***Breaking News – Twins Trade AJ Pierzynski to the Giants for Joe Nathan, Boof Bonser, and Francisco Liriano.***

Friday November 14, 2003

NFL “EXPERT” FOOTBALL PICKS

TIMBERWOLVES WIN IN OT

RANDOM NOTES

(Quick Note – unless something big happens in the world of sports over the weekend, there will not be a posting on Monday, November 17, 2003. I need a day off and actually won’t even be in town. So, you get to enjoy the following article for an extra day!!! Lucky you! Have a great weekend!)

Bang For The Buck - The Remix

This report took quite some time, finding and then entering all of the data. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to e-mail me! I also need to thank the people over at Baseball Prospectus  for the work they do to provide many great statistics. I also need to thank Lee Sinnis, who re-sent me his RCAA reports so that I could use them in this report. I also need to thank everyone who took the time to e-mail me your thoughts on the previous version of this report. Every bit of it helped.

Almost a month ago, I calculated and wrote up a rough draft of a Bang for the Buck article. It was a very rudimentary, simple calculation. The equation was just OPS divided by Salary. In doing that report, I knew that it would be too simple. OPS (On base plus Slugging Percentage) is just a number. Yes, it signifies how well a player performs, but it doesn’t do any comparison to other players. It doesn’t adjust for park or league averages.

Things I learned from that report include that it is difficult to compare a rookie making the league minimum salary of $300,000 to a player with a $15 million salary (or more). But at the same time, isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to show?  Which player provided the most production to his team for the least expense. Thanks to the many e-mails I received, I understand that in doing this comparison, we want to see how much better the players are than the league average or above a possible replacement player. That’s what teams want, a player who is better than a regular option to them.

(Seth’s Note - I definitely don’t claim to be a SABRmetrician. I believe that hunches and gut feelings should be used by managers at times. I think that a player such as Juan Pierre, whose statistics are very near average, can still be valuable. That said, I find statistics incredibly fascinating. I think that they are very important at this time of the year, in the offseason, when teams are trying to better themselves. Teams that don’t have the economic means to go after the big name free agents are looking for a cheaper option who can provide them the most “Bang for the Buck.”)

So, today, I will be updating the Bang for the Buck report, using some other statistical metrics. For each of the four metrics used, I will briefly explain the definition of the stat and then give the top dozen players using their salaries. Just for fun, I will also show the bottom dozen, those who provide the Least Bang for the Buck.

WIN SHARES

As someone pointed out to me, what’s more ‘banging’ than Wins? That is the goal of the game. Win Shares is a statistic that Bill James developed to help determine how much impact a player has on his team winning a game. I actually have his book titled “Win Shares” . I won’t give the mathematics involved in calculating this (click here if you want to read about it), but as Baseball Graphs explains, “The basic idea of Win Shares is to credit individual players with the number of wins they contributed to the team, based on virtually everything they did while on the field: batting, pitching and fielding, even a little baserunning.” This number has also been adjusted to the ballpark. Albert Pujols led all of baseball this year with 41.14 Win Shares. Barry Bonds was second at 39.21. Gary Sheffield, Todd Helton and Alex Rodriguez rounded out the Top 5. So, which players provided the most (and least) “Wins” per million dollars?

These charts make sense. Those who provided the most Wins per million dollars in salary are all young players, not even arbitration eligible, making under $500,000. They also all hit the ball well, including All Stars Marcus Giles and Vernon Wells, AL Rookie of the Year Angel Berroa, Scott Podsednik, the NL runner-up to Rookie of the Year and Twins catcher AJ Pierzynski. Those who provided their teams the least “Wins” per dollars are players who either missed some playing time due to injury or really played horribly who happen to make a lot of money. Money I’m sure their teams would have loved to have used on other players.

RARP - Runs Above Replacement Player

This statistic is pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it? It measures how many more runs the player accounted for than an average replacement player at that position. (a replacement player is meant to be approximately equal to the lowest-ranking player at that position) Essentially, it’s saying how better off a team is having the player play, than having a backup play instead. The Major League leader in this category for 2003 was Barry Bonds and 106.5. Albert Pujols, at 90.8, came in a distant second. Alex Rodriguez, Todd Helton and Manny Ramirez finished out the Top 5. But did any of them rank in either of our lists?

Some of the names on the Highest RARP per million list are looking pretty similar to the first list. Giles, Huff and Podsednik are back in the Top 5. Albert Pujols, despite having twice the salary of anyone else on that list makes an appearance. That’s saying something! On the other end of the spectrum, we start seeing the players with the negative RARP. Hmmm… that means that they are worse than a backup level. That’s not good! That said, I really like Carl Crawford’s and Endy Chavez’s potential. The rest, may never hit much, but a couple (Dodgers double-play combo, Cesar Izturis and Alex Cora) can play some really good defense!

VORP - Value Over Replacement Player

A very similar report that factors in more “stuff”. But the concept is very similar. It shows how much better a player is than a potential replacement. These number are all park adjusted, so that the numbers of players in hitters ballparks aren’t inflated (A-Rod, Helton).  To be fair, let’s look at the Top 5 in VORP in the league, regardless of salary. Barry Bonds leads the way at 114.6. Pujols is again second with 97.3. Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield and Javy Lopez round out the top 5. Will our list of VORP per million look any different?