johnbitzer

Fangraphs research has shown that its value varies between $2M and $4M during the prospect phase of the player's career. But that depends on when you're valuing the player -- the closer they get to MLB, the higher it typically gets. Also, hitters are typically worth more than pitchers due to the injury risk. For now, at BTV, we placed its value at $3M just to split the difference and average it out.

John, Thanks for stopping in and contributing! If possible, can you use the "quote" feature when responding so we know which post you are responding to? Thanks. Sorry, will do, thanks.

Steamer projects him for only 0.6 fWAR. Our other models project him for a little more, but not by much. Our weighted risk-adjusted value estimate projects him to be worth $6.7M for 2020 against a $2.9M salary. for a surplus of 3.8. For 2021, it's 6.0 against 4.6M, for a surplus of 1.4. For 2022, it's 6.8M against a 6.9M a salary, for a surplus of -.1

No, he's been at 5.1 for the entire offseason.

I noticed the discrepancy yesterday when I was updating the Brewers' list based on the Baseball America update. Fangraphs had updated him to a 40 a while ago, but we hadn't changed it (sometimes that happens when we're rushing, and to be honest, the lower-level prospects are not as high a priority to change on the site because there's not much difference between 0.8 and 1.1).

Hey guys, Over at Baseball Trade Values, we think this deal comes in as very fair. We had Narvaez at 5.1, with the return being Hill at 1.1 and the draft pick anywhere from 2-4 (figure 3 to split the difference). So it matches out pretty well from a value perspective. https://www.baseballtradevalues.com/trades/trade-17416/

Thanks for the feedback. Please see my other responses on this thread. I will add: if this were an isolated case, we would make no adjustments, as we would see it as an outlier. But as I mentioned, there are other cases like this, where prospects have fallen in value not just with one team, but with the market, which suggests that you can't just pin it all on Preller being taken to the cleaners. He did get taken, no question. But it's probably not quite as much as it first looked.

Thanks for that feedback. However, our analysis does account for bad trades. We fully agree it was a bad trade on Preller's part. He's in win-now mode, and under pressure from his owner to deliver a winning team in 2020, so he's going to overpay. And he's obviously done that before. And we also know that Stearns is very savvy, so he's going to take advantage of that situation. That said, we respect the market enough not to ignore what it's telling us. We think it's highly unlikely the Brewers were the only team Preller talked to about Urias. There are several other teams who could use a 2B or SS with upside for league minimum. The A's, Reds, and Phillies come to mind. (I'm an A's fan, and I'm sure the A's could have offered a similar package to SD at the Grisham price point that would have enticed SD.) We're not naive enough to think this is the only offer they got. Rather, the more likely scenario is that this is the best offer they got. It's still a bad deal for SD, and we account for that because there's still a big gap in the numbers. Heck, Lauer for Davies alone is a bad deal. And then we also find out that there's one more element to it -- a PTBNL -- which makes it even worse for SD. So yeah, we still think you guys got a great deal.

So here's how we handle tweeners (what we call guys who are not quite established yet in the majors, but graduated from the minors): we do a pro-ration method where we take the major-league projection (which is based on their major league performance) and weight that against their prospect value, up to three years. So a guy whose prospect value is, say, 60, who then has a bad first year which projects him for, say, 30, will have a value of 50 ((60*2)+(30*1))/3. If the same pattern holds another year, the weighting will shift more to the majors' value ((60*1)+(30*2)/3 = 40. After three years, he's a fully established major-leaguer. However, we've found that it's not quite that simple. There are many cases where the market showed us that the value had changed more than that would suggest. For example, Jharel Cotton was a 55 who was just DFA'd by the A's, then sold for only $100K to the Cubs. His meager MLB performance dragged his value down, but not as much as that would suggest. What made the number line up was a change to the prospect rating -- we had to infer that he wouldn't be a 55 anymore if he were still being rated by the evaluators. There are other examples of this as well, where former top prospects fall out of favor faster than you'd think. (Injuries can play a role in this as well.) Trouble is, that puts us in a precarious position, because we're not talent scouts. But we can do some basic algebra and solve for x, so that's what we do. x in these cases is the adjustment to the prospect rating. So on the one hand, we agree that tweeners like this shouldn't be adjusted up or down too much, because in most cases their ratings are fine. But there are enough other cases where they're not fine that we have to treat them as those types of exceptions. As to your other questions about those prospects, we use a weighted average of the big ratings systems. We place a higher weighting on Baseball America, because they're the most respected and established, their system is thorough, they have strong relationships with front offices, and weighting them higher correlates well with our findings. So those variations are due to those weightings. (We place very little weight on BP's prospect ratings.) As for Hader, you'll no doubt be aware that he was recently identified as a Super 2. That means he's about to be paid a lot more, since he has four arb years, and not three. And the salary he gets in his Arb 1 year will set the floor for the next three, which will compound. In other words, his surplus value took a big hit because of that. He's still quite valuable, but there's less now as a result of that.

No worries, sorry to barge in on the discussion. I was invited in some months ago, and thought I'd pop in to see the reaction to the trade. The new data is the trade itself. We totally agree there's a value gap, it's just a matter of degrees. We change numbers all the time based on the data inputs we get from prospect ratings outlets, performances, projection systems, and most importantly, what we see in the marketplace. The constant is not the numbers themselves, but the process of using as much significant data as possible to get as accurate as possible.

I appreciate the advice, but I respectfully disagree. Models are dynamic -- you can't ignore real data if you want to make them more accurate over time. We definitely stand by our methodology. As with my Zillow analogy, Zillow can't insist that a house is still worth $500K if it was sold for $250K. It will take that into account as new information, in order to make the model smarter. That's all we're doing. The good news for Brewers fans is, you should still be happy you got a great deal.

I agree -- we have both Hader and Hiura higher than Woodruff. And again, testing this anecdotally: as an A's fan, I would give up the sun and moon for either Hader or Hiura. I would not for Woodruff. That's not to disparage Woodruff -- he's a fine pitcher, and looks like he'll settle into a nice career -- but he's not as much of a needle-mover as those two.

Okay, that's what I thought. Heck, I'm an A's fan, and I love Matt Olson, but even I would trade him for Hiura in a nanosecond. My point is to illustrate one key difference between the BTV approach and the Fangraphs approach. The Fangraphs series ranked Olson ahead of Hiura, which in theory means that the Brewers would make that trade because they'd be getting more value (and I would also note that each player would be a fit in terms of positional upgrade in that scenario). But I don't think they would in reality. Our approach is based on what front offices do -- what they've done in the past and therefore would they're most likely to do in the future (as opposed to the FG approach, which is based on what they say). That's not meant to one-up them; I do respect their series. But I don't think it's super-accurate, because a) they don't test it with real-life examples like this; b) they also don't square it up with their own research on prospect valuations (which, ironically, is what ours is based on -- and which puts Hiura higher).

One more thought on this: Would any of you trade Hiura for Matt Olson?

We think Aguilar has just enough positive value to justify that, based on three+ plus years of control and the fact that if the Brewers ever floated him, he'd be attractive as a DH to AL teams.