The best ability, the saying goes, is availability. That’s certainly true in baseball, where the MLB player’s value is directly related to the time he spends on the field.
Case studies establishing the importance of availability are so common they hardly need to be mentioned. But just for the record:
- Fernando Tatis Jr. never took the field in 2022. His Win Probability Added, obviously, was zero.
- Jacob deGrom logged just 64 innings in 11 starts. For his Mets, that worked out to a 0.8 WPA.
- Bryce Harper missed 63 games with an injury. His 2.2 WPA was less than half his total from one season previously.
- Kris Bryant, a former MVP signed by Colorado for seven seasons at $184 million, missed 120 games and valued out at -0.7 WPA in 2022.
- Mike Trout had his playing time limited by injuries for the second consecutive season. Since finishing fifth in MVP voting in 2020, Trout has generated just 5.6 total WPA for the Angels. That was his annual average between 2012 and 2017.
Availability is one of the most important yet least talked-about aspects of talent assessment. Which MLB players can a team count on to take the field year-after-year?
This is a fresh look at player value reassessed through the prism of availability. For each position, players are assessed based on two common SABRmetric factors: WAR and OPS+. But here’s the catch: Players are only assessed if they made a minimum of 500 plate appearances in each of the last two seasons: That’s the availability part.
A total of 85 position players met that availability criteria in both 2021 and 2022. The player who set the standard for availability with a total of 1,448 plate appearances was Marcus Semien.
That 1,448 figure gives us our third ranking criteria: percentage of plate appearances against the 1,448 standard.
Position-by-position, here are the game’s most valuable players when availability is factored in.