Yankee's 2008 Payroll Efficiency

The numbers in these charts, by the way, are in terms of millions of dollars.



The 2008 Yankee's cumulative net payroll win-value was +12.23 million. The win-profit margin is nothing impressive, given the size of the Yankees payroll (est. at $210 million).

As one might notice, there are very many negative value contracts on the Yankees payroll for the primary roster spots. Carl Pavano, Bobby Abreu and Jason Giambi were the most inefficiently paid players on the 2008 squad; each had a win-value profit margin below -$10 million.

Johnny Damon, Xavier Nady and (suprisingly enough) Derek Jeter were the only primary offensive players whose contract values provided a postive win-value profit margin.

It was the Yankee's pitching, anchored by rookie arms, that kept the team's cumulative win-value profit margin positive. Players like Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes, who were paid in peanuts, kept payroll way down while providing the team some value along the way. That and Mike Mussina's stellar final year in the majors.

A-Rod, suprisingly enough, wasn't really overpaid in 2008. He provided the Yankees with just enough offese to create $160,000 in win value profit.

What one could conclude from this graph is that the 2008 Yankee's offense was, indeed, highly overpaid.

Cubs Payroll Efficiency, Take 2

Here is a breakdown of the payroll efficiency of the 2008 Cubs pitching staff



The overall contract profit of the team's rotation and bullpen comes out to about $43.5 million, meaning that the Cubs organization did a decent job at value pricing contracts in 2008. Of course, this neglects the impact of backloaded contracts, which easily skew payroll efficiency.

The team's biggest losses were in Jon Lieber, who cost the team roughly $4.4 million, and (no suprise here) Bob Howry, who was overpaid by about $3.6 million. Though Jon Lieber really wasn't that bad outside of 3 outings, his injury and minimal playing time lead to a negative WARP in 2009.

Zambrano was also a hefty loss at -$3.48 million, although much of that negative value comes from his late season injury/ineffectiveness. Prior to mid/late August, I'm sure that the contract value was about even. Regardless, it is easily discernable that Zambrano is overpaid at his current rate as Dempster and Harden, who had better years than Big Z, had production values that only slightly edged out Z's 2008 cost; as Z's costs increases over the next few seasons, the probability that he provides a contract profit will decrease -- even (and especially) if he produces at his career averages for the remainder of his tenure with the Cubs.

What you may find shocking in this data is that Jason Marquis had a slightly profitable contract in 2008, producing $1.8 million above his salary value. In 2007, his contract profit was even higher. However, this is and was largely due to contract backloading (Marquis is set to make $9+ million -- or little under one-half of his three year, $21 million contract value -- in 2009). If his contract were to have been evenly set at $7 million a year, his two-year contract profit value with the Cubs would have been a cumulative $1.2 million (Marquis was worth $7 million in 2007). So while Marquis may have sucked, he surely wasn't overpaid -- at least not relative to the rest of the league.

On a final note, given Kerry Wood's overwhelming productive contrubution to the team (his contract profit was fourth to only Harden, Dempster and Marmol) in 2008, I'm shocked the Cubs decided not to bring him back for 2009. Even at a cost of $10 million last year, he would have been "underpaid."

This information is courtesy of Fangraphs.com, who calculated the 2008 pitcher WARPs and WARP values.

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.