’s important to remember that these totals are median estimates with fairly large error bars (one standard deviation is ± 6 or so wins). But, the point is that the 2025 Twins are expected to be right smack in the part of the win curve where it pays the most to try to add potential wins.

If you peek again at the curve above, you’ll also see that the marginal value of those wins from 85 to 90 is a little more than $6M each. That chart is from 2017, so we can assume that inflation has increased that number in the last 8 years, perhaps closer to $8 or $9 million.

It’s interesting to note then that Bader and Coulombe are projected to produce a bit more than 1 win above replacement together and the Twins will be paying them a combined $9.25M. Their cost is well in line with the marginal benefit they are expected to provide.

The Twins beat reporters shared last week that soon-to-be Team President Derek Falvey and GM Jeremy Zoll were recently “green-lighted” by ownership to add to the club’s roster and payroll.

While we won’t know how Falvey and Zoll pitched extra salary room to Joe Pohlad, it is very possible that the proposal included the roster’s expected location on the win curve and the marginal value of those next few wins.

It also might have had something to do with the second topic I wanted to get into.

Does it Pay to be Patient?

Since Falvey has been in charge of the Twins’ baseball operations, the team hasn’t often played heavily in free agency, but when they have, they’ve had a habit of being patient and not making deals until late in the offseason.

As a strategy, waiting out the market has been thought to be to the team’s advantage. It’s logical that as available roster spots across the league start to dwindle late in the offseason, the prices for free agents will come down.

Max Rieper of our sister site Royals Review showed this trend with a study back in 2018 and FanGraphs’ Ben Clemens recently put a new spin on it. In both studies, the data clearly show that free agents who signed later in the offseason earned contracts with smaller salaries than they were projected to receive before the offseason began.

They offer a clear argument that it pays for teams to wait out the market. The data shows they’ll get less expensive deals, which is an attractive proposition to team owners and maybe one that influenced the Twins’ ownership to open up their checkbook recently.

Photo by Brace Hemmelgarn/Minnesota Twins/Getty Images

But, cost is only part of the value equation. Another important piece is the production the players provide for that cost. When that is factored in, it’s much less clear that it pays to wait.

Clemens recently followed up with another piece looking at how the free agents who signed late in the winter have performed and found that they tend to under-deliver. They tend to produce less WAR than expected and give less performance per dollar than the free agents who sign earlier. One of the summary conclusions Clemens reached was this:

The free agents who sign last might sign smaller-than-expected deals, but their delivery of worse-than-expected performance has overwhelmed the savings in recent years. If you’re a team that wants to maximize its free agency dollars at all costs, waiting until the end of the market to offer deals to the players no one else has yet signed doesn’t appear to be the solution.

That takeaway and description sure seem applicable to the Twins.

Clemens is careful to note that these takeaways are aggregate trends, not guarantees for individuals. Bader, Coulombe, and France signing late in the winter does not mean they’ll underperform this year or are ill-advised moves.

Those findings are consistent with what Minnesota has reaped from their late offseason additions under Falvey. Greggory Masterson at Twins Daily recently recapped those moves and showed they’ve been a decidedly mixed bag. For the successes of Nelson Cruz, Marwin González, and Carlos Santana, there are the flameouts of Logan Morrison, Lance Lynn, and Matt Shoemaker.

The Twins were right to add to this roster and I’m glad they did. These players fit this roster well and seemingly address risks (especially Bader) that, if left unaddressed, could make it difficult for the Twins to compete for the playoffs this season.

However, consistently waiting out the winter for prices to drop ignores the very real, but often hidden or overlooked, opportunity costs that come from doing so.

Yes, the Twins might be able to suppress free-agent sticker prices with that approach, but it’s far from clear that they’re getting better value.

In that light, I can’t help but think about a famous quote from investor Warren Buffett: “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”

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John writes for Twinkie Town, Twins Daily, and Pitcher List with an emphasis on analysis. He is a lifelong Twins fan and former college pitcher.