First off, happy spring training everyone!

While looking at some of the contracts given out this winter, I was wondering what some of the worst (and best) returns teams might expect from their investments. I decided to look at the top 50 player salaries for 2008, and compare this with their WARP1 (wins above replacement player, normalized for the season…this metric also rewards/punishes a player for their defense) performance. I chose WARP1 because I was only interested in 2008 salary/production. Read on to find out which players were a good value per WARP, and which player would’ve been more valuable for his team if he was playing for someone else…

Ok, so here’s the top 50 highest paid players in MLB in 2008, their salary, their WARP1, and how much they were paid per WARP that they contributed:

WARP for the 50 Highest Paid Players (2008)

Things to note: teams paid these former “big ticket” free agents an average of $3.35M per WARP that they contributed. This was calculated after I threw out the data for Jason Schmidt, John Smoltz, Mike Hampton, Jorge Posada (all due to missed injury time), and Andruw Jones (negative WARP would’ve messed everything up). The average would’ve been several hundred thousand higher otherwise. Once again, Pujols leads this list, as his 13 WARP only cost 13.8M…the best bargain on the list.

From here I moved on to the 53 (meant to do top 50, but kept going by accident) highest WARP performing players from 2008. Here are those players:

Top 53 WARP Performers (2008)

Here, the top 53 players last year (according to WARP), were paid an average of just about $710,000 per WARP that they contriubted. You’ll also notice that only ten out of those 53 come from the highest paid list. I guess this can be viewed as the price of free agency…Ryan Howard is the only guy who had a crazy-high arbitration salary (and he’s neither among the top 2008 WARP performers nor arbitration eligible anymore). During the period where teams can control a player (their early years through their arbitration years), they can add the majority of their projected wins at a relatively low cost (as long as they identify the right players). And while there is some overlap in the lists, once top-50 salary level players hit free agency, interested teams are probably going to have to pay about four or five times more for the same production ($700K per WARP vs $3.4M per WARP). Probably not a big newsflash, but interesting to see what teams are actually paying for.

Tags: best, contracts, value, WARP, worst

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Nerdtron's computer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.