THE BOOK cover
The Unwritten Book is Finally Written!
An in-depth analysis of: The sacrifice bunt, batter/pitcher matchups, the intentional base on balls, optimizing a batting lineup, hot and cold streaks, clutch performance, platooning strategies, and much more.
Read Excerpts & Customer Reviews

Buy The Book from Amazon


SABR101 required reading if you enter this site. Check out the Sabermetric Wiki. And interesting baseball books.
MOST RECENT ARTICLES
MAIL : You ask | We say

Advanced


THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Filter posts by...

 

Monday, October 10, 2011

Does it make any sense for a player to be “untouchable?”

By , 09:45 PM

You hear this kind of thing all time:

“I’m tired of talking about it,” he said. “We’re not shopping him. We’re not entertaining offers. It’s frustrating. He’s one of the best players in the game. Why would we trade him? I wish people would stop writing about it.”

That was by Walt Jocketty, the GM of the Reds, and it is in reference to Votto.

Now, some of it is posturing, but you hear it so often, that surely it can’t be posturing all the time.  Personally, I think that most of the time it is sincere.

It makes no sense.  What is the difference how good a player is?  One, someone could always offer you a better player or combination of players.

Two, and MUCH more importantly, who cares how good a player is?  It’s not like you own him for free, like if I had one of the best cars in the world, say a Bugatti Veyron (worth 2.5 mil and one of the most expensive cars in the world), in which case I could reasonably say that I wouldn’t trade him for any other car in the world (of course, someone could offer me 2 cars or 10).  You have to pay all your players a salary, which is like a mortgage, as Tango likes to say (and it is a great analogy).  What you own of course, is the equity on that player, which is roughly the difference between the win value of that player and his salary.

If someone offers you a deal that has more equity, you should consider it.  Obviously there is more to it than that, but to say or think that any player on your team is “untouchable” seems ridiculous and irresponsible to me…

(18) Comments • 2011/10/11 • SabermetricsFinances
Page 1 of 1 pages

Latest...

COMMENTS

May 25 17:02
“Why Kickstarter works”

May 25 16:59
Howard Stern

May 25 16:43
Pete Palmer’s new book: Basic Ball

May 25 16:31
What sabermetrics is NOT

May 25 15:28
Largest demonstration in Canadian history?

May 25 15:12
Do pitcher’s reach back for velocity when needed?

May 25 12:51
Chad Curtis

May 25 11:26
Lack of hustle during a game

May 25 10:58
Rooting for laundry

May 25 02:38
NFLPA lawsuit against collusion

THREADS

October 10, 2011
Does it make any sense for a player to be “untouchable?”