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.

We respect the Fangraphs series a lot. But as I mentioned in the comment thread there on Friday, their approach is based on what front offices say; our approach is based on what they actually do. Both are valid. In my view, we are generally aligned. The specifics vary a little, but the top players are grouped in a similar way, as are the next tier. Trout is an exception that is maddening (and the FG guys seem to agree), because he's the top of the market in terms of field value, and his contract undervalues him -- the matter of degrees is purely theoretical since no one's ever been paid that much relative to his production. We took a slightly more conservative view based on the size of the contract being an impediment for most teams.

1) Thanks for the reminder on the Comp A and B picks. Yes, we plan to add those. Basically, any tradeable asset should be in our model. 2) Yes, we adjust for both position and positional flexibility, both for prospects and veterans. Having said that, we have to determine whether the adjustment is permanent or temporary, based on patterns we see in the marketplace. For example, we've found that the ability to play 2B is (perhaps surprisingly) not particularly valuable. This is probably related to the current supply glut of 2Bs, such that adding one more who can do it is just adding further to the glut. 3) Yes, definitely. Because there is currently a general lack of offense from the catcher position, it means the few catchers who can hit are much more in demand -- we talk about that a bit on the site in reference to the Realmuto trade this past winter. Demand for him went up because the supply of offensive catchers was so low. So we give a small upgrade to an offensive catcher as a result. Having said that, we have to be careful about judging whether it's a temporary situation or a permanent one. As you point out, it wasn't that long ago that there was a dearth of good-hitting shortstops, and now they're all over the place. So that doesn't mean we should make the offensive-catcher upgrade permanent; it just means they're a bit more in demand now. One positional trend that does seem to have taken on a sense of permanence is the downgrade of corner sluggers. Guys who can slug, but are largely stationary and can't play much defense, are just not valued very highly (see: Castellanos), because they're relatively easy to replace for less cost, and also because teams are smarter now about paying for a true two-way player rather than a bat-first-only one. So: some positional adjustments are temporary, some permanent.

My pleasure, glad you like it!

We've only taken a crack at valuing the Comp A and Comp B draft picks that are allowed to be traded today. As I mention on the site, the Claudio trade was a key focus point for that math. But I assume the nature of your question goes to the grand majority of draft picks. We haven't done our homework on that, because we haven't needed to yet, since those are not tradeable. But off the top of my head, we'd likely apply the prospect model we use (which we describe on the site under "Valuing minor-leaguers"), minus the signing bonus. We think there's a fair amount of surplus built into the system already -- a hitter who's rated a 50 FV on the FG scale is worth about $22M, but his signing bonus will typically be a lot less than that. One recent clue was the Kyler Murray situation: he got roughly $5M when he was drafted by the A's, but they offered him quite a lot more later in an attempt to get him to give up football. They did that because they knew he was worth closer to $22M, so they were tapping into that projected surplus.

Yeah, that Castrovince trade matches up very well! And yes, it's correct that we're going to add the ability to propose three-team trades very soon (hopefully in the next couple of days). We're just fine-tuning some of the details now.

1) Figuring out the roster-risk adjustments was a matter of trial and error. As you guys probably know already, I focused on the trade of Domingo Santana as a test case (which I describe on the site on the Effectively Wild podcast) to quantify the reduction amount -- I went back and forth between a percentage and an absolute number (at one point thinking that a roster spot is worth X amount), until I found more and more correlations with similar examples, so I ended up using the percentage approach. I did the same thing with Rule 5 risk. But the harder part of it was estimating the probability of those things for players who are approaching that status, and doing so with a graduated approach. For example, a prospect who has Rule 5 risk this December may or may not have his value impacted, because it depends on whether the team will add him to the 40 or not (at which point he'd get three option years, which eases the pressure quite a bit). Since we don't know that, we have to take a probablistic approach to that: what are the chances he'll get added to the 40? One example is Nick Solak, who was just traded at a discount to his on-paper value because he plays a position at which the Rays are stacked. He was blocked, so the Rays were less likely to add him to the 40 and waste a roster spot on him. That increased the probability he was a Rule 5 risk. Sure enough, they traded him for what they could get, to ensure they didn't lose him completely for nothing. We take a similar approach to guys who are in their last option year. I'm an A's fan, and I know Daniel Mengden is likely to get squeezed out of the rotation when guys like Puk, Luzardo, Manaea and Cotton come back. He's just... okay, and he's in his last option year, which means if they don't trade him now, they risk losing him for nothing as a DFA when he's squeezed out of a roster spot. So we anticipate that, and dock his value now thinking that other teams know that. On the other hand, if he started pitching lights-out, that probability would go down. So there's a push/pull dynamic going on with those cases that we monitor for. 2) I've seen some very informed commenters on the site, but no one yet has identified themselves as a FO employee. I'm not naive enough to think I'm adding anything to what they already know; quite the opposite. I'm just trying to deduce what they already know for the benefit of the public. So I don't want to assume they'd go there, other than for curiosity's sake, but I do get the sneaky sense sometimes that they're there.

We update the numbers monthly, so the current numbers for Chacin were reflective of his performance and likely projections through the end of June. As we do that, we see the variations, but we have to weigh them against the bigger picture. in his case, we have his AFV (adjusted field value) for the remainder of this year at $2.8M, which is not terrible. But he's due to make $3.4M. So given that and the short timeframe of control remaining, even if he kept improving on the field, at best he'd be close to zero, maybe 0.1 or so in a month. It's not going to move the needle much.

Hi folks, Some of you may be aware of the new baseballtradevalues.com website (I believe there was a thread about it recently here). I'm the founder of that site, and I've been invited to be a sort of guest here to answer any questions you may have -- be they about the site, how we calculate the values, Brewers player values in particular, or anything else around the larger topic of trades. Side note: as of this writing, there have been two significant trades (albeit of minor value) -- Cashner and Bailey -- and our predicted values matched up very closely in each case, so we're feeling good so far. So if you have any questions for me, fire away! John Bitzer proprietor, https://www.baseballtradevalues.com