Then by definition every single great player in the game is grossly underpaid. That's not particularly useful.
Tickets go on sale Friday: How excited are you about the 2020 Red Sox?
- Thread starter Lose Remerswaal
- Start date
Exactly.
Mookie had 6.6 WAR last year (fangraphs)
Trout had 8.6 WAR.
Mookie is making $27M in 2020.
Trout is making $35.83M AAV
Mookie is making 75.4% of what Trout is making.
Mookie had 76.7% of Trout's WAR last year
Seems pretty fair to me.
I think the whining about the whining has exceeded the actual whining. SoSH has become a delightful singularity of whining.
My whining, however, is noble.
It is freighted with history, watered by the tears of young Bernie Carbohydrate, lisping out the question, "Who is Gary Allenson?" to his enraged father in the winter of 1980. Daddy firing a can of Gansett against the wall -- the only acceptable answer.
I whine so as to call Red Sox Nation to account, and my words are like fire, to keep them in would be to burn.
By June the Main Board will be safe for the Knights of the Spreadsheet, free to sensibly grunt about Verdugo's VORA (Value Over Replacement Asshole) and the inestimable virtues of "The Reset."
Let the Sensible Men of SoSH go to Fenway this summer and start the wave when The Reset comes to bat with the bases loaded. Hell, go ahead and retire The Reset's uniform number, put it up there beside Fisk.
Clap in the 2004 way, but now instead of "Nomar's Better" we can chant "Je-ter's bet-ter - clap-clap clap-clap-clap. Jeter, indeed, is better for the bottom line. Maybe he can bat between Verdugo and The Reset in our own Murderer's Row (sorry, that's the Videotape the Assaulter's row).
But until then, this thread is about "How Excited Are You." Oh I am excited. I am excited to let every Mookie homer screaming across Chavez Ravine carve a scar into the stinking corpse of the 2020 Red Sox campaign. Pink me now, this is all I am anymore.
Because of the weird economic structure of baseball and the fact that younger players make up an increasing proportion of the best players in the game, yes, most of the elite talents in baseball are underpaid. This fact does not make any of them any less valuable.
If you want to get better by 6-7 wins right now, you'll have a hell of a time doing that while spending just $27M worth of cash or assets. That's what Betts being grossly underpaid means in a practical sense.
The Trout situation is subtly different from most post-arb guys because he's so ridiculously good, far better than anyone else who signed a contract in the last two decades, that a "fair" contract for him looks totally bonkers, and blows all recent comps out of the water. Combine that with Trout's apparent disinterest in maximizing his income, and you get a huge deal which still carries some incredible surplus value.
We can accept intuitively that something is weird about Trout's situation, right? He has literally been as good as Bryce Harper and Manny Machado put together, but his AAV is 65% of their combined average. The usual criticism of $/WAR calculations is that they don't give additional value for condensing more WAR into a single roster spot, and here we are with a guy who puts up 9, making less than guys we expected to put up about that much between the two of them.
Betts' free agency is going to be interesting to watch because of this. He's not Trout, but he's about as close to him as anyone has come, and Trout's contract would probably be more or less fair value for him. Assuming he performs as usual this year, weather he gets more or less than that is probably going to come down to precedent vs cold calculations on how much a guy like this is really worth. Free Agency is a lousy spectator sport, but at least this one will hold some academic appeal.
If you want to get better by 6-7 wins right now, you'll have a hell of a time doing that while spending just $27M worth of cash or assets. That's what Betts being grossly underpaid means in a practical sense.
The Trout situation is subtly different from most post-arb guys because he's so ridiculously good, far better than anyone else who signed a contract in the last two decades, that a "fair" contract for him looks totally bonkers, and blows all recent comps out of the water. Combine that with Trout's apparent disinterest in maximizing his income, and you get a huge deal which still carries some incredible surplus value.
We can accept intuitively that something is weird about Trout's situation, right? He has literally been as good as Bryce Harper and Manny Machado put together, but his AAV is 65% of their combined average. The usual criticism of $/WAR calculations is that they don't give additional value for condensing more WAR into a single roster spot, and here we are with a guy who puts up 9, making less than guys we expected to put up about that much between the two of them.
Betts' free agency is going to be interesting to watch because of this. He's not Trout, but he's about as close to him as anyone has come, and Trout's contract would probably be more or less fair value for him. Assuming he performs as usual this year, weather he gets more or less than that is probably going to come down to precedent vs cold calculations on how much a guy like this is really worth. Free Agency is a lousy spectator sport, but at least this one will hold some academic appeal.
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