from Amazon
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Paying your DH
A good job by devil_fingers on seeing what kind of performance is required, in order to justify the contracts paid out to DH.
A little technical note: the 40/60/80 should apply to the salary above the min 400K. Also, for the pre-arb players, you really shouldn’t bother trying to figure out what his real value is, because the correlation is rather weak in terms of salary and talent, since all the pre-arb players barely make anything about the 400K minimum.
In any case, when you look at the chart, compare the “xwOBA” figure he has (which is the wOBA the hitter needs to get, in order to justify his contract) to the Marcel (or Chone) forecast column. Just eyeballing it, and it looks like a decent match. We get a decent match because the basic idea behind the WAR process for DH works fairly well: the replacement-level DH is a league average hitter. Teams are paying with that in mind.
Thanks for the link and the comments, Tango. You are correct that I forgot to subtract the $0.4 replacement salary, so I went ahead and made that update (and noted it at the end)—not a huge difference, but worth doing, at least for me.
I ran into the problem with Lind/pre-arb guys because I was starting with the “money end” to see what teams are paying for rather than just doing the “is this guy any good” thing. I guess the point is that a pre-arb player is almost always going to be a “good deal” unless he’s Tony Pena, Jr., 2008 model or something in that neighborhood.