Does Oakland Really Have More Roster Turnover Than Other Teams?

Are busy signing good free agents the A’s are. busy losing them and keeping less than desireables. There is a reason in the past 6 years why the A’s have only made the playoffs 1 time. If your chart makes you feel better great for you

These numbers suggest that average team tenure is more closely related to wins than team payroll… or at least it was in 2010. I wonder what these numbers would look like taken over a larger range of years?

Unlike some others, I DO find this to be very interesting, because it is a common complaint, especially about small market clubs. So it is interesting to see it all down in a chart. I’d be curious when factoring in things like service time what sort of difference it would make. I wonder if longevity is artificially elongated for teams with young rosters because of your methodology, i.e. guys who are shuttled back and forth to Triple-A have four years in the majors as per your chart when in reality they have like 80 games between them.

I guess its easy to forget about how long Chavez has been on the team, since he might as well not have been there the last 6 years or so. I wonder if there’s a similar correlation between players above 5 WAR or so and how long they remain tenured to the team.

A Padres teammate once offered Rickey Henderson a seat anywhere on the team bus, saying that Henderson had tenure. Henderson supposedly replied, “Ten years? What are you talking about? Rickey got 16, 17 years.”

There are so many awesome quotes from Rickey, one of the greatest to ever play the game in my opinion and I am so glad that I got to see him play in person for our team!

Back to the post, thanks Dan, this was some very interesting information and an awesome read. If you look at the teams above the A’s in tenure it is pretty much, with the exception of the Cubs, Indians and maybe the Blue Jays, all of the teams that seem to be contenders year in and year out.

We rely on cost controlled and arbitration eligible players which means we are likely to keep players for 4-6 years.

I think the issue with the fans is that we let our stars go elsewhere when they get expensive. This is usually after 5 years or so in a trade or 6 if they just walk.

With the casual fan, they won’t really get to like a player for a few years so to them it seems like a constant chrun when really the player has been around for many years.

Contrast this with Boston and New York, teams that are constantly sending away young talent for short-term upgrades while also signing aging vets. They keep their stars and bring in more stars at the cost of the young cost-controlled players.

It looks like they are committing to their players while we are not, but in reality that is just for the cream of the crop and across the entire roster our players stick around longer than theirs on average.

I was under the imrpesion the A’s had much more fluid rosters over the last decade, so I’m very interested to see they’re right in the middle. The supplemental text information was really neat, too. Thanks for putting this together.

Although I don’t consider myself merely a “casual” fan… I am ignorant in many ways, and I always assumed that the A’s had way more turnover than other teams. This graph makes me feel better.

Most people aren’t comfortable only “rooting for laundry”, especially when it feels like most of the players have only been around for a couple of years at the most.*

The average tenure in Oakland is slightly over 3 years. I consider 3 years to be equivalent to “a couple of years.”

Both the highest and lowest correlations pertain to payroll. According to the chart, a high payroll only somewhat increases a team’s chance of winning, but greatly increases it’s attendance. Interesting since the A’s, in recent history, have earned more wins than their other factors would imply. It’s almost like this low payroll type of winning alienates casual fans (attendance), but makes the hardcore fans (wins) happy.
Something to think about I guess.

…your mention of variance makes me wonder if median might be a more meaningful stat than mean/average. for example, in the case of the a’s, you state that team is not just a bunch of new guys because we had 3 old guys (chavy, ellis, duke). i suspect those old guys may be skewing the average and that based on median, which is less influenced by extremes, we may not be as middle of the pack as your graph suggests. anyway, just a thought.

And it is a start, but I think we need to look beyond 2010 and, as RS said above, take into account WAR. Nobody (outside of AN) complains about the loss of Hiram Bocachica and Adam Melhouse. They complain about continually losing core players like the Big 3, Giambi, Tejada, etc.. In addition, roster turnover needs to be separated into losses and gains. Yankee fans clamor for additions every offseason. So turnover by addition of great players is a good thing.

thanks for the visualization, and enlightening me. I, too, believed the A’s were in the bottom third of teams as far as roster turnover went. This sheds some light on overall league tendencies, and it puts our fan percieved “migration of players” into perspective. Thanks for the good work.

who has been our franchise player these past several years, don’t say chavez

not retaining homegrown stars when they hit their prime, and not that overall tenure is too low.

…and they love hatin on the A’s, and this is one of the reasons why. It really is nice to see, like so many rampant fallacies that surround this club, that they are easily so debunked.

That being said, cant wait to hear what other flat out BS I get to read about my team next cuz…

You ask any casual fan why they can’t get into the A’s and I’d imagine “They can’t keep their players.” is high, if not #1 on that list. Then you see this chart and it’s right down the middle, the A’s are almost the statistical mean cutting right down the center of the 30 teams.

That said, the casual fan analysis still holds some effective weight because of the abstract “fan identification” factor, which can’t really be quantified (yet)… people who dig on sports tend to dig on them precisely for this factor, the personalities and how long they stick with your team so you can build an affinity and a commitment to them. I think what’s happened over these last years is that the A’s have failed a bit in providing an antidote to that perception — that no one stays. One reason for this is possibly the lack of perceived “star power,” the “superhuman” Pujols or the outsize Big Papi-type personality that provides the casual fan mind with the heroic, constantly magnetic nucleus around which his/her perceptions of the other personnel can orbit and feel identified with.

It’s posts like this that inspire visions of the territories where the left and the right brains, if you will, can come together and I really enjoyed this post… thank you Dan.

The more the A’s stay the same?

If you don’t count service time or anything like that, wouldn’t September callups skew the numbers a bit?

Couldn’t the casual fan’s perception be due to the fact that it is not the amount of players that reflect roster turnover but the type and quality of player that leaves the organization? Whether it be by trade or by free agency, I think the perception is correct that the A’s lose quality players. Off the top of my head I can think of two consecutive MVPs and several No. 1 starters. I suppose that if the return were better for these players was better then the causal fans’ perception would fade. The reality is that the return has been less than par. There might have been valid economic reasons at the time for the turnover. I don’t dispute this. However, public perception doesn’t reflect this. Maybe this is due to public relations folly or just that the A’s fans are unforgiving. I don’t know.