For the last few years, I've been playing Armando Marquez in CF.  He was great  when he's cheap, but now I can't figure out his real value.

http://whatifsports.com/HBD/Pages/Popups/PlayerProfile.aspx?pid=2339038


I'm paying him 5.2mil in arb money this year.  He has a lifetime OPS of around .625, but puts up spectacular defensive numbers.  He has 22 plus plays this year, with another 20 games left to go...and will win a Gold Glove.  Next year is his last arb year, and I am trying to decide whether or not to give him a long-term contract in the $5mil/year range.  Some important facts: I do not have a great CF prospect coming up.  Probably the best is a guy who will OPS .550 and play average defense.  There are no real good CF FA's next year except an aging superstar who will probably go for $12+ mil, and I don't want any part of that.  So the question is, A) do I give him one more arb year and let him go, B) try to trade him, open up budget space, and replace him with a AAAA CF, or C) sign him to a long term contract (4 years, I think.)

Has anybody worked up a spreadsheet with replacement values for offensive and defensive numbers?  Or is there just a veteran out there who can eyeball this and pass a verdict?  Any insight appreciated...

IMO, a + play on D is like a hit at the plate.   So, FWIW, your guy hit .276 this year.   As far as roster decisions, you have to make those on your own.  I think the guy is worth 5m a season.

I'll put it to you like this:

Over the course of about 6 seasons, he's had a roughly average fielding percentage with a +/- of 104. Take the 104 +/- fielding plays he made and assume 80% were doubles and 20% were singles. So take his career stats and add another 83 doubles and 21 singles.

His OPS would now be .285/.348/.356. How much is an average-fielding CF (maybe 83/83 range/glove) with that batting line worth to you?

Put another way, over his career, he's been worth about 72 runs per season offensively add another 13.8 doubles and 3.5 singles per year and he's be worth about 88 runs offensively. An average-fielding CF with 180 hits, 20 doubles, 2 triples, 15 home runs, 60 walks and 20 steals would produce about that.

Now for how much is he worth? That's a question nobody can really answer because it depends on your individual finances. I play in two leagues. In one league I operate with a very low (60-65M) payroll and put a lot of money into scouting, etc. On that team, I would never give a guy like that 5M+. On the other hand, in my other league I use a 100M+ salary, so I would possibly think about paying him that much.

I don't think you can really use replacement values for HBD, because of how the salary cap is uniquely structured and it being very different than real-life baseball. Also, if you use strict replacement value and marginal wins, very few players will be "worth" 5M+, simply because HBD teams feature so many more pre-arb players who produce at a significantly higher rate than in real-life.

I'm sure that answered none of your questions. But maybe gave you some things to think about.

Basically, I just gave you the long version of what MikeT said.

jt-- I think replacement values work better in HBD than in real life, because you're inside the system and can see the actual replacement level ratings, and because ratings are inherently more stable than statistics over time.  You just have to define replacement level as the kind of player that is (a) available in rule 5, or (b) has logged a couple of seasons in AAA without progressing to the majors, or (c) can be signed for <$500K on opening day.  It's enough to get a pretty solid idea.  I have a very strong sense of how many wins I expect when I go out and get an FA or make an arb decision.   

However, I completely agree that it's damn near impossible to determine a reasonable, consistent price to pay for those wins in a capped game.  The best I can do is to assert that each individual team, during a preseason, has its own reasonable value per win; but that number can be so hugely different for different teams as to have no generalizable value.

Max-- In the leagues I've been in that guy would be in the gray area where he's about 2-3 wins above replacement, and he's decently valued at the current salary, and you have to make judgments about where your team and budget are going to make the call on him.  I don't think there's a clear-cut numerical solution.

in other words-- what Mike said, only with a lot of inscrutable sabermetric jargon.

I wish I had that guy at 5m a season.

dedelman, good point. As you mentioned, I think it is not too hard to predict with pretty good accuracy how a guy will perform (over time, certainly not withstanding year-to-year fluctuation), and you can calculate replacement value from there, but the real challenge of the game is deciding just how much those marginal wins are worth.

That's why I play my two teams so differently. Definitely a different (and fun) challenge in building a team that has 100M in payroll every year than one that's less than 70M every year.

Forget number crunching.  I'll boil it down to two simple things: he plays well-above average defense at an important position (CF), and offensively he's averaging 90.75 runs scored per 162 games played over his career.

I'll take that anyday.

Posted by tecwrg on 2/27/2011 8:41:00 PM (view original):
Forget number crunching.  I'll boil it down to two simple things: he plays well-above average defense at an important position (CF), and offensively he's averaging 90.75 runs scored per 162 games played over his career.

I'll take that anyday.

Well I think we would all take that, but I assume there would be a dollar value that you wouldn't pay? 5M? 7M? 10M? 12M? I think that's what the guy is trying to get at.

6 mil a season avg would be about my max but if I didn't have a suitable replacement I would pay a bit more over 5 seasons and he will continue to get better due to his ratings.

Thank you, all.  This is what I was really hoping to get.  It looks like good ol' Armando has a future in Philly to look forward to...