How do you judge a contract?

Is it purely based on the player's production? How about the value you paid? Does money really matter if it eventually results in a World Series? What about in comparison to other possible acquisitions?

I had been looking at Tim Wakefield's long career, and while Wake isn't anything but slightly above league average with a lifetime K/BB of 1.7 and a 4.70 FIP, I was curious how his current contract situation benefits the Red Sox.

For those of you unaware, Wake and the Red Sox have a unique contractual agreement. Tim has a "perpetuating" club option for $4m. So long as the Red Sox pick up this option in October, another $4m club option vests for the following year. Naturally, this cycle can repeat for as long as the team chooses.

So I thought of an idea. If you make me pick one statistic to measure a player's effectiveness, I'll always go with WAR. As Wins Above Replacement became more widely used, its effectiveness in team building and analyzing how pieces fit together, in my opinion, was huge. What better way to construct a team than analyze how different players supply wins, and properly tune the amount of wins you can generate at each position. When it comes to free agency, why not also judge that against how much you actually have to pay for a player?

So I present mWAR. mWAR is the amount of Wins Above Replacement awarded per million dollar spent. It's nothing groundbreaking like xFIP; but a relatively simple method for comparisons. I restricted myself to just looking at the free agent starting pitching targets in 2005 for this iteration.



Some baselines to think about.

An mWAR of 1 means a player generated 1 Win Above Replacement for each million dollars. In Wakefield's 2005 season, he contributed 4.3 WAR while making 4.64 million dollars. Pedro Martinez? 5.9 WAR, but while making 15 million dollars.

Now, I'm not saying better mWAR means the better acquisition, but it helps show you how well your money can be spent. From this graph, Kevin Millwood looks like the most successful acquisition in 2005 (and 2006, he was a free agent twice), balancing excellent WAR values (3.9,5.1,2.7,3.1) for modest payroll (7m,6m,7.5m,8.5m). Expectedly, the failed acquisition of Matt Clement and (laughably) Carl Pavano show them barely staying above 0. At least Matt had one successful campaign in 2005 before he fell completely out of baseball.

When you think of the money actually spent that offseason, the multi-million dollars spent on Derek Lowe and Pedro Martinez look rather inefficient, don't they? While Pedro had his excellent 2005, he quickly tailed off, and Derek's Lowe 36 million dollar four year contract seems a bit of an albatross as well. Kudos to the Indians and Rangers for spotting the Millwood revival.

You can graphically see my analysis by plotting WAR versus mWAR. The further to the right(X-Axis) a player is, the more valuable that specific season was in terms of WAR. The higher(Y-Axis) on the chart, the more efficient his contract was accoridng to mWAR. Naturally, this means if you hit the top right corner, you're got the perfect contract: maximuim Win Shares, maximum contract efficiency.



Once again, Wakefield and Millwood lead the charge. Millwood has 4 above average years, Wakefield had two, and Pedro had one. You can see Derek Lowe floating just below most of Millwood's data points as well, so while he wasn't a bad choice, Millwood was clearly the best signing.

So what does this have to do with Wakefield? It shows that unlike other teams signing the Carlos Silvas, Jeff Suppans, and Kyle Lohses of baseball, the Red Sox get their "league average" pitcher at a relative bargain.

Every year, that's what I expect of Wakefield: give us league-average performance at the #5 spot. It ends up being stronger and more cost effective than any other teams' veteran presence anchoring the back of the rotation. He gives you a rubber arm that can take one for the team and give up 10 runs in 8 innings when the bullpen is shot. Why pay 2 or 3 times as much for the exact same performance from those pitchers I named above that are somehow getting double digit contracts?

One day, we'll miss the payroll flexibility, overly sunburned neck, and (recent) beer league pooch the old man provides each year. While his performance overall has been slightly above average at best, Tim Wakefield has been a great asset to the organization.

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