An owner in my league drafted Ty Cobb'11: $12,571,648. Playing in Coors, his stats are about the same as my Tim Raines playing in the Astrodome at a salary about half of Cobb's. Has anyone ever felt they got their money's worth out of a player in an OL valued at, say, over $10,000,00?

Posted by rob_frazer on 12/4/2011 4:09:00 PM (view original):
An owner in my league drafted Ty Cobb'11: $12,571,648. Playing in Coors, his stats are about the same as my Tim Raines playing in the Astrodome at a salary about half of Cobb's. Has anyone ever felt they got their money's worth out of a player in an OL valued at, say, over $10,000,00?

Probably not, but I love experimenting with "overpriced" players in OL's -- `11 Cobb, Ruth, Silver King, etc.  I just bumped up my thread about it.

Posted by seels on 12/5/2011 11:43:00 PM (view original):
Look at the performance history of '27 Ruth and tell me you can't figure out a way to win around that $12M salary....

You can win with almost any player.  The real question is what kind of value does that player provide.  For example, '27 Ruth is worth 232 runs on average according to his performance history. That equates to $54,677 per run.  '25 Max Carey costs $5,868,988 and is worth 122 runs on average; that is $48,106 per run and he is likey to get you a gold glove in right field.

But the 1929 Ruth only costs $47,719 per run. No gold glove and 39 fewer PAs, but still a cookie.

Posted by firesalt on 12/6/2011 11:49:00 AM (view original):
But the 1929 Ruth only costs $47,719 per run. No gold glove and 39 fewer PAs, but still a cookie.

Yes, but once you factor in defense and the fact that Ruth loses much of his value when facing cookie deadball pitchers like Joss and Mathewson, Carey is the clearly the better value-- at least in an OLs.

Production is not linear....a $12 million player isn't going to be TWICE as good as a $6 million dollar player.    I don't believe you'll find many people who think it is cost effective to use a $10+ hitter in an OL.

No, I am saying you can get 150 RBI from a 3 hole hitter in Coors for under 6 million.

     OBP is a curved function and players' prices reflect that. As OBP goes up linearly, runs scored goes up exponentially. Likewise, as a player's OBP goes up linearly, his salary goes up exponentially. The '04 Bonds, for instance, doesn't cost $20,000+/PA because he hit a few HRs, he costs that because of his .600 OBP. A team full of .600OBP players would score over 20 runs a game. But the key there is a team full of like players. A player's OBP is for the most part only as good as the rest of the teams. If you could draft '04 Bonds nine times and get him to perform at his real life level, he'd actually be a bargain, but if you put him on an 80mil team with eight .350OBP guys, he only raises the team's OBP to .378. To make a short story long, its a lot cheaper to buy nine .378 OBP players.
     As for slugging, it isn't exactly linear either. Its value goes up exponentially as OBP goes down linearly, and approaches zero as OBP goes up linearly, but I'd say in the .330-.400 OBP range that most teams end up at, it has reasonably linear value and it isn't a bad deal to spend big money on a slugger with similar OBP to the rest of your team.

Extremely well put.