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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Tuesday, December 30, 2008SI: Red Sox made play for SS Ramirez
Tripon
Posted: December 30, 2008 at 03:46 AM | 215 comment(s)
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You get a 6 WAR player, and he's going to play as often as he's capable of getting into the lineup. For players of lessor ability, this is not the case. I brought up the 0.25 win player earlier, lets call him RobbQ. RobbQ is not good enough to play everyday, but just good enough to stay on a roster. So in his bits of playing time, he actually only gives you .05 or .10 WAR.
WAR = playing Time * (Talent over baseline)
playing Time itself is a function of Talent over baseline (plus management stubborness).
***
I'm trying to have a basis for discussion by coming up with specific scenarios (as drdr did) and then forcing people to come up with a dollar valuation under those specific scenarios. (If the scenario is not specific enough, then make it more specific.)
Please don't come up with reasons as to why we can't have a discussion!
Unless someone wants to come up with a plausible scenario where 2 3WAR players are not going to get paid anything close to 1 6WAR player (or 2 2WAR players compared to 1 4WAR player, if you object to the scarcity of 6WAR players), then I'm going to continue to maintain that the status quo is that the 2-for-1 makes nary a difference.
As far as paying goes, if you are paying free agents, I think that past practice has shown that clever organizations shopping for 3 WAR players would pay them between 80% and 100% of their projected win value, maybe less for teams whose marginal win value is high. But 5+ WAR players will almost always get full 100% value from the team that signs them, maybe even a few percents more. Since they are mostly signed by teams with higher marginal win value, they will be payed more per win.
To put another price on value: if we accept that Hanley is 6 WAR player, Lowrie and Lester are 3 WAR players and that Lowrie and Lester (together) will be payed over the next 6 years roughly the same as Hanley (and all of them keep exactly the same value over the next 6 years - all of them are young enough), Boston should trade the two of them and some prospects - let's say two who are pretty good bet to be 2 - 3 WAR players for a bulk of their careers or one with upside for 5+ WAR, but with low probability of achieving it (more like that CF kid they traded for Gagne than Hanley when they traded him) and some classic fillers (classic good arm/no control or good tools/no results guys). Because they could then get Lowe and be about 3 wins better than they are now and in Yankees - Rays - Red Sox division that last win in 90+ range that gives you playoffs has really big value.
The most disastrous contracts are those for 2-3 WAR players who have potential (or had potential) to reach 5+ WAR and who are paid 80% of what 5+ WAR players are paid. That includes players who can be stars when healthy, but can't be healthy, like Nick Johnson, and superstars who already are in decline.
This argument is circular. You're defining "true superstar" after the fact, by what happens during the contract. Paying for players who overperform is tautologically a good thing, but you don't know who's going to overperform until after the fact.
Mike Hampton sure looked like a true superstar at the time of his big payday, and if he had pitched 1500 innings of 3.00 ERA, that would have been a steal. Conversely, if Bonds had Griffeyed or Jeter had Canoed, they'd be a colossal albatross.
Certainly, any contract can be a bad one if the player gets hurt. But if injury, rather than descent into suckitude, is the primary problem with these superstar contracts, that's a good reason to spend your money on superstars.
I think Bill James said in one of the Abstracts that this is why it's a good idea to sign Dave Winfield - even if he has an off year, he's still Dave Winfield, and he pushes you toward a pennant. If Ed Whitson has an off year, your team gets worse.
Manny Ramirez would be another one for the sign-superstars argument.
That said, I think Tango is right that in practice, MLB salaries are linear, and teams don't pay elite players more per win. Or the premium is small enough that it hardly matters. My guess is this is a function of injury risk: the downside of tying up so much payroll and talent in one fragile human is substantial. The odds that 2 3-WAR players will both sustain career-ending injuries is much smaller than the risk for 1 6-WAR player. In fact, if we knew how much teams paid to insure the elite players, and included that in their salary, we might find that teams do effectively pay proportionately more for their services.
I'd think 6 > 3+3, myself - in part because the replacement level is not fixed - our assumptions for it assume a value that is, I think, on the low end. If the replacement level is actually a half win higher, then we're comparing 5.5 to 2.5+2.5 (and so on).
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