Late Innings

As most people who read LI know, I’m a huge fan of Beyond the Box Score. They love WAR data, and so do I. Of late, they’ve been experimenting with graphical charts used to project replacement data, which generously comes from the fine statisticians at Fan Graphs. I’m starting to plot some of their data as well, and I’m using an excellent API provided by Google to do so.

Google Charts is pretty slick to say the least. And what did I want to plot? Simple. I wanted to use it to analyze the Brian Roberts extension.

All in all, Roberts will be extended for four years at 40MM. These are all free agent years, so he’ll be paid on average of 10MM per season. It’s a deal I like (and I’m sure a deal that Peter Angelos pushed for), even if he’ll be 36 at the end of the deal. Last year, Roberts was worth about four runs above replacement, or roughly 18MM per season. He’s been worth this for the past three or so years as well.

Using a comparable contract, the Orioles extended Nick Markakis for 66+MM over six years. However half of those years are arbitration years. If you throw in the seventh option year, Markakis will be paid 59MM over his first four free agency years, or just under 15MM a season. Now the question is, which player is worth more… using the wonderful data again from FG, we can plot the Markakis data versus the Roberts data as follows:

FanGraphs + Google = Amazing.

From the graph, Markakis clearly has the edge due to his defense and his bat. Roberts however gets the edge for his position. Markakis is a corner outfielder, yet he was still worth six runs above replacement in 2008, which is astonishing. If he played center field all last year instead of Adam Jones (which he clearly can), this number would have been higher. In either case, both players are being payed “market rate” during their free agent years, with Baltimore coming out ahead slightly in each deal (if they didn’t, Andy MacPhail wouldn’t have planned the contracts.)

Roberts was worth four wins above replacement last year, which is worth 18MM (using the 4.5MM per win strategy.) His best season was 2005, when he was worth 6 wins above replacement. That was the season which he essentially hit half of his home runs in April. In either case, giving Roberts four years wasn’t essentially wise, but it needed to be done. If he stays between three and four runs above replacement during the four years, he’ll be worth the dollar.

And in case anyone is interested, here’s the Google query which got me the cool graph:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvg&chs=400x400&chd=t:23.4,-3.7,23.5,2.4,45.6|34.7,10.1,23.2,-7.3,60.7&chco=FF6E1F,0F0F0F&chtt=Roberts%20v.%20Markakis%20|%202008%20WAR&chts=333333,12&chdl=Roberts|Markakis&chxt=x,y&chxl=0:|Batting|Fielding|Replacement|Positional|Value%20Runs|