Major League Baseball

Best player bargains of the MLB season so far

Published Jun. 26, 2015 3:10 p.m. ET

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By Owen Watson

Depending on who you ask, a really fun or terrible thing is happening this season: Alex Rodriguez has been better than anyone expected. Perhaps he’s been way better than anyone expected. Thirty-nine-year-olds in the post-PED era aren’t supposed to have these kinds of seasons. Also of note, however: Alex Rodriguez is getting paid a lot of money: $22 million in 2015, to be exact. So, in this very surprising year that 39-year-old A-Rod is having, the question now becomes: has he been worth that much money so far? And, in the bigger picture: which players have been the best value so far in 2015, and which have been the worst?

The conventional wisdom with the sort of contract that Rodriguez has — the savagely long, payroll-sucking kind — is that they are sort of a wash at the end. A team pays for the production up front, back ends the deal, and secretly hopes they can offload the aging slugger or pitcher to another team at some point toward the end, eating a little of the annual contract when doing so.

It happens all the time: Boston is still paying Manny Ramirez; the Mets are still paying Bobby Bonilla (I thought I was crazy, but yeah, they still are, and will be forever). Obviously, that makes it really hard for the players to live up to their end of the deal in the final years, even though they aren’t complaining. We’ll get to A-Rod a little later, but for now, let’s look at the rest of the league.

For ease during this exercise, we’ll use the standard offseason free-agent value of a win — about $7.5 million. We can debate this figure, but it’s what we have, and we’re going to roll with it. Dave did great work in the past on the very issue of how much a win costs. We’ll then use that figure to discern how many wins a team is paying the player for at this point in the season (salary wins), and compare that to how many wins they’ve actually produced (WAR), to get surplus wins. We’ll use both Average Annual Valuation and 2015 salaries to see the differences.

We’ll also divide players into two groups: pre- and post-arbitration. Some veterans getting the league minimum will be placed into the former group for ease, while some technically pre-arbitration players who have signed deals with their teams will be placed into the latter.

Let’s jump in. First up, 2015 salaries — very simply, how much each team is paying players this year. Who is the biggest bargain so far this year among the post-arbitration crowd? Let’s have a look at a chart that compares overall WAR to surplus WAR (the WAR that each player’s team is essentially getting for free):

Well, this isn’t too much of a surprise. One finds almost entirely young, cost-controlled superstars, with the odd veteran who is earning his keep. Bryce Harper and Jason Kipnis have only been paid for .15 and .25 WAR by their teams this year, but they’ve put up a little bit more than that. This should also probably serve as a reminder that Todd Frazier is having a really great year, and remains undervalued. Here is a table, for those inclined to them:

Now, what about pre-arbitration? Let’s have a look at who is doing the most damage while only making the league minimum. For this, we’ll chart things a little differently, as we know everyone’s salary is the same (or very close to it). We’ll just look at cost per win vs. WAR:

Inexpensive wins! The bedrock of any successful team strategy. A lot of names we would expect to see here, and yet another reminder that A.J. Pollock probably should get way more credit than he does. With the amount of money the Dodgers have (and spend), it almost seems criminal they’re getting so many wins out of Joc Pederson for so little money. Here’s another table, for those who like them more than charts:

Let’s also tackle the other side of the spectrum — the worst values so far this year. I’m expecting to see one or two of those large, back-ended contracts we were speaking about earlier. Here is a chart of the players with the worst surplus WAR (actual WAR minus salary WAR):

Yikes. Jayson Werth, who had been pretty bad when healthy, leads the pack. After him, it’s a cavalcade of names we know for their franchise-player tags, including a quite conspicuous Robinson Cano. This is not necessarily a list you want to be a part of right now, or at any time. Here is a table with the results:

Finally, let’s look at the best values by Average Annual Value of contracts. This might take away a little of the bias for this year when it comes to backloaded contracts, and give us a more steady idea of who might be performing, given the entire life of his contract. Again, much like the first chart, we’ll compare overall WAR to surplus WAR, except surplus WAR is now calculated using AAV, instead of 2015 contracts alone:

That’s a little more even in terms of overall contracts, and elevates the players with more reasonable, even contracts. At this point, you might be wondering, what happened to A-Rod? Well, I’ll give you the good news: he’s actually outperforming his contract this year, given AAV. With 2.2 WAR currently, and only 1.65 salary WAR, he’s carrying a nice .55 of surplus WAR. That might change as the year goes on, but it’s interesting to think about A-Rod actually being worth more than his contract is giving him (given the current free-agent value of a win, of course) almost midway through his age-39 season. Next week we’ll look at the same sort of data for pitchers, to see who has been worth more (and less) than their contract this season.

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