One popular mainstream media meme is that this year’s is a weak free agent class. But one popular independent media meme* is assuming that everything the mainstream media agrees upon is nonsense.
Anyway, in an effort to figure it out, I added up the 2009 Fangraphs.com WARs of the top 20 players on MLB Trade Rumors’ top-50 free agents list (who has time to do all 50?) and the 2008 WARs of the top 20 players on last year’s list.
I skipped Aroldis Chapman, since he has no Major League data yet, and so added the 21st player — Adam LaRoche — this year. Similarly, I skipped Mike Mussina, who retired, and Ben Sheets, who was injured, from last year’s set, adding Orlando Cabrera and Jamie Moyer.
For a variety of reasons, it’s an imperfect way of calculating the depth of a free-agent class. I only measured the top 20 guys in each year and I only used one year of data.
Anyway, last year’s top 20 free agents totaled 72.1 WAR, and this year’s totaled 65.1 WAR.
So yeah, last year’s class was stronger. Not by a ton, but probably by a significant margin.
Of course, last year’s class was a lot better at the top. It had three players — CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, and Manny Ramirez — with 6.0 or greater WARs, while the current class can boast only one: Chone Figgins. But last year’s list had five players with 2.0 or lesser WARs, while this year’s has only three.
That said, this year’s list has two players with WARs below 1.0: Vlad Guerrero and Jose Valverde. Last year’s didn’t have any.
Anyway, that’s all just an exercise. Tim Dierkes at MLB Trade Rumors doesn’t rank his free agents by the prior season’s WAR — nor should he — so mine is a flawed study. Obviously one season’s worth of WAR is not a perfect measure of a free-agent’s value.
But I wonder if this is really a one-year blip in the free-agent market or indicative of a larger trend. Recently, we’ve seen lots of teams — including small-market ones — locking up their best players to long-term extensions before they hit arbitration, as the Mets did with Jose Reyes and David Wright.
The Rays have options on Evan Longoria’s contract that could keep him under team control until 2016, so, even though he made the Majors at a young age, he might not hit free agency until he’s 31.
There are also cases like Johan Santana’s, wherein a player with a no-trade clause approaching free agency agrees to waive that right to sign an extension with a club that trades for him. The same thing could happen with Roy Halladay this offseason.
Those are very, very isolated examples, but if the trends continue, I have to imagine we’ll see fewer and fewer excellent players hit free agency in the midst of their primes, as Sabathia, Teixeira and Matt Holliday have.
The 2011 free-agent class could be stronger than this year’s, but there’s reason to believe many of the top players on this list will sign extensions with their current clubs before the 2010 season is out.
*- As Sam points out below, this is likely an inappropriate use of the term “meme.”
Tedquarters 
I don’t think that’s what meme means.
Probably not for the second use. But I think “meme” is a perfect word to describe how ideas reproduce themselves in mainstream sports journalism.
From the wiki: Dawkins’s memes refer to any cultural entity which an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesised that people could view many cultural entities as capable of such replication, generally through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient (although not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour. Memes do not always replicate perfectly, and might indeed become refined, combined or otherwise modified with other ideas, resulting in new memes, which may themselves prove more, or less, efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for a hypothesis of cultural evolution, analogous to the theory of biological evolution based on genes.
Has misuse of the word meme become its own meme? Can life imitate art that perfectly?
This trend stresses how important it is to properly scout and draft talent and to develop it. This is why I’ve been saying that our best bet for the long run is to do whatever it takes to get the Marlins scouting staff and the Phoenix Suns trainers to NYC.
I was not aware, and certainly would not have guessed, that Chone Figgins has the highest WAR of this year’s free agent class. Let’s hope he finds a new home somewhere other than Philly.