Crowdsourced Results: Dead Money of Select Trade Targets

Yesterday, FanGraphs facilitated a crowdsourcing effort not unlike that other recent crowdsourcing effort which produced year and dollar estimates for the contracts likely to be received by this offseason’s top-55 free agents.

In the case of yesterday’s exercise, however, readers were asked not to estimate the values of the league’s free agents, but rather of those players who are both (a) candidates to be traded this offseason, and also (b) signed to contracts of disproportionate cost relative to the player’s likely benefit to a team in wins.

The purpose of the exercise: to estimate the actual market values (in dollars) of those same contracts for the actual years which remain on them. And the secondary purpose: to estimate, as well, the amount of “dead money” — that is, the amount a player’s club would have to cover to successfully trade away a player — present on each of those contracts.

For example: it’s a fact that Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp is signed for five more years at a total of $107 million. It’s something like a fact, as well, that Kemp — were he a free agent this offseason — that Kemp would receive something less than $107 million in the event that a club, for some reason, signed him to a five-year contract.

The question of interest here — and certainly one of interest to those general managers who might consider trading for Kemp — is this: How much would Kemp receive for five years? Something more than $0, presumably, but also probably something less than $107 million.

Below are the results of yesterday’s crowdsourcing effort. Years denotes the number of years remaining on the relevant player’s contract; Dollars, the total dollar amount left on that contract (including buyouts for an un-exercised option year); Crowd, the crowd’s estimate of the player’s value on the open market for the number of years stipulated; Dead, the amount of dead money on the contract, per the crowd’s estimate (so, Dollars minus Crowd); and DAVV, that dead money on an annual basis for the years remaining on the contract. Those same headings preceded by an -o- denote the same information, but for those instances in which the relevant player’s option were hypothetically exercised.

Here are the results:

Some notes:

• Among those players who’ve been the subject of trade talks, none appears to have so much dead money on his contract than Ryan Howard. The crowd would pay Howard $4 million for two years of service — even while he’s guaranteed no less than $60 million for those same two years. Indeed, roughly 23% of respondents estimated Howard’s market value to be $0, indicating that free might be too costly an expenditure for Howard. That’s not entirely unreasonable, perhaps: according to Steamer, Howard is projected to produce negative wins in 2015.

• Matt Kemp’s contract features the second-largest sum of dead money, according to the crowd — nearly $50 million in total. That said, among the players listed here, only Mark Buehrle features a crowd estimate which comprises such a large percentage of that actual remaining guaranteed money. The crowd thinks Buehrle’s present value is about 68% of his contract’s value; Kemp, about 56%.

• It’s important to note that this data might also carry with it certain biases. FanGraphs readers have provided markedly conservative estimates of the years and dollars likely to be received by the highest-profile of free agents. Moreover, the market has typically valued home runs and RBIs (of which Ryan Howard prodyced 23 and 95, respectively, in 2014) more than this site’s readership, whose estimates seem (naturally) more highly correlated with WAR.