from Amazon
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
WAR, Salary, and Service: Estimating Dollars Per Win
Sky gives it a go. I like the overall effort involved. The main issues I have is that the intercept has to be the league minimum salary. If it is not, then the WAR model has the wrong replacement-level baseline (for salary purposes).
When under team control: Salary = .51 + WAR*.001
When Arb eligible: Salary = 2.26 + WAR*.31
When FA eligible: Salary = 5.53 + WAR*1.23
So, an arb guy with negative 6 WAR will be paid the league minimum. That is impossible. The problem here is almost certainly because the “arb eligible” should be split by arb1, arb2, arb3, arb4. You also have a similar problem with FA, where negative 4 WAR will give you the league minimum.
If Sky is finding that players who generated between negative 2 and 0 WAR earned around 4MM$ in free agency, there’s a problem.