This morning, I presented some data on the off-season price of a projected win in free agency, noting that one could come to a reasonable conclusion ranging between $5 and $7 million per win, depending on preference for average versus median or how significantly to discount future spending. That was mostly just an explanation of the assumptions and a data dump, but there’s plenty more to say about the market price of a win, so let’s dig into the data a bit more.

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While there are still a few lingering holdouts — or, perhaps more simply, a few players who still aren’t yet convinced that they’re not worth what they’re asking for — the off-season is pretty much over at this point. In fact, we’re only a couple of weeks away from a pair of actual baseball games that count in the standings. The 2014 season is almost here, so we can begin to make some declarations about what we can learn from the recently completed off-season. And one of the things I like learning the most about is the economics of baseball’s closest proximation to a free market.

For every team, their off-season goal can essentially be drilled down to the attempt to purchase future wins. Whether they’re signing a free agent, making a trade, claiming a player on waivers, or even building academies in foreign countries, most decisions made by a baseball operations staff are in the pursuit of buying wins for their team on the field. They aren’t always wins that manifest in the short term, and the exchange of dollars for wins is not always so straight forward, but this is the transaction that front offices are hired to make. Buy wins, as many as you can afford.

The most obvious market for this exchange is free agency; players market themselves and the wins they can bring to an organization, and the team that bids the most usually lands the player. While players come in all shapes and sizes, they are all essentially selling the same product, just in different types of packaging. If a team finds one player’s asking price too high, they’ll simply buy their wins in a different form. Free agency is the great equalizer, allowing players of all varieties to sell themselves next to players who they are rarely compared against, and for the observing public to find out exactly what teams think different packages are worth.

The resulting bids can essentially be translated into dollars per wins, or $/WAR, as we often refer to it around here. And now that we’ve got most of the free agents signed, let’s look at what wins were going for over the winter.

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Well, this is something. At the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston this morning, Bob Bowman — CEO of MLB Adavanced Media — announced that they are creating an entirely new model to capture data at the MLB level. And it sounds pretty great.

Here’s a video example of what MLB hopes to be able to do with this data.

And a few comments from people involved with the building of this product.

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As we reach the beginning of the Cactus and Grapefruit League schedules, pitchers are starting to ramp up towards opening day. It’s no longer just long toss and stretching, but now, they’re expected to throw actual innings at a physical effort level approaching what they’d do in the regular season. And, naturally, some players are experiencing some issues while ramping up, with some even heading off to get MRIs.

We know that these kinds of strains and pulls and soreness are pretty common in February and March, but what we don’t know — or at least, I don’t know — is how often these reported spring training issues turn into something more serious. Plenty of people out there have tracked and continue to track the “Best Shape Of His Life” group, but as I read about a few more pitchers going to the training room today, I wondered why we’re not tracking pitchers who report spring training pain, in order to learn what percentage of guys who have to undergo treatment in February and March end up on the DL in April through September.

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Mike Trout is reportedly close to signing a long term deal with the Angels that will value the free agent years he’s giving up at around $30 to $35 million apiece. At the time he signs the deal, he’ll almost lock in the largest single season salary ever guaranteed to a Major League player, topping the $33 million that Clayton Kershaw will earn in the last year of his freshly minted extension. And even with that, he’s still going to be drastically underpaid.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a few conversations with folks where I’ve unsuccessfully tried to explain why Trout is worth something between $40 to $50 million per year for his free agent years. In a time where even the best free agents are signing for half of that, it’s a tough sell, and I’ve realized that most people just generally don’t believe that Trout is twice as valuable as other star players.

So, this post is an effort to help illustrate the dramatic gulf between Trout’s value and the kinds of players that are signing for $20 to $25 million per year. I’m going to try to make the math as non-scary as possible, and avoid using fancy acronyms or models that rely on black box data. We’re just going to deal with the basics.

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Nelson Cruz got tired of unemployment and signed a one year, $8 million deal over the weekend, taking nearly half of the salary he turned down when the Rangers made him a qualifying offer back in November. However, according to agents Scott Boras and Bean Stringfellow, fellow remaining free agents Ervin Santana, Kendrys Morales, and Stephen Drew aren’t particularly interested in following in Cruz’s footsteps, and are even openly talking about waiting until after the June draft — when they will no longer have compensation picks attached — before signing a new contract. The theory is that, without the encumbrance of draft pick tax, teams would be lining up to sign these players.

There’s a problem with this theory, however; the math simply doesn’t work. Over at MLBTradeRumors, Tim Dierkes did a great job laying out the picks that each team would have to surrender if they signed any of the remaining qualified free agents. He also helpfully included the pool amount allocated to each pick, so we can see that the exposed draft pick “values” range from $2.8M down to $600K.

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Yesterday, the Yankees gave Brett Gardner $52 million to not exercise his right to become a free agent next winter. Instead, he’ll now stay in New York and play left field alongside Jacoby Ellsbury, rather than testing free agency to see if he could land a bigger deal as the best center fielder on the market. And that means Gardner has just signed up for four more years of criticism from those who think a left fielder should be “a run producer”, a guy who knocks the ball out of the ballpark and hits in the middle of the line-up.

Gardner is not that guy. He has more career triples than home runs, and a large part of his value comes from running down balls in the outfield. He’s a speed-and-defense guy, and traditionally, speed-and-defense guys have not been paid the same level of wages as similarly valuable sluggers. But while these kinds of labels help us describe the ways in which a player creates value, there’s also a trap to using these kinds of generalities, and we shouldn’t be so confined by player types that we miss the fact that Brett Gardner is actually a pretty good offensive player.

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