Formula Predicts Value of Baseball Free Agents – NYTimes.com
Posted by Sean Forman on November 8, 2010
Formula Predicts Value of Baseball Free Agents - NYTimes.com.
A very basic look at what some of the free agents might get on the open market and a look at who might be the most valuable.
November 8th, 2010 at 10:56 am
I wonder how many people will completely miss the chart because it's so small and stacked with a bunch of other stuff unrelated to the article. Good design choice, NY Times!
November 8th, 2010 at 11:43 am
Any formula that thinks that Lance Berkman, Johnny Damon, Manny Ramirez, Lyle Overbay, Derrek Lee and Jim Thome are going to be worth more next year then Adam Dunn is pretty much worthless.
November 8th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
Hartvig,
I think that these less than reliable predictions come from not adjusting for aging. Dunn is the youngest of those you list, isn't he, and all the others would be expected to decline more. Dunn also moved to !B full time in 2010 and is much closer to average there than in the outfield. This means that using 2008 and 2009 data for him will show him as a worse defender then is likely true. Again lowering future predicted value.
There was a note in the article indicating that aging had not been taken into account. And I understand that there are fairly strict limits on the length of these articles, but leaving out aging adjustments makes these predictions pretty questionable on a practicle basis. Especially given the ages of most of these free agents.
November 8th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Jeter was the one that really stood out for me. I'm not ready to say he's done as an all-star level performer, and I think it's reasonably likely he'll do better next year than he did this year. But it also seems plausible that he won't do much better. If I was setting the over under on his 2011 WAR it would be a lot lower than 3.25. More like 2-ish. And I suspect any similarity projector that took age into account would score him quite a bit lower also.
November 8th, 2010 at 8:55 pm
Sean Foreman [sic] is the creator of Baseball-Reference.com.
For a guy whose articles they love to publish, Sean, The Times didn't make anyone stay late checking the spelling of your name, did they?
November 10th, 2010 at 9:50 am
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