Deals of Mystery

Derek Zumsteg

When looking at the recent free agent signings, it's easy to see insanity. But it makes a limited sort of sense. Not the Kevin Brown signing, of course, but -- anyway, here's a better way to look at many free agent signings.

When you evaluate players, you want to look at their total worth as an addition to the lineup. There are a few ways to do this:

Rating	What is it?	Advantages	Drawbacks
OPS or OPS allowed	On Base% + Slugging	Easy to figure and great offensive measure	Defense, durability
TPR	Total Player Rating, calculated by Total Baseball	Includes everything	Suspect defensive measures
VORP	Value Over Replacement Player	Allows the measure of a player against a minimal-cost replacement (think AAA scrub) performance. Includes durability measures.	Doesn't include defense, confuses people

And so on.

For the purposes of this article, I'll be using Derek's Super Statistic, a all-encompassing easy way to calculate a player's worth to their team. Unfortunately, I haven't yet patented it and am wildly paranoid about it leaking out to my fantasy league opponents, so you won't be calculating it yourself. Since we're talking about hypothetical stuff, it's not going to matter. If you're really curious, send me money.

Now, in a major league lineup you want to win the most games while remaining within your budget.* So in general, what you're going to look for are players you can acquire, by free agency or trade, who are undervalued.** If you're smart and pay attention to, say, OBP instead of RBI, and you read your John Sickels (or better yet, have your own John Sickels), this is a difficult but not impossible task. However, in any given year it's almost certain that between twelve and fifteen of your players will be tied up in long term contracts.

So what you, as a hypothetical GM, see is this:

• A fairly reliable roster of players
• A couple of holes that desperately need filling
• A limited amount of money to fill them with

The players you've targeted for trades or acquisition are also usually being targeted by other GMs.*** But imagine that you're the GM of a team that could contend for a division title. You've got a couple of stars and a roster of journeymen, you've traded for some prospects ready to perform.**** All you need now is a right fielder to replace the one who got a 6-year, $105M contract with, oh, the Diamondbacks. You have $15M left. Your choices are, rated by Derek Super Statistic scores:

Who	How Much	DSS
AAA Scrub	$0.1M	+0 games
Journeyman	$1M	+2 games
Decent Free Agent	$5M	+4 games
Boras-Agented Star	$14M	+6 games

Initially, the choice seems obvious: you want the Journeyman, who will get you two more wins over the course of the season for a reasonable rate. But that's not who you'd sign. You want to sign the Boras-Agented Star and damn the effects on the market, or the hassle of having to deal with Scott Boras (and, let's face it, if the market wasn't there for his clients, he wouldn't exist). Because what you want is the greatest improvement in the team, and that $15M isn't going anywhere.

This makes a lot of signings make sense. If you were the GM of a team recently acquired by, say, a media conglomerate that then, Bond villain-style, wanted to make news, and they hiked your payroll by $18M and they've already locked up much of your roster, a signing like that may be the smartest move you can make. However, the inefficiency of such a move quickly catches up to you: If you have, say, $18M, and two positions open:

Who	How Much	Total DSS Worth
Two Decent Signings	$10M	+8 games
Star and a Journeyman	$15M	+8 games

It starts to look much uglier from then on. But the point of this little bit of analysis is not that inefficiency quickly becomes a massive burden. Instead, it's that there are situations in which the best thing to do is neither the most efficient or, over the long term, the wisest.

dmz@strikethree.com.