Bay's Signing Boosts a Flawed Club

In Jason Bay, the Mets get the middle-of-the-order bat they desperately needed while assuaging a fan base hell-bent on acquiring big-name talent at any cost.

Bay, as you might have heard, is a right-handed slugger with classic "old player" skills. He strikes out often and doesn't boast high batting averages, but his ability to take a walk and hit for power make him one of the best offensive outfielders in baseball. Bay's .921 OPS last season lead all AL OF's, and his prodigious pull-power should fit well in Citi Field, an expansive park that's actually quite kind to sluggers with Bay's swing path. His troubles with breaking balls are well-documented, but he can rope a fastball with the best of them.

While Bay provides ample value with the bat, his glove is enough of a problem to call into question the prudence of Mets GM Omar Minaya, who handed the 31-year-old Bay a contract valued at $82 million over five years. Sophisticated defensive metrics, such as UZR and Fielding Bible, rank Bay among the worst left-fielders in baseball. Now, as Keith Law pointed out, Fenway's quirky confines have a tangible effect on these defensive ranking systems. A 314 foot fly ball to LF is a 'can of corn' in 29 other MLB parks, but in Fenway it's a wall-ball double if not a round-tripper. UZR hasn't yet adjusted for this phenomenon, making Red Sox LF's inherently underrated. Which means Bay, like Manny before him, probably isn't quite as wretched as the metrics suggest, though it's still a stretch to call him adequate. Bay was able to mask his defensive limitations 81 games a year, but his deficiencies with the leather quickly became apparent in some of the AL's bigger ballyards (Seattle, Oakland, LA). And now that Bay's left to patrol the expanse of Citi Field -- not to mention the rest of the NL East, which houses huge parks in Atlanta and Florida -- his limited range, feeble arm and bulky knees should turn the visiting-half of home games into a Ringling Brothers act.

So we know the Mets forked over a bunch of money to a one-way player masquerading as a major league outfielder. But how much is Bay worth annually? Did the Mets overpay? Let's find out.

First, when determining the value or "worth" of a player, it's important to explain what teams are actually striving for: replacement wins. In the course of a major league season 4,860 games are played. 2,430 of those games are won, and 2,430 are lost. Further distilling the schedule, a team of rag-tag replacements can be expected to win, at minimum, 48 games*. Which means on the eve of Opening Day 2010 you can etch in stone 48 W next to each team's name in the standings. So with an additional 1,440 wins out of play (48 wins x 30 teams), that leaves 990 "replacement wins" (2430 - 1440) to decide who's playing in October and who's booking tee times with Tiger at the Playboy Club.

Estimating the amount of money major league teams pay for these valuable replacement wins is tricky, but it can be done. First, you take the total money spent on payroll (2.67 billion) and divide that amount by the number of replacement wins (990). That gives us 2.31 million, which won't get you very far in the free agent market. I'll let someone much smarter than I explain the rest of the process.

*since WWII, only three teams have failed to win 48 games in a season: the '52 Pirates, the '03 Tigers and, you guessed it, the '62 Mets.

Courtesy of Fangraphs:

If you want to compete in the market for available wins, you have to know what the going rate for a win is, and the easiest way to calculate that is to look at the free agent market. Let’s look back at 2007, for instance. 90 free agents signed major league contracts last winter, ranging from Alex’s Rodriguez $275 million deal to Josh Towers‘ $400,000 contract with the Rockies. The sum of those 90 contracts paid out $396 million in 2008. To figure out what the average cost per win of a 2007 free agent was, though, we need to know how many wins that group was worth.To calculate this, I did a three year weighted average of their win values, then multiplied that value by .95 to factor in aging and estimate what teams considered a player’s true talent win rate for 2008. In total, I came up with 88 wins, or $4.5 million per win. That’s what major league teams were paying for a marginal win last winter, so for 2008, that’s a players dollar per win value as listed on the site. I re-did this for all years going back to 2002, and the dollars per win for each are as follows:

2002 – $2.6m / win
2003 – $2.8m / win
2004 – $3.1m / win
2005 – $3.4m / win
2006 – $3.7m / win
2007 – $4.1m / win
2008 – $4.5m / win

Bill James and some astute fans on Baseball Fangraphs project Bay to be worth 30.7 runs next season, or 3.1 wins (10 runs = 1 win). To put a dollar figure on Bay's 2010 value, we'll simply multiply his projected performance (3.1 wins) by the market rate for a win ($3.5 million in this miserable economy). Which makes the answer to our initial question -- how much is Jason Bay worth annually? -- $10.85 million.

