The Best Bargains of 2015

There’s a lot of talk about market inefficiency in the long aisles of the baseball analysis superstore: which teams find value where others don’t, and, conversely, which teams see value that maybe isn’t there anymore (or even in the first place). For small market teams, finding inefficiencies is a matter of successful survival, and for large market teams, it’s a way of adding something extra to the x-factor that works: money.

Whatever the case may be, it’s part of our job to measure how teams are faring in the efficiency department, and we do that generally by looking at how much teams are spending in relation to what they’re actually getting, production-wise. Today, we’re not exactly going to go into specific strategies, like what the most recent Billy Beane magic wand looks like, but rather see which position players are projected to provide the most amount of production (WAR) for the least amount of money ($).

To do that, we’re going to split players into two groups: those making the league minimum, and those who aren’t. This is mainly so we don’t skew the data too much with extremely talented young players who haven’t yet reached arbitration. Those with more service time and who have hit free agency get their own group.

First, we’ll look at players who have hit free agency or arbitration. My fellow FanGraphs scribe Craig, who has been working on some great pieces about payroll and projections, laid some ground work and supplied the contract data for 2015. I’ve combined the contract specifics for all teams with WAR projections and calculated the cost per projected win.

It’s not perfect, and neither are any 2015 projections. We know WAR is sensitive to defensive performance in a given year — it’s meant to be the center of a player’s possible range of production, and we’re going to keep that in mind as we move forward. However, this is meant to give us an idea of which players are great bargains, and it will do that nicely.

I’ve filtered the top 30 position players by cost per projected win and have presented them below. I’m going to supply these in both graph and table form. We begin with the post-arbitration crowd, and their salary vs. expected WAR for 2015:

And now we present the same data in a table format, with the all-important cost per win field added:

A few things jump out right away: there are a lot of catchers, which can point to the sometimes difficult nature of projecting defense at the catcher position. However, I don’t think it’s too much of a surprise to see our friend Yan Gomes leading the charge: he’s growing into one of the best offensive catchers in the game, he just signed a team friendly, back-loaded contract, and he had an outstanding 2013 defensive campaign.

We see a lot of speedy outfielders with great defense and base running skills, and the table also highlights the lack of low-cost, high-production first basemen. This was highlighted yesterday: right now, first basemen are getting paid a lot of money league-wide. I’m inclined to think this is because we’re in a time when many veteran, franchise first basemen are in the middle of their contracts, pushing the cost for that position skyward, but that needs more research and less speculation.

Now let’s move onto the young guns: the pre-arbitration position players. As a primer, let me say this: pre-arbitration salary plans differ by club. Some give raises per year based on number of plate appearances, some do service time, and all generally keep their scheme under wraps. The important thing to know is that any difference in pre-arbitration salaries are really small. Because those salaries aren’t always disclosed, and for the simple sake of ease, I’ve set the salaries for all of these players at the league minimum for 2015: $507,500. Also because of this, I’ve charted this one a little differently — because we know everyone’s salary (or close to it), I’ve put cost per win in place of salary. Here we go:

And now also in table form:

These are the names we know, the ones we hope for, the players that the perennial next year is all about. You can argue with some of the minutiae of the projections if you want to, but there’s no arguing that this list is a who’s-who of great prospects, as it should be. While there might be some surprises on the first list, this second one holds no illusions.

Finally, a point that should be taken into account with this research is that it pertains to 2015 only – many of these very reasonable salaries (for the first group) in 2015 are part of back-loaded contracts that will explode in the next few years. Yan Gomes is one of them: he’s due for a raise of $1.5 million in 2016 and $2 million in 2017. That’s still a bargain for a great all-around catcher, but it’s less of a bargain than it is this year.

As we see less young, talented free agents hitting the market in the current era, more tact and strategy will be needed from teams on when and how to extend their young players. Commit too early in the hopes of locking a player up, and you could be stuck with paying someone who might not pan out; commit too late, and you’re not getting value for your money or another teams swoops in during free agency. Given the first group, the current strategy seems to be extend, backload, and hope to trade before the players become too much of a payroll liability. We’re seeing how that strategy is working out with huge, aging free agent contracts. Many teams can afford those deals; many can’t.

For some teams, finding this value is about survival. For the others, it’s just icing on top of a very expensive cake.

Thanks to Sean Dolinar for the graphic templates.