When the 2013 Crowd Gave Good Advice
Yesterday, I heaped swift and mighty judgment upon the Contract Crowdsourcers of 2013 for their (your) contract proposals that were considerably more fiscally irresponsible than the contracts that were actually proposed to the players at hand. Between the injuries that befell some of the players mentioned yesterday — rendering their one-year contracts more or less entirely useless — to the career-worst years that befell the healthy, it was a veritable carnival of inefficiency, disappointment, and waste.
I told you the bad news first. But there is indeed good news! Here are five instances in which The Crowd’s proposed contracts are, I would argue, more beneficial to the team than the contracts that the teams actually agreed to. In three of the cases studied below, The Crowd’s noted tendency to underestimate both the years and average salary given to upper-tier free agents played to The Crowd’s advantage — when it comes to free agents who disappointed in 2014, no doubt The Real-Live GMs would much prefer to have a lot less guaranteed cash remaining on the books. In the other two cases, The Crowd bestowed modest multi-year deals upon players that were ultimately thrived on one-year deals — and who will be hunting for increased compensation this winter.
In the charts below, the columns cYRS, cAVG, and cTOT refer to the number of years, the amount of annual compensation, and the amount of total compensation that The Crowd gave to the players. The columns aYRS, aAVG, and aTOT list what the player actually, non-hypothetically received. The complete results of the 2013 Crowdsourcing can be found here.