The Mets are overpaying slightly for Bay's services next season, but an extra $5 million for a big market club like the Mets won't hamper the franchise going forward. In the successive years of Bay's contract, however, that $5 million in lost value likely will balloon to a more cringe-inducing figure as Bay enters his decline phase and inevitably moves to 1B because he can't handle the outfield without a clown car.

The Mets added a nice hitter here, but paying $16 million per season to a one-way player on the wrong side of 30 isn't the type of move that should inspire feelings of confidence from a dedicated fan base, as it's not going to vault a flawed team up the totem pole. The Mets still have several issues to address, particularly in their starting rotation, which boasts one front-line pitcher and a host of question marks, resulting from injuries (Maine), inconsistency (Pelfrey) and incompetence (Perez).

Why Beltre is a No-Brainer

This off-season, I fully expect Angels leadoff man Chone Figgins to garner most of the free agent buzz at third base. Figgins, 32, is coming off a career year both at the plate and in the field. He posted a high on-base percentage (.395), dazzled with the glove and ran around the bases like Secretariat at The Belmont.

But another AL West third baseman strikes me as the better play for a club desperately seeking a power infusion and top-notch defense.

His name is Adrian Beltre.

When discussing Beltre the first thing that comes to mind is his glove. For numerous reasons – subjectivity in categorizing hit type (line drive, fly ball, etc), ball speed, defensive positioning – Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), a metric that determines how many runs a fielder saves or costs his team relative to a league average defender at his position, can’t be trusted entirely. But both UZR and the Fielding Bible have reached a pretty strong consensus on Beltre’s defensive ability: he’s tremendous, and somewhere around 12-15 runs above average.

So, if Mike Lowell bounces back and regains some of his range at third, how much of an upgrade does Beltre represent? I’m unaware of the team’s numbers and medical reports, of course, but it wouldn’t shock me one bit to find out Beltre’s a dozen runs better with the glove, probably more, as Lowell ranked dead last in virtually every respected defensive measure (UZR rated him 10 runs below average, while Fielding Bible was equally unkind).

Offensively, aside from his outlier contract year in 2007, Lowell has pretty consistently posted a batting line (.338 OBP/.465 SLG roughly) which translates to 4-5 runs above the average hitter. Beltre, on the other hand, has displayed similar on-base skills and more power while doing his work in a pretty tough hitters’ park, Safeco Field, which massacres right-handed batters. Beltre's park-adjusted runs above average (RAA) numbers typically have rested in the +8-10 area.

His shoulder and groin injuries from this past season aside, Beltre’s three-year splits average out to .327 OBP and .468 SLG, or an OPS+ of 108 – 4 percent higher than Lowell’s output. By performing a crude ballpark adjustment using Baseball Reference’s park averages, we can expect Beltre’s Fenway batting line to reach .339/.488 -- or 10 runs above average – provided his offensive skills haven’t tapered off. Should Beltre fail to realize his three-year splits, he’s still Lowell’s equal with the bat and more than a win better on defense.

If you need further proof, Fangraphs recently conducted a study comparing Beltre’s slugging percentage on fly balls hit at Safeco Field to fly balls hit on the road, as well as the angle of those balls in play. What they found, unsurprisingly, was Beltre hit for more power away from cavernous Safeco. But it was such a significant disparity that, in Dave Allen's words, makes Beltre "in many other ballparks... an above average offensive player. He has the chance to be a solid free agent signing once again.”

As for the direction of his power, it’s mostly concentrated to left-center and hard left-field. After reading their study I couldn’t help but think it should’ve been titled “Why The Red Sox Should Sign Adrian Beltre.”

Using Marcel’s 3-2-1 salary projection system, Beltre would rightly command $13.5 million per season on the free agent market. That takes into account his dismal 2009 season with the bat (.304/.379), when he was still overall a more valuable player than the Red Sox’ incumbent.

While Figgins’ defense is exceptional, the brunt of his offensive value stems from A) his newfound ability to get on base at an elite level (which may or may not be sustainable) and B) his legs. He’s certainly one of the more underrated players in the game, but if the Red Sox front office truly wants to improve its offensive production away from Fenway Park – a problem resulting from drastic home/road splits throughout the lineup, particularly in the power department -- it can ill-afford to supplant Lowell’s bat (.335/.384 on the road) with Figgins’ career .097 ISOp. That doesn’t fix the problem. As past studies suggest, adding a low OBP, high slugging player to an OBP-heavy lineup provides more value than simply signing another high OBP, low slugging guy, like Figgins.

Conclusion: Beltre looks to be a two win upgrade over Lowell. With him and the newly acquired Marco Scutaro manning 3B and SS, respectively, the left-side of the Red Sox' infield will have made significant strides in the run prevention department.