Reliever contracts make sense

Most free agent contracts are relatively easy to predict. Calculate the going rate for a single win, multiply it by the player’s expected wins above replacement over the life of the deal, and the result will be quite close to the actual contract. This generally applies to every type of player except one: the lowly relief pitcher.

The Mets gave Lucas Weaver $22 million for two years. The Tigers gave Kenley Jansen $11 million for his age-38 season. The Reds gave Emilio Pagan two years and $20 million, with the second year a player option. Run all reliever contracts signed this offseason through a dollars-per-win calculation, and they will almost uniformly look like terrible deals.

The sport seems smarter than ever, and yet teams continue to spend piles of guaranteed money on bullpen arms that almost never rank in the top 2 in WAR. What is their problem? Well, maybe teams have collectively decided to behave irrationally in a specific market, but I don’t think that’s it. I think teams behave as rationally as any other in the reliever market, but they just happen to use a different metric for evaluating reliever deals. The relevant metric, I think, is not dollars per win, but something like the added probability of championships.

In the 2025-2026 offseason, I calculated that teams paid about $8 million per expected win for starting pitchers and position players. Here I’ll note that for multi-year deals I’ve ignored years beyond 2026, simply calculating next season’s dollars per win. Other calculations that take into account the performance decline of players on multi-year deals have come up higher, but the point is to establish an apples-to-apples baseline with relievers. I also used the AAVs in our Free Agent tracker, which are adjusted for deferrals. Finally, my dataset for both relievers and non-relievers includes all deals signed as of January 10th – my apologies to Pierce Johnson.

Even for non-relievers, dollars per win poses all kinds of problems as an evaluation framework. As many baseball analysts have noted over the years, there are good reasons to believe that wins should be valued in a non-linear fashion. A player projected at two wins might be worth as much as $16 million for a year of work, but a player projected at four wins is probably worth a little over $32 million, while a player projected at a single win is probably worth a little less than $8 million.

The reason is the scarcity of both players and roster spots. Four-win players are nearly impossible to find on waivers or hanging around in Triple-A; this is less true for players who can produce 1-2 WAR. On Bluesky last weekJonathan Judge of Baseball prospectus also argued that those paid through free choice are a small and specific portion of the player pool, and thus dollars per win have limited applicability.

Even with these caveats, a linear application of dollars per win tends to explain the contracts of position players and starting pitchers with a high degree of accuracy. Below is a look at all 2026 hitters and starting pitchers who signed contracts with an average annual value (AAV) of at least $2.5 million. The x-axis shows their expected WAR per ZiPS; the y-axis is their AAV. The blue line is an AAV of $8 million. As the plot shows, multiplying the expected war in 2026 by $8 million gets you pretty close to almost any signed contract:

This is not the case with midwives. The chart below shows all reliever contracts signed since 2021, with the same $2.5 million AAV cap. Almost every deal tops $8 million per win. The average reliever contract in the 2020s exceeded $15 million per expected win, nearly double the going rate for position players and starting pitchers:

None of these insights are particularly new. In 2011, Jack Moore wrote a piece for this site titled “Can WPA Explain How Teams Buy Relievers?” As Jack wrote, “simply declaring that ‘teams overpay for relievers’ ad nauseam does little to advance our understanding of how the game actually works,” and suggested that a win probability framework could better accommodate the vagaries of the market.

In 2018, Russell Carleton delved deeper into this theme in his story titled “Why First Responders Get Paid.” Russell pointed out that “teams don’t get context-neutral wins,” which is more or less what WAR measures. In other words, the win that takes a team from 88 to 89 wins is much more valuable than the win that takes them from 78 to 79. Relievers, Russell says, have the ability to “determine the games that can make or break a season.”

I’m going to take Russell’s idea one step further. Competitive teams aren’t just willing to pay high prices for high-leverage relievers because they can be the difference between playoffs and no playoffs. They pay for the play-off innings himself. In other words, the Dodgers didn’t pay Edwin Diaz $69 million just to deliver a 2.25 FIP over 65 regular season innings. He carried an AAV of $23 million, because when they find themselves in the 10th inning of World Series Game 7 again, they will have Díaz instead of a starting pitcher working on zero days’ rest. (Jarrett Seidler suggested something similar last month, which got me thinking about this topic in general.)

Proving that teams pay relievers by cWPA rather than WAR presents a whole host of complications, not the least of which is the general public’s tendency to project only regular-season stats. Unfortunately, there isn’t really a way around that; a projection cannot assume a player will compete in the 2026 postseason, let alone two, five or thirteen years into the future. Most of the time this is fine, and you wouldn’t necessarily expect a player to be significantly more important in the regular season than in the postseason, and so it all makes about enough sense.

But all this backfires for relievers. WAR, even though leverage is adjusted for relievers, cannot fully explain the prices teams pay for bullpen weapons. It’s not that they don’t care how someone performs in April or July; that can make a major contribution to the question of whether you can still play in October. But they also pay for a condition: if we make the play-offs, this player has disproportionate value. Considering that something like cWPA might get a little closer to matching the way they pay for other types of players.

Since there’s no easy way to create cWPA projections for relievers, I’ve come up with a roundabout way to account for this trend. Using the same dataset of reliever contracts from the 2020s, I first created a simple linear regression model predicting reliever contracts using only projected WAR. That model had an r-squared of 0.3; in other words, it predicted 30% of the variation in reliever contracts during this decade.

I then added the preseason playoff odds for the relievers’ signing team to the model. (For the 2026 playoff odds, I created a proxy based on Steamer projections; they’re not perfect, but I think they’re close enough. I put them in a Google Spreadsheet if you want to join them.) It wasn’t a huge jump, but the addition of playoff odds improved the model predictions significantly. The r-squared jumped to 0.37; especially the larger contracts came much closer to the predictive line:

And this isn’t just a case of better teams spending more money. I performed the same exercise with the starting pitcher and position player data set; Adding the playoff odds increased the r-squared from 0.8 to 0.81. You could also argue that this model merely reflects the fact that only playoff contenders will pay full market price for relief pitchers. But I don’t think that’s entirely correct either. As playoff odds – and therefore World Series odds – increase, teams will spend marginally more on each reliever, all else remaining constant. To me, this suggests a specific premium for relievers, applied to their expected probability of winning a championship, added.

The dominant contract framework has always been a bit bizarre in a way. We tend to think of teams paying players based on a projection of their regular season performance, but a team’s ultimate goal is to win in the playoffs. Even the nerdiest clubs aren’t just trying to maximize their regular-season winning percentage; they want to win the whole thing, even if the final goal at some level is more of a random achievement.

In general, these objectives overlap. Signing a shortstop doesn’t magically make him more important when the playoffs start. But that does not apply to care providers. A single playoff inning pitched by a reliever can significantly change a team’s chances of winning or losing a World Series, and the postseason schedule allows the same reliever to appear in virtually every game. (Hello, Louis Varland.) Relievers, especially the best of the best, increase in value when the playoffs start, and teams pay those players accordingly. If you look at the dollars per profit, it may not work out; sub in cWPA, and the math may well start with math.