metsmarathon

year 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 player total a$ 1.084 1.120 1.189 1.071 1.177 1.384 1.441 1.720 1.998 2.264 2.383 David Cone 1.72 W3^2(a/p) 2 - - - - - - - - - - 1.31 W3 2.6 2.60 p$ 4.25 Jeff Kent 348.19 W3^2(a/p) 6 55 68 28 10 23 26 17 40 37 37 18.66 W3 0.8 3.1 5 4.3 4.1 6.6 7.9 7.6 10.9 9.9 9.7 69.90 p$ 0.109 0.195 0.437 0.71 1.96 2.625 3.4 5.75 6 6 6 Ryan Thompson 244.53 W3^2(a/p) 8 62 135 40 - - - - - - - 15.64 W3 0.9 3.1 5 3.2 0 12.20 p$ 0.109 0.175 0.22 0.275 0.275 so, here's what i show. for each player, i found their wins above replacement, their salary, and the average salary in the MLB at that time. i calculated, for each year following hte mets trade until such time as the player was either released, left his team via free agency, or retired (a player who is granted free agency but returns to his previous team is not considered to have left his team), the players' production times the players value. production is defined as wins above replacement player. value is defined as wins above replacement, divided by the ratio of the player's salary to the average league salary. this turns into, for each year, WARP3^2 * average MLB salary / player's salary. i've summed this for each player - the number immediately to the right of the player's name. the number below this is the square root of the above sum, which is an easier scale to look at, but is likely meaningless. the bottom number is the sum of the player's WARP3's, or total production. you'll note that the bulk of thompson's production-value comes in 1994, where both he and kent produced 5 wins above replacement, but he did it at half the cost. right now, this puts kent:thompson at 1.42:1 (an excursion i just did, with warp3 cubed, puts it at 2.17:1, but i have a harder time framing that logic.) and maybe this does tend to drive home the point that part of a trade is getting or giving away cheap talent...

cool. the league minimum isn't as important to me... i suppose there's just no real reliable salary data available prior to '89?

if you can tell me where to find a) minimum league salary by year and average league salary by year, i can run through my first method, which is merely an attempt at improvement of your formula. the latter method is more a philosophical approach for somebody with far more time and access to attempt, and which may have already been approached by some out there, just not comprehensively, and not applied to the mets. i can start with kent/thompson for an initial sanity check.

perhaps another method, and i've seen snippets of this across the internet, would be to come up with a wins above contract type of figure. basically, you would assume there to be three different types of players out there - pre-arbitration, mid arbitration, and post-arbitration - which have different wins/$ rates. the pre-arbitration list would be rookies, two year players, and three year players, right? so you figure, for a given year, what the total WARP3 for these players is, and their total salary, and divide to get a wins/$ rate for their salary. actually, to be more correct, you'd prolly do salary above league minimum (essentially replacement level) since you're looking at wins above replacement, and this might keep em on the same scale. for the mid-arbitration players, you'd look to all the players who are in their arbitration-eligible years, and do the same thing - total wins above replacement divided by total salary above league minimum. then repeat again with all players beyond their 6th year of service - all those who are eligible for free agency. these three populations get paid at markedly different rates, i'm sure you'd agree, making comparisons really only valid within the groups. then you could take any player in any given year, and figure out which group he belongs to, and figure out, based on his salary, how many wins above replacement you would expect him to have. the difference between this and his salary would tell you the approximate value you're getting from the chap. mind you, upon further reflection, i think this might be more of a measure of how effective and efficient your GM is as opposed to being able to measure the merits of one side of a trade against the other... but you tell me. i do know that this would be virtually impossible, i think, to figure out without working directly for baseball prospectus, and having access to their entire database instead of typing in one-by-one all the player names to get the WARP3 figures... (is such a thing available, btw, or is the manual entry 'DT cards' the only way to get at the WARP3 data?)... so the other way i've described sure looks better right about now!

i think the problem with the formula that i didn't recognize at first is that it is only measuring production versus cost of the players involved in the trades - essentially 'value'. but when you're trading for a player, you don't just want value - you also want total production! is there a solution? i dunno. maybe squaring the WARP3 would do the trick, thereby measuring total production X production rate. in this case, it might be more appropriate to do it on a year by year basis, and sum the results, as well. kent would be (i'll assume $2M avg salary here for expediency): {0.8 x [0.8 / (0.11/2)]} + {3.1 x [3.1 / (.19/2)]} + {5 x [5 / (.4/2)]} + ... = some number as compared to simply: 69.9 x [69.9 / (33.1/15.9)] = 2,347 for kent and 12.2 x [12.2 / (0.49/3.58)] = 1,087 for thompson the latter method is sure easier, but i think the former might be more correct, as you're not squaring the sum, but rather summing the squares. 3^2 + 3^2 = 18 (3+3)^2 = 36 i'm overall not sure if that'll make things better, or just more cumbersome, but if you've got the yearly salary numbers (i don't, necessarily) and the time (i don't really) and the inclination (not me), it might be worth an investigation.

the furthest logical extent you could go with this (and it would be tough) would be to play it out to the end... player X was subsequently traded for player Y who was then traded for player Z, who left via free agency. but edgy's formula is the way any such thing should be measured, imo.

