August, 2006

The MVCs of the BDBL

I recently solicited some input for this month's article, and Mike Stein was gracious enough to contribute a good idea.  He wanted to know who are the most valuable commodities in the BDBL.  Notice he didn't say "most valuable players."  That would be easy.  Simply look up the leaders in VORP, WARP, win shares or whatever your favorite all-encompassing stat may be, and there you have it.

"Most valuable commodity," however, provides a worthwhile debate.  A valuable commodity in any league is an ace starter or stud #3 hitter.  But in any league with a salary cap, the most valuable commodities are those ace starters or #3 hitters with dirt-cheap salaries.  If you own one of those guys, you can own two superstars for the price of one.  And it is these types of players that separate the champions from the also-rans.

So who are the MVCs of the BDBL?  Well, we could take a subjective opinion poll to come up with a list of names.  But you know how that would go: No one would vote for any Cowtippers, just to spite me.  So instead, let's try going the objective route.

In order to do so, we'll need to establish the market values of the players in question, then compare those values to their actual salaries to determine how much money they "save" their team.  And what better way to do so than by using the handy-dandy Doyle Formula�?  Recently, I made a few more tweaks to the formula, and I'm now more confident than ever in its accuracy.

Unfortunately, I don't have the time to manually enter all the necessary information for every player in the league.  So, I simply went through every roster and picked out the players I felt were probably the most valuable.  Using this quick-and-dirty method, here are the players I discovered to be the most valuable commodities in the BDBL this season:

A couple of things you may have noticed about the new-and-improved Doyle Formula�:

• A player's age doesn't seem to affect his market value very much.  Jose Contreras' market value, for example, is the same as Dan Haren's.  The reason is that the Doyle Formula� uses winning auction bids to predict market value, and of the 200 players in our free agent auctions, only three were younger than 25.  So this system doesn't know what to do with younger players.  I thought about giving younger players a bump up to account for this, but I don't know how much of a bump that should be.  $1 million?  $2 million?  Who knows?  So I left it as is.
• You'll see a lot of repeating values for predicted salary.  This is because the Doyle Formula� is no longer a "formula."  It is now a decision tree.  I originally ran a linear regression, hoping to get a formula that I could simply pop into a spreadsheet, but I discovered that market value isn't as linear as I thought.  In the end, the decision tree model performed much better, so the regression model was scrapped.

Now, let's take a look at the MVC's for 2007.  To do this, we'll use prorated stats, assuming that all of these players continue to perform as well in the second half of this MLB season as they have in the first.

Raise your hand if you ever dreamed, in your wildest imagination, that Matt Clemm would own the most valuable pitching staff in the BDBL in 2007.

Put your hand down, Matt, you big liar.

Liriano, Lackey and Crapuano save the Jamboree a total of $39.1 million next season.  That is absolutely mind-boggling.  We're talking historical savings on the order of the 2004 Ridgebacks, when Oswalt, Mulder and Peavy were raking in just $3.8 million in salary combined.  As good and cheap and young as Villanova's front three of Dontrelle Willis, Rich Harden and Joe Blanton have been this season, they are priced "only" $20.5 million below market value.  2007 should be a fun year for Matt.

Let's move on to 2008.  In order to do so, we'll need to predict the future.  And since my Psychic Friends Network membership has expired, the only tool I know of that will help us do so is Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA.  According to PECOTA, here are the top bargains in 2008:

While looking at these numbers, you have to understand that PECOTA wasn't really built to predict the future (although that would be cool.)  It was built to provide probabilities.  The farther into the future we look, the wider that bell curve is stretched, and the more conservative the predictions become.  So PECOTA is never going to predict that ANY player will post a 100 VORP in any future season, because the probability of that happening -- above a 50% percentile -- is extremely remote, no matter how great that player is.  Things like injuries and slumps happen all the time to players that look like sure things.  Just ask Tony Chamra.  That's why we see so many conservative market values above.

In case you're wondering, here are how some other notable (notorious?) players fared using this system:

It's sort of pointless to look any farther ahead, but let's do so anyway.  Here is 2009:

Of course, this doesn't include rookies like B.J. Upton, Justin Upton, Alex Gordon, Mike Pelfrey, Lastings Milledge, Delmon Young, etc..  But it's still interesting nonetheless.  (At least I think so.)

So, who is the Most Valuable Commodity in the BDBL?  Well, if we combine the numbers for every player, and sum for 2006 through 2010, we get something like this:

There's your top ten.  There are several interesting things about this group:

• Five of these ten players were acquired via trade.  I don't care WHO was acquired in exchange for these guys.  It was a BAD trade for the teams that parted with them.  (And I traded two of them, so I should know!)  Trading these guys is like giving away $25-$40 million.  That's a BAD trade.
• We have given a lot of crap to Jim Doyle for his Chipper-for-Dempster trade.  And we've given a lot of crap to guys like Gene and John Duel this year.  So why is it that Bobby Sylvester has gotten a free pass for trading Joe Mauer for Juan "Stick Boy" Cruz several years ago?  When all is said and done, THAT may just be the worst trade in BDBL history.
• Just to make Bobby feel even worse, Liriano was actually first drafted by Bobby in the third round of the 2003 farm draft.  He was then released in Chapter Four of that year to make room for...get this...Steven Head.
• Here are the highest Baseball America rankings for each player on that list: Wright (21), Mauer (1), Cabrera (12), Pujols (42), Bay (74), Sizemore (9), Zambrano (68), Liriano (6), Webb (N/R) and Utley (81.)  Just goes to show how what a lucky crapshoot it is to find these guys.
• And finally, here's how these guys were acquired: Wright (3rd round of farm draft, 48th overall), Mauer (via trade from Wapakoneta for Juan Cruz), Cabrera (1st round of farm draft, 3rd overall), Pujols (1st round of farm draft, 18th overall), Bay (via trade for Griffey/Colon), Sizemore (via trade for Steve Karsay), Zambrano (via trade for Sheets), Liriano (1st round of farm draft, 10th overall), Webb (via trade for Clemens), Utley (3rd round of farm draft, 50th overall.)

Don't you feel stupid now?