What Can Peter, Paul and Mary Teach Us About Roster Construction?

We have all kinds of fantastic stats for tracking player performance, metrics that are descriptive, predictive and somewhere in between. Today, I would like to introduce a descriptive stat for the folks on the team who do not wear spikes. Think of this as an attempt to measure the performance of management by trying to quantify the work of the front office and coaching staff using a folky metaphor.

Oh, Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist, in a land called Honah Lee

Baseball is a game for kids. The best of the best get to frolic in the autumn mist in a Honah Lee called the World Series. Baseball has many reasons to favor youth, some structural to the game as a business and others more existential, like Peter, Paul and Mary sing about.

Team control and the aging process conspire to make young, developing players the most valuable to the ballclub. Their income constraints mean that youngsters can rack up surplus value if they hit their ceiling, and are an inexpensive sunk cost at worst. The best baseball exists in the sweet spot between the physicality of youth and the skill earned through repetition. Not exactly revolutionary, but my stat builds from the logic that you want to play guys who can either contribute to wins this season or might develop into contributors in the future. Additionally, I am assuming that playing time at the major league level is far better for evaluation and development than the upper minors due to the quality of competition as well as the availability of data, scouting tools and other resources, though obviously that might vary depending on the org and the player. Here is where Peter, Paul and Mary, darlings of the Greenwich folk scene of the 1960s, come into play.

A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys

The trio’s classic tune provides both the metaphor and the title for the stat: Puffs. The dragon enjoys adventures with Peter Piper until the boy grows up and ceases to return for adventurous romps. Then, Puff sulks into the cave, instead of… oh, I don’t know… getting back out there and finding another fun-loving youngster to fly around with.

Puffs are an accounting of the plate appearances given to players in their age-30 or older season with a wRC+ below 100 and negative FanGraphs defensive WAR. Every team has 6,000 or so plate appearances to fill each season (last year, the Diamondbacks led the league with 6,284, while the White Sox finished last with 5,869). Plate appearances live forever, but not so little boys, as the song goes.

Before we look at how the 2025 season projects in terms of Puffs, here are the 2021-24 Puffs by team:

The Rays and Twins separated themselves, with the Guardians and Cardinals rounding out the top four. These are teams that used their opportunities efficiently by my definition. Minnesota and St. Louis generally rank near the middle of the pack in salary, while Tampa Bay and Cleveland are often near the bottom. Perhaps a ruthless conservation of plate appearances comes from frugality.

These teams also resisted the siren’s song of the sunk cost fallacy. No player who registered even a single Puff on these clubs returned the following year (excluding pitchers, whose shadows no longer darken the batter’s box anyways). The Cardinals gave Matt Carpenter this treatment twice, once after 249 Puffs in 2021 and again after 157 in 2024. This statistic speaks to outcomes and treats processes as a black box, but there has to be some similarities in thinking to get such a behavioral-economics-pleasing result.

The other side of the table highlights the Angels, Rockies, Athletics and Nationals for accruing the most Puffs. All four employed a hitter who collected Puffs in back-to-back seasons for the club, with Charlie Blackmon and Anthony Rendon topping the list as three-timers. In those seasons, they took 1,658 and 670 plate appearances, respectively, that could have gone to someone else. Every Puff bears witness to a tragedy, often more than one.

Rendon’s Puffs came in the 2021, 2023 and 2024 seasons, all of which were marred by injury. Rendon was thus unable to perform at the level he demonstrated he could during his four consecutive top-11 MVP seasons from 2017-20. These danged fallible bodies! Additional tragedies come from guys who performed in Triple-A but might not have received enough leash in The Show to work through their rough patches. Trey Cabbage was a 30/30 guy in Triple-A for the Angels in 2023 (during 474 plate appearances in the admittedly hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League), while the big team racked up over 700 Puffs by outfielders. He then struggled in 56 big league plate appearances that season and was DFA’d. Looking at the world through the lens of Puffs has made me wonder how much more a lack of opportunity, as opposed to true talent, creates “Quad-A” players.

I am sure you can think of examples from the recent past in which Puffs played a role on your favorite team. Maybe you have a favorite prospect who never seems to get consistent run because of a Puffs player. Maybe you think that that veteran has a one last gasp of greatness in him, and that Puffs are dumb. If Puffs are an indicator species, I’m curious to get feedback on the ways this thinking applies to each of the 30 ecosystems.

And with that, let’s take a look at your 2025 projected Puffs, according to the FanGraphs Depth Charts as of March 25:

The Padres went from being the fifth best at avoiding Puffs from 2021-24 to third worst in the 2025 projections. Perhaps this is a sign of a closing competitive window. A team that splurged prospect capital in an attempt to challenge the Dodgers in the division now projects to get 714 Puffs from Jason Heyward and Jose Iglesias. They’d probably rather populate lineup cards with James Wood and CJ Abrams, who were traded away, instead.

The top two teams in projected Puffs for 2025 add different verses to the overall tune. Both figure to have team leaders in Puffs who won MVPs: Kris Bryant projects for 476 Puffs, while Andrew McCutchen projects for 455. They are two famously nice guys who surely add to locker room chemistry and provide mentorship value, but Puffs care only about production and aging.

