After yesterday’s recap of last year’s list, and the lessons taken from it, we’re off to the races again with the 2011 Trade Value series.

To maintain transparency and avoid any kerfuffles this time around, I want to be clear that this column was inspired by Bill Simmons, who tackles this same topic for the NBA. Thanks for the fantastic idea, Bill.

Before we get to the last five spots on the list, let’s talk briefly about what question this list is attempting to answer. Trade value is not an easy thing to measure, and it differs for each team – the Yankees will be interested in an entirely different type of player than the Astros, for instance. Winning teams with high payrolls will give up prospects that rebuilding teams would never move, while for some teams a premium player with a salary to match just isn’t someone they’d be willing to add to their payroll. No teams will put the same value on the player, so we have to answer something a little more broad than “would this team trade Player A for Player B”, because if we’re talking about the Yankees and the Royals, we’re answering a specific question that has a lot of extra variables in it.

So, instead, I’d say the goal of the list is to measure the league-wide demand for a player’s services if that player was made available in the trade market. There are a few players that every single team in baseball would call about if they were put on the block due to their abilities and their contract status. The demand would be astronomical if they were actually gettable, and in most cases they’re so valuable they just won’t be traded.

Beyond those elite guys that are fairly easy to put near the top of the list, though, there are players who have some big positives, but also a significant negative that depresses their value to some franchises. For some guys, that may be a high salary with a long term commitment, or they could be near the end of a contract and be looking for a big extension in the near future. For others, the contract might be the asset itself, with the player having some kind of wart in his game that would keep some teams from actually thinking he’s worth a premium return. Others have off-the-field issues that might cause teams to discount what they’d give up to get them.

I try my best to weigh these factors and determine which teams would see as the biggest determinants in whether he’s a player they’d make a real push to acquire. That said, sometimes this involves hair slicing or making judgment calls, and not everyone is going to weight things the same way, which is fine; this list is intended to spark conversation and interesting discussion, and reasonable people can disagree over placement. Just try to keep in mind that there’s not a huge difference between spots on the list, and in many cases, a guy could move up or down by a decent margin and still have it be reasonable.

If you get bent out of shape because someone is #43 and you think he should be #41, you’re probably reading too much into specific placement on the list. In eyeballing the list, to me there’s a pretty clear top 15 or so, then there’s a big jumble where you could make a lot of different judgment calls than I do. There were also a few guys who I couldn’t believe I had to leave off the list (there’s no Jered Weaver, Cole Hamels, Matt Kemp, or Eric Hosmer for instance – it killed me to exclude them), but I ran this by a bunch of smart people who offered good feedback, tried to weigh the pros and cons as best we could, and this is what we came up with.

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Beginning tomorrow, the 2011 Trade Value series will kick off here on FanGraphs, but before we go forward with this year’s version, I wanted to look back at last year’s list and see if there are lessons to be learned from some of the rankings. Obviously, things can change quite a bit in 12 months’ time, and many of the outcomes could not have been easily predicted last July, so we can’t just say “that guy got hurt, so it was a bad ranking.” However, I’m wondering if there are trends we can spot that might say something about what has transpired over the last year or perhaps some errors in logic I made that might have led to some rankings that don’t look so great in hindsight.

Before we talk about some of the things that we learned, however, it’d be helpful to revisit the list in its entirety. And so, here’s last year’s Top 50 Trade Value assets.

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It’s July 5th and the PIttsburgh Pirates are just 1 1/2 games out of first place in the National League Central. Outside of the career rebirth of Ryan Vogelsong, this has to rank as the most surprising outcome of the first half of the season. While there are some good young players on the roster, this team was not expected to be a contender, especially not in a tough division with three other teams all chasing the brass ring this year.

But we are 85 games into the season and the Pirates are still hanging around. They’re not exactly blowing away the competition, but at 44-41 Pittsburgh has held their own to date and benefited from the fact that no other team in the division have yet to really establish themselves as the team to beat. So, now we’re a little less than four weeks from the trade deadline and the Pirates are the team that is going to have to make the toughest call on what they should do before July 31st. Do the Pirates believe in their team in order to make a move to try and chase down a playoff spot, or should they sell off some of their potentially interesting trade chips in order to keep building for the future?

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We’re now just a week away from the west coast debut of FanGraphs Live. We’ve got a great line-up of guests coming, and yesterday, we added Sam Miller of the Orange County Register to the list of attendees. If you missed the earlier announcements, here’s the details:

We’re proud to be teaming up with SABR to host an event at the same location as their national convention, giving you the chance to take your baseball nerdery to a whole new level.

Our event will take place from 7 to 10 pm, and include three interactive panel discussions:

Jon Weisman (Dodger Thoughts), Eric Stephen (True Blue LA), Rich Lederer (Baseball Analysts), and Sam Miller (OC Register) will answer questions and converse on the status of the two local teams, so we’ll begin the evening with an interesting look at the Dodgers and Angels. You will have a chance to ask questions of the panelists, as well as hear them talk about the various topics surrounding those two franchises.

After the local teams panel has concluded, we’ll transition slightly into looking at the national landscape and the game as a whole, and will bring Rob Neyer (SB Nation) and Vince Gennaro (President of SABR, author of Diamond Dollars, consultant to MLB teams) into the discussion. We’ll talk about what we’ve seen during the first half of the 2011 season, as well as some of the more interesting aspects of the current landscape of statistical analysis of the sport.

Finally, we’ll have a FanGraphs-centric Q&A with members of our staff, including the aforementioned Mr. Keri, David Appelman (President of FanGraphs), Carson Cistulli (NotGraphs specialist), Eno Sarris (RotoGraphs wizard), and myself.

