What if transactions were not allowed in Major League Baseball?
For one thing, it would make for a boring baseball offseason. The winter leagues in Latin America are great and keep our anticipation for spring training somewhat at bay, but it's the trades and free agent signings that serve as our MLB touchstones until Opening Day.
Still, let's try to imagine a more severe landscape -- an even more extreme version of the reserve clause era -- in which once an organization acquires a player, both he and the team are stuck. No trades. No free agency. Together forever, or at least until the player retires.
This exercise gives us an idea of which organizations have done the best job of identifying talent. The outlook changes with each passing year, as players age out and retire, and the organizations ebb and flow. It's a freeze-frame from a movie full of jump cuts.
It works like this: Using a database on player logistical data from The Baseball Cube, I've assigned each player on my 2025 list to the organization that first signed him. The player has to sign, so drafting him only to see him head to a college program doesn't count.
Once those player assignments were completed, I generated depth charts and merged those with the 2025 player forecasts. A revised season baseline was generated for each club and used to run 10,000 simulations of the coming season.
The result is a response to our what-if: What would the majors look like if players stayed with the team they originally signed with for their entire careers?
The what-if projection is accompanied by what each team's set of core regulars might look like, though more players than what's listed impact the numbers. The projection is also compared to each team's current actual win forecast, which suggests the cumulative impact transactions have had on each club's 2025 outlook.
Let's see how our what-if rosters stack up.