The Rockies have a long history of high-Puffs seasons, while the Pirates were 10th lowest in Puffs from 2021-24. Pittsburgh had a 21.9% likelihood of making the playoffs to Colorado’s 0.1% entering the season (those numbers have now slipped to 10.5% and 0.0%, respectively). The Pirates are built around several players who have only played in The Show for the yellow and black. Oneil Cruz, Bryan Reynolds and Ke’Bryan Hayes all project to either hit or field well, with only Reynolds over the 30-years-old cutoff. The biggest projected Puffs contributors are boundary cases who hint at a specific aim: McCutchen and Tommy Pham. First, entering the season those two projected to hit for a 97 and 94 wRC+, respectively. Second, the Pirates are projected to hit the fewest home runs of any team, so a couple of veterans who have 458 career homers combined and project to be third and 10th on the team in 2025 makes some sense if you really squint, though I would also accept that the Pirates projected high Puff counts mean they should have looked elsewhere for offense during the hot stove season.

The Rockies, on the other hand, projected to have just one hitter (Sean Bouchard) above a 100 wRC+ entering the season. One approach to breaking the cycle of big Puffs season after season would be to test out the guys on the farm. Give older prospects like Julio Carreras and Ryan Ritter a full season, collect data, and see if you like the numbers. Carreras has a bazooka for an arm and projects to be a dynamic shortstop. Can he hit enough to be a glove-carrying regular, or is his ceiling that of a defensive replacement? Ritter can do “acrobatic stuff at shortstop” according to Eric Longenhagen, and he has hit well at every stop in the minors, but he has also run some high strikeout rates. Can he hang at short and figure out how to lay off the exploding sliders? I would rather have solid answers to those types of questions than rack up Puffs year after year, which is admittedly easy for me to say without skin (scales?) in the game.

The universal DH factors into my thinking here. Puffs from designated hitters are among the most tragic to me given the flexibility of a lineup spot without defensive responsibilities. For a team destined to miss the playoffs yet again, what purpose does platooning serve? Why not look to maximize reps for young guys with tools? Those 6,000 plate appearances can be an asset if used smartly.

Bryant, once a versatile and serviceable defender, has been sliding down the defensive spectrum since his days in Chicago. That move away from defensive responsibility makes sense when it’s used to accommodate a bat like Yordan Alvarez’s, but not as much for a below-average hitter. A Puffs-conscious front office does not need hundreds more plate appearances to believe what the previous hundreds said.

A pair of standouts at the wrong side of the 2025 projections reside in the same city. The Angels are getting most of their Puffs from Yoán Moncada, while the Dodgers get there with Enrique Hernández and Chris Taylor. All three players say something about the value of team chemistry, versatility, familiarity and error bars. Moncada is playing his age-30 season and entered the season projecting for a 99 wRC+ and Def of -1.7, so he’s as boundary a case as they get. He accounts for 525 of the 623 projected Puffs for a team with a currently healthy Mike Trout, so the combination of floor and ceiling seem reasonable. Puffs were born out of embracing doubt, so believing the stat is perfect would itself be pretty hypocritical.

The Dodgers, meanwhile, have the opposite problem of most high-Puffs projectors. As the heavy favorite, they want to reduce their error bars as much as possible. Uncertainty can help an underdog, whereas the favorite wants to proceed on the chartered course. It makes sense to me that the projected winningest team would be willing to sacrifice some ceiling for assurance on the floor.

The four Puffs standouts from previous seasons – the Twins, Cardinals, Guardians and Rays – project to have zero Puffs in 2025. None allowed a Puff accumulator from last year to return, letting painted wings and giant’s rings reign. The projections suggest their approach to filling those 6,000 plate appearances remains consistent and logical.

Joining the usual suspects on a zero Puff projection are the Nationals, Athletics and Marlins. All three are also projected to improve on their 2024 win totals in 2025. These teams have attempted to avoid the Puffs of the past by getting both better and younger. They project to get solid seasons from established players, acquired either in trade or off waivers, in Brent Rooker, Jesús Sánchez and Nathaniel Lowe. Perhaps this says something about taking risks with players who other teams have drifted away from.

Additionally, these teams stand to benefit from big seasons from pre-arbitration players who were projection darlings. James Wood, in his age-22 season, and Xavier Edwards, in his age-25 season, are projected to lead their teams in WAR; both were acquired in trade. Jacob Wilson, in his age-23 season, is slated to contribute the second-most value in California’s capital city. Additionally, these teams are stocked with young players on the right side of the aging curve: Luis García Jr., CJ Abrams, Lawrence Butler, JJ Bleday, Shea Langeliers and Otto Lopez all project for 2.0 WAR or more in 2025.

Teams ought to learn the lesson of the magic dragon and let their precious plate appearances go to someone who can either help the team win now or in the future — or, hopefully, both. Remember that every Puff is a tragedy, so when a team racks them up, stop to take note of how the plot ran away from the protagonist.

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