The event should be a blast and well worth the $20 admission fee. However, the goodness doesn’t end there – anyone who registers for FanGraphs Live is eligible to use the FGNonMember-41 discount code when registering for the SABR convention. That code will give you 15% off any conference registration, whether it is a one day pass ($59, pre-discount), two day pass ($93, pre-discount), or full conference registration ($159, pre-discount). Those of you who are good at math will take note that the registration discount for the full conference is actually more than the cost of attending FanGraphs Live, so if you’re planning on registering for SABR as a non-member, it is actually cheaper to register for our event and then use the discount code than to not attend our event.

Even if you can’t make the whole weekend, however, I’d highly recommend at least a one day pass if you can get away from work. There are a lot of interesting things planned for July 7th, and if you can’t get enough of me on discussion panels, I’ll be participating on a baseball media panel with Russ Stanton (Editor of the LA TImes), Sean Forman (Owner of Baseball Reference), and Bill Squadron (General Manager of Bloomberg Sports) in the afternoon, and Scott Boras will be giving the keynote speech in the morning. You could spend the whole day geeking out about baseball, and no one there would judge you.

You can purchase tickets by using the widget below. We look forward to seeing you guys in three weeks.

On Tuesday, Justin Inaz wrote an article for The Hardball Times laying out who he would like to see on this year’s All-Star team, using projection data rather than seasonal data to select the players. I found his article interesting, but disagreed with the premise, so we argued about what the All-Star Game should be. That conversation is below.

Dave: Over at THT, you relayed a sentiment about the All-Star Game, and in particular, your dislike for the way it is treated as a reward of small sample flukes. You even called the game itself a “frustrating experience” because of how much luck can influence decisions over which players are named to the team each year. In the article, you suggest that we’d be better off if the teams were chosen by systems designed to estimate a player’s current true talent levels, with 2011 year-to-date stats playing a small role in who is selected to represent their teams at the event.

First off, am I re-stating your position accurately? Is there anything you’d like to add to that summary, or an aspect of your view that I left out?

Justin: My position is that All Star Games should be about showcasing the best players, not the players who have gotten lucky. Whether we use projections or not is a matter of personal choice (maybe the alternative is scouting? Or some combination of both?), but projections are a good way to estimate player talent level.

I actually think that a lot of fans (a majority?) agree with the notion that All Star Games should be a showcase of the best talent. That is how they seem to be advertised. It’s just that we (fans, media industry, etc) put far too much weight on a player’s current-season statistics when judging talent. 2011 statistics do matter, and we absolutely should use them as part of the evaluation process. But we shouldn’t ignore what players have done, for example, in the past calendar year, or in prior years. As it is, second-half performances get almost no consideration in All Star selection, which I think is absurd.

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When Frank McCourt filed for bankruptcy, he also acquired a $150 million loan to cover his immediate expenses, but since he’s broke and has bled the Dodgers dry, the only way he could come up with a big loan on short notice was to pay through the nose. Specifically, McCourt went to a subsidiary of J.P. Morgan who offered to give him the money in exchange for an interest rate of at least 10 percent along with a $4.5 million fee to secure the loan in the first place.

Because the loan is structured as being 7% above the current London interbank offered rate (usually referred to as the Libor), with a minimum Libor of 3%, the rate will always be at least 10% and could go higher depending on how the markets move. When you factor in the $4.5 million fee, the APR is closer to 13% — it’s not quite usury, but it’s a pretty terrible loan for a property that is worth “between $500 million to $1 billion” and has relatively minimal outstanding liabilities.

Meanwhile, Major League Baseball offered to loan the Dodgers an equivalent amount of money at a 7% interest rate with no fee attached, so the cost to the team would be just slightly more than half of the loan that McCourt managed to come up with on his own. Just the difference in interest rates on the principal amount borrowed is over $12,000 per day, and again, that’s not accounting for the sizable fee that McCourt agreed to pay to in order to secure a last minute emergency loan.

While having a franchise under control of Major League Baseball is clearly less than optimal, when the alternative is having it under the control of Frank McCourt, it looks like utopia. The sooner MLB can take the team away from Frank McCourt, the better off the Dodgers will be.

A few weeks ago, we looked at a few of the arms who might be available for mid-season trades, and it wasn’t exactly a list of Cy Young candidates. Jason Marquis, Kevin Slowey, Jeremy Guthrie… useful pitchers all, but not exactly the kind of sexy addition that a team looking to make a big time push for the World Series is dreaming of. Looking around the league, there just didn’t seem to be any high quality arms with front-line starter upside who would be on the market this summer.

But then, June happened to the Marlins. After looking like a surprising contender in April and May, they’ve gone 3-22 in June, changed managers, and are now 14 1/2 games behind the first place Phillies. Even their Wild Card hopes seem long gone, as they stand 10 games back of the Braves and would have to leapfrog over 10 teams to claim the consolation playoff berth. The 2011 Marlins are going to be also-rans, and that puts a pitcher on the market who could change a lot of playoff races.

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Sandy Koufax is rightfully considered one of the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball. His run from 1963 to 1966 – before his career was cut short by injury – is one of the best four year stretches of pitching in the history of the game, and his dominance is why he was elected to the Hall Of Fame the first time he was eligible in 1972. He might not have had the career length of other all-time greats, but his peak was so good that it was impossible to come to any other conclusion than that he belonged in Cooperstown.

It’s time we say the same thing about Roy Halladay.

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