THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Kevin Gregg jumps out as a candidate for me. He has the mythical ‘save experience’, but had a lousy year with the Cubs in 2009

Michael Wiener, the impending executive director of the MLBPA, agrees that the criteria used for the draft-pick compensation system need to be revised.

“During the last round in ’06, we greatly reduced the number of players subject to draft pick compensation. We need to make the actual rankings a little bit more rational. It’s something we’ve actually had some preliminary discussions with the Commissioner’s Office about, and I would expect that in this offseason we’ll have discussions in earnest about seeing if we can do a better job of it. There’s mutual interest by the players and management having those rankings make sense. The Elias ranking system has essentially been the same since the early to mid ’80s. I think both sides agree it’s something that should be revisited.”

Source: http://bit.ly/2X8TXl

Even ignoring the free-/restricted-market implications, for all that MLB talks about competitive balance, that they can keep pushing this compensation system is a bit of a joke.  MLB commissioned a report nearly a decade ago from what they called the Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics formed of independent experts to study the issues of competitive balance in MLB (think Mitchell Report-in fact, George Mitchell was on this panel too-but about parity instead of steroids).  One of the suggestions for MLB to adopt to improve competitive balance was to eliminate compensatory draft picks for free agents.  So why hasn’t MLB tried to do anything about it or even ever brought it up when discussing issues of parity?

I think it’s hard to predict who will be most hurt until we see who is offered arbitration.  A lot of the players who would be hurt most by Type A stigma would be the borderline cases who teams might want back enough to risk having to pay them in arbitration.  Benjie Molina and Randy Wolf struck me as guys who might end up being particularly hurt by their classification, though.

Also, it took me a minute to figure out who Jay Bay was.

Carl Crawford is a type B. Hilarious.

I looked at the list and figured out the WAR (from Fangraphs) for the position players.

Adrian Beltre is a Type B, despite 6.5 WAR over the last two years.  Beltre’s hitting stats are suppressed by Safeco and he gets much of his value from defense.

The outfield is a bit wonky:

11.9 WAR Matt Holliday--Type A
9.2 WAR Manny Ramirez--Type A
8.3 WAR Mike Cameron--Type B
8.2 WAR Carl Crawford--Type B
6.6 WAR Johnny Damon--Type A
6.4 WAR Jason Bay--Type A
6.2 WAR Randy Winn--Type B
5.9 WAR Marlon Byrd--Type B
3.9 WAR Xavier Nady--Type B
3.2 WAR Vladimir Guerrero--Type B
3.1 WAR Brian Giles--Type B
1.4 WAR Jermaine Dye--Type A

Crawford as a B and Dye as an A is ridiculous.

The biggest joke is of course, giving guys like Grabow and Hawkins the rankings of type A. They would have negative surplus value even if you paid them nothing because the two picks would be worth far more than the .5 WAR or so you’d get from them per year.

Darren Oliver.

As I am sure Tango and the Mariners know, one of the reasons that defense is still “undervalued” even though more and more teams are starting to use advanced defensive metrics, is because if you have a player (like Gutierrez) whose defensive value is high, he is not going to command nearly as much in arb, and also will tend to be lower in the Elias rankings.  So one of the strategies for smart teams is to acquire good defense, bad offense protected players and keep them through their arb years.

Bobby/5: great work!

So, Dye would be a ridiculous signing for any team.... IF he’s going to offered arb. 

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And yes, a fielding specialist won’t get his value maximized in arb, while a Justin Morneau will be overvalued in arb.

I’d suspect that Dye is the most likely to be left wanting for lack of willingness to give up a draft pick, but I’d also be surprised if the White Sox offer arbitration.

Thus, I’d say any of the relievers seem unlikely to have many suitors if they come with strings attached.

Great short piece by the Jeff at Lookout Landing

http://www.lookoutlanding.com/2009/11/9/1123822/fun-with-the-elias-rankings

Money quote:

“Among the potential free agents, there are 26 Type A’s, 52 Type B’s, and 102 unranked. The average 08/09 WAR of the Type A’s is 4.6. The average 08/09 WAR of the top 26 Type B’s is 4.9.”

Hideki Matsui: unranked.  Granted, he’s a pure DH with no knees, but that’s pretty funny.