Overpaid Bums Of 2008 (Cubs Edition)

Lord Kelvin, the magnificent dude who invented the modern universal scientific temperature measurement system (degrees Kelvin), once said "When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind."

I'm tired of saying "Player X is an overpayed bum!," where X is some player whose production (Y) is less than expectations (eY) and whose contract (K) is ridiculous, but not being able to quantify my claim. I'm also tired of people calling good players like Adam Dunn bums because they don't "hit for average." Thanks to fangraphs, who recently calculated the value of each win contributed by a player to his team in terms of dollars, we can take an interesting look at who was and was not an " overpaid bum" in 2008 by multiplying this number by each players WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player)

Given the sheer volume of major league players, I'm simply going to periodically break up 25-man rosters by teams from the 2008 season in order to determine which players were under/overpaid and how teams, as a whole, "profited" by their signings. In summation, we will find out which teams are efficient at offering baseball contracts.

Let's begin with the Cubs.


As you can probably tell by the profit margin, the Cubs, overall, did very well is paying for offensive production in 2008. Edmond's listen value is based on total production from 2008 and his overall contract value. I know the Cubs paid him the league minimum (500 K, with the Pads picking up the other 8 million), but I could not find his WARP split stats. I'm sure he provided an overwhelming amount of profit for the Cubs.

Basically, this chart shows what we already know. Soriano is an overpaid bum, Ward pretty much sucked and Soto/DeRosa are completely underrated (and paid) as players. When DeRo is up for Free Agency next year, he's gonna get some nice offers IMO. I wish the Cubs could have him another 2 years.

Final note: Despite Cedeno and Pie's profitable contracts, they are still shitty players. They are just paid shit too.

I'll update this post with further analysis later.