I'm sure we've noticed it - guys playing over and above their historical stats during the year in which they become eligible for free agency so that they can go out and command a big contract.  The question is how common is it, or is it a statistical anamoly so it gets noticed more easily (e.g. Scutaro, J.Bay, V.Martinez this year).  I don't know where to find the stats, so hoping some of the others can chip in.

And how does the number of free agents-to-be on your team affect the success of the team that year?  For eg. how many free agents-to-be were on our 92,93 champion teams? And the last few years?

I ran into a thread about offensive consistency on the Yankees board, so I thought I would run some numbers to compare the top 4 teams in the AL EAST so far.  I define offensive consistency as the ability to score 5 runs or more, over several games (see first figure).  I choose 5 runs because the majority of team ERAs in the league are between 4 and 5, so if your team scores 5 runs or more, you are likely to win.  I checked this likelihood with the 4 teams, and although it is correct, there are also some interesting differences in the ability of a team to convert an offense of 5 runs or more into a win (see second figure).

via i40.tinypic.com

via i44.tinypic.com

Of course comments welcome here.

Some things to note :

Based on this kind of binned analysis, it appears that the Red Sox have had the longest streaks where they have scored 5 runs or more.  Also interesting is the similarity between the Rays and the Yankees - lots of singular streaks where they score 5 runs, and then less than 5 runs(Yankees have done it 14 times already).  One could refer to this as inconsistency (?).  The Blue Jays are different from the others, they have the highest frequency of 3-game streaks where they score 5 runs or more (8 times!), but have not been able to extend any of those streaks beyond 3 games even once.  This could explain why they don't have a winning streak longer than 4 games all season.

Also note here that all of these teams have scored 5 runs or more almost the same total number of times so far (37-40 times in all cases), so this comparison between teams is based on the same sample size.

Another key difference (although its seems slight) is how well the Red Sox convert a 5 run offence into a win (nearly 90%), and how that is a bit lower in the case of the Yankees (78%).