What could have been.

Followers

December 8, 200421 yr

Back in June KW got raked over hot coals in the media, and by many here, for acquiring Freddy Garcia from the M's for the cost of a streaky, poor-hitting, catcher with a reputation for poor play-calling in '04, their top prospect and and a project of a minor league infielder...He also got a similarly poor catcher in return.

A few days later FG signed to a 3-year $27M contract extension.

Fast forward 6 months, and pitchers are getting handed incredibly rich contracts for seemingly no reason.

3yr AVG WARP Salary/yr $$$/WARP

Benson 2.03 $7.5 $3.69M

Wright 1.37 $7.0 $5.12

Wilson 3.03 $4.1 $1.35

Bradke 5.00 $9.0 $1.80

I talked a little bit about game theory and the Winner's Curse in a couple of other threads, but I won't get into it here. Pay attention to the last column, over the past few season's the Major league owners have been paying about $1M-1.25M for each Win Above Replacement. (In theory a team made up of purely AAA players will win about 60 games, WARP is a stat that approximates how many more wins above that of a AAA player that a player provides a team)

For those wondering Garcia averaged 5.43WARP the last three seasons, and garnered an extension at $9M per, meaning KW paid $1.65M per win above replacement, well under the current market value.

Given the current market, we see that not only is FG a bargain, so too is Paul Wilson!!!!

I would imagine that the opening figure to land FG would he have been a FA would have been about $11-12M/yr....

Quote