]Yes the fact that Santana can easily turn into the next Victor Zambrano just as easily as he can turn into the next Al Leiter is a major concern nothing in that sentence is even close to being correct. if santana turns into the next al leiter, then i think it is safe to say that we would ALL be very very disappointed in that. santana is the next santana. there is really no apt met-related analogy. the closest might be piazza, if you want to look for career arc to point of trade, and deserved superstardom of the goods received. but we traded more to get piazza. and i'm pretty sure we traded more to get leiter. and think we might have even traded more to get zambrano. santana can turn into zambrano? please! maybe if we had traded gomez, humber, mulvey, and guerra for rafael santana in the hopes that he could blossom into an ace starting pitching. leiter? he was a very good starting pitcher. he was not, and was not close to, the best pitcher in the game in the midst of his prime. that's santana. i don't understand the need to mischaracterize this in the service of making a greater point.

no, the players they got in return did.

per wfan. yay! (irish's thread is better. it has a frickin' quote and all)

i think the candidates should've posed for topps' cameras specifically, holding assorted baseball paraphernalia, perhaps imitating notable cards of yore, like hillary holding kirby puckett's gigantic bat from the '92ish set, or mike huckabee standing in for billy ripken.

soupcan wrote: How about if the Mets say to the Twins 'We're close but we need more time" Could the Twins then say - "you know what, we've been roundly ridiculed for this deal and other teams have since basically indicated that if they knew this was all it would've taken to get Johan that they would have ponied up a better package. With this in mind, we think we can now make a better deal so, no Mets, we're not going to grant you any negotiating extension. Deal is now off." 'zat possible? i don't think it's up to the twins, but rather to mlb.

well, they had been keeping tony bernazard in the dark... (actually he was in the dominican and likely didn't have the best cell reception, but i like it my way better)

]Did you see Reyes and Wright in one of those magazines? I thought they looked a little dorky. Yes! That�s why I could never say David Wright. He�s too dorky. truer words have never been spoken. david wright - uber-dork. like an athletic, baseball playing steve carell.

i'm far more worried that the incessant inanity of football analysis will continue right up until sunday night than i am about this. god, can i hear just once about what kind of damned passing routes, or blocking schemes, or defensive packages the giants should use to attack the seemingly superior patriots instead of what amounts to "um, just play better than them"? frick! i'm not worried about santana signing, too much, as i expect him to sign, and if he does not, then i will cease to care. at all. about the mets. no hand wringing. no bitching. just. done. so what's to worry. either it enhances my enjoyment of the sport, or it has no effect on my life. either way, its all good.

espn/scouts inc's top 100 prospects is up there, and only two of the four players the mets gave up are on this list - gomez at #35 and guerra at #80. fmart is up there at #10. i really, really like this trade, cannot fathom that santana seems to've come so (relatively) cheaply, and hope to hell the contract extension gets amenably signed sometime in the next 27 hours!

i would suggest, at a minimum, an air hole. another opening or two might be good, too, for keeping things unmessy.

well, its a (fairly) smart contract that hte mets want to sign him to. i like the idea of a vesting option year or two. i figure it'll take some smart negotiating and some sizeable concessions to get it done that way though. like, lots of signing bonus and the like, and much more front-loading than we're used to. and to be honest, i really like the idea of front-loading a contract as opposed to the more customary backloading idea... i just really hope they get something done. clearly, the mets cannot let it fall through.

so mr met wears a white jersey to the white folks' wedding, but wears a black shirt for the ethnic wedding? what's up wit dat?

Benjamin Grimm wrote: ="Marty Noble"]In a development like few others in franchise history, the Mets have put themselves in position to change the dynamic of their team, their upcoming season, their place in the New York sports spectrum and their foreseeable future. its, like, the first of these in three years, even!

this is the happiest a mets fan has ever been with armando on the mound!

jeez.. what's taking so long on the extension already? get it done, either way already! we need some NEWS!!!

i'm personally trying to rein in my jubilation.. jic... but yippee.

any deal where the mets keep pelfrey, church and f-mart is a great one!

what, no harry potter? its the only movie keeping me from claiming to have seen only academy award nominated movies this year: ratatouille the bourne ultimatum transformers i didn't get to the theaters much...

this might be a wee bit less obnoxious with smaller pictures...