A look at MLB’s expansion of the international player talent pool

Is MLB truly becoming a league of international talents?

Good morning. Today, I am back in analytic mode. You’ll get graphs and numbers and together we will explore a narrative to see if the numbers bear it out.

MLB has made great efforts to create a more international flair to the game. Some very notable international players dominate today’s MLB headlines. A VEB contributor guided me to look at the MLB leaderboards for a clue about the international influence. At the end of 2024, the offensive leaderboard (in fWAR) included such luminaries as Ohtani, Soto, Lindor, JRam, De La Cruz, Marte. 6 out of the top 10 are IFAs. 60%!! And that is with Acuna being hurt all year. On the pitching side, but one. A fellow named Christopher Sanchez. Who? Interesting.

I made a mental note in Spring Training to explore this more when I got home. It seemed to me, anecdotally, that the Cardinals had a greater international presence in camp, moreso than prior years. I didn’t sit and count guys, it was more of a sense, triggered by the observation that Oquendo and others travelled from field to field and did a lot of Spanish/English translation. I wondered if this reflected a general trend, was a Cardinal thing, or just a figment of my imagination.

Has the international influence grown in baseball? Let’s look at the last 25 years and see what trends we can spot.

A quick side note on the data: I still have found no database on international signings. I formulated a data store by extracting player bio information from basebaseball-reference.com, selecting anyone who had an MLB debut date and was NOT drafted. I then sorted this set and eliminated players from areas that are subject to draft rules (USA, Puerto Rico), figuring this would be a pretty good data set of international free agents. I probably excluded Alex Reyes with this criteria, since he was born stateside and moved to DR to skirt draft rules. I don’t believe this was common. I then use fangraphs.com batter and pitcher WAR APIs to extract and count up all the career fWAR for each player in the IFA set. The 25-year fWAR dataset is getting well worn. Thank you, again, cdb.

The chart below shows the 5-year moving average of IFAs that debuted in the majors each year.

Data provided by baseball-reference.com and Fangraphs.com

My reasoning for showing the moving average is simple. The year-to-year counts are super noisy (you will see some of that below), and it is much easier to pick out the trends using the moving average. What do we see? First, starting in 2005 and carrying out through 2010, we observe a sea change in the number of MLB debuts by IFA players. From a low of 12 players in Year 2000 to an average of 34 players in year 2010. That is quite a jump.

Then we see that the numbers levelled off for a period of time. From 2010 through 2016, you see a dip but a return to the average of 35 by 2016. Then from 2016 through 2021 the average jumps a bit, from 34 to 41 (still 20%, or about 4% growth per year). However, nothing like the tripling of IFA players seen in the early 2000’s (the “aughts”).

Peculiarly, the moving average peaked in 2021 and is in sharp decline. Year over year changes have been negative since 2021 and 2024 was the lowest number of IFA player debuts since 2006. Let’s blame COVID. I blame COVID for everything else, why not this?

But what about 60% of the offensive leaderboard in 2024 being comprised of IFA players? Well, let’s start with all of the leaderboard guys were signed before the downturn. Also, except for 2018, the total % of fWAR doesn’t seem to outstrip the % of IFA debuts. This suggests the talent coming out of the IFA pool is not unusually skewed. And the % of debuts doesn’t seem to be rising any more. So, this leaderboard could really be an anomaly. More a point in time than signal in the noise.

Data provided by baseball-reference.com and Fangraphs.com

In a little bit more granular form (above), I translated the raw # of player debuts to a % comparing IFA to all players, both in terms of the count of players as well as the career-to-date fWAR of those players. In the red line, we can see the year over year decline in IFA debuts from 2021 to 2023, with a slight uptick in 2024. We see a more drastic fall off in IFA fWAR over that same period. For example, in 2021, IFA’s made up more than 25% of all player debuts, but only 10% of the player value (as described with career to-date fWAR).

If you mentally block out the peaks and valleys, you can begin to discern that in any given year, IFA debuts will range from 22-27% of all player debuts and will yo-yo wildly between 15-28% of all player fWAR production, usually with the % of fWAR running a tad below the % of total player debuts. This corresponds with notable players analysis data that has notable IFAs comprising about 20% of all notables. One anomalous year in this graph is 2018. Guess who? Ohtani.

One thing that I noticed that I don’t have a graph for. The two highest peaks of IFA debuts (2006 and 2017)? They coincide with the two lowest data points in drafted WAR over the same 25 year period. Two data points do not make a trend, and there is no obvious correlation, but it was weird and interesting all the same.

A couple of other data points that don’t graph easily. Actually, they do if I want to populate a world map, but I don’t. Almost half of all IFA players originate from the Dominican Republic. The area of greatest recent growth is Venezuela and represents the #2 source of all IFAs at 189 out of the total pool of 799. Japan has been a constant all 25 years. Always between 1 and 4 players every year. The Cardinals’ Chen Wei-Lin will be the 15th Taiwanese player if/when he makes his MLB debut.

So, has baseball expanded its international presence (from a player standpoint)? Like all narratives, some truth, some misinterpretation. There is some clearly visible expansion, but more ebb-and-flow with a general upward trend, more than expansion. Much of the focus is on a few countries (DR, Venezuela), more than the cosmopolitan flair the narrative suggests. And it would be hard to expect the MLB leaderboards to be so dominated by IFAs if the current trends continue or flatten.