Baltimore Orioles and 2016 Moneyball Power Rankings
What is the bang for the buck that the Baltimore Orioles are getting for their player investments as compared to other MLB teams?
One of the more interesting articles you might come across is one in Bleacher Report that seeks to examine this question by Moneyball sorts of metrics. These categories of rankings begin with varied assumptions and parameters that may be argued for accurately telling the whole story, but at a minimum they do give the overall picture of who is getting the best values relative to dollars invested in contracts and salaries.
The article is very statistically-driven (therefore likeable to baseball geeks like me, and probably you) and is oriented to the WAR number. Beyond that, the dollar value is determined to be about $8 million in 2015 per 1.0 of WAR, based upon the FanGraphs value system.
So this is not as complicated as it sounds. For example, if a player has a 2016 projected WAR number of 2.0 and is being paid, say, $14 million, he represents a positive value of $2 million.
In this system, players who are in their arbitration-eligible years prior to free agency, and who are performing well, are going to be likely the best values. The worst values are obviously the free agents who have received a large contract but are not living up to it whatsoever.
Even so, the very best value of them all remains Mike Trout. While being paid over $16 million, his 9.3 WAR is a value of over $74 million.
When you think of teams who have not been getting good values for their contracts, you probably think quickly of the Yankees and Phillies. And indeed, they do rank #30 and #29 respectively. We know they have a bunch of bad contracts versus performance: players like CC Sabathia (-$23.4M), Carlos Beltran (-$12.6M), Mark Teixeira (-$11.125M), and Ryan Howard with a whopping -$30.6M!
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So how do the Orioles rank? And who would be the three best and three worst values on the team (given for each team in the article)?
In terms of team ranking, the Orioles come in at 24th place, which is surprisingly low. It is interesting also to see that the expanded salary structure of the O’s has them now with a projected payroll that is #9 in all of MLB.
So who would you name as the three best values for Baltimore? The first is quite easy to figure: Manny Machado. With a projected WAR of 5.9 that translates to a $47.2 million value, along with a $5 million salary, it is a positive value of $42.2 million.
The second and third Orioles might be a bit of a surprise, though not shocking: Adam Jones (+$11.667M) and Chris Davis (+$7.4M).
But who are the worst values? The first name I would think of might be Ubaldo Jimenez, but he is not in the top three. Rather it is Matt Wieters, who I would have listed along with J.J. Hardy, and they are indeed the top two poor values. The third is a surprise: Vance Worley. The numbers for these three respectively are negative millions of dollars of 5.4, 3.7 and 3.4.
The teams with the best values are the Houston Astros and Pittsburgh Pirates. The World Champion Kansas City Royals ranked #11. Baseball is a complex game.