I know lately I have been attempting to discuss trades using young prospects and how we should proceed with trades. I wanted to show more of where I got this information and how it is valuable to us. The bulk of this information was condensed at this link on Beyond the Boxscore by Sky Kalkman.
I'm going to go through some of the information here as well. The first value we need to look at is a player based on his draft pick number amaryl. Here is a graph of average WAR based on selection in the draft by Sky Andrecheck at BaseballAnalysts.
As you can see there is a huge drop off after the first 30-40 picks and then it becomes less likely to top 5 WAR anafranil. This is why it has been tough to value players like Ryan Westmoreland and Casey Kelly. Kelly has value coming from the first round, but what about Westmoreland who has been ranked the number one prospect in the Sox system by BaseballProspectus.
This brings us to prospects and their value based on available scouting information. Once we have the new Baseball America top 100 and John Sickels new ratings for 2010 at MinorLeagueBall we can get a better picture of value.
Once we have the rankings we can go from the work done by Victor Wang at THT and placed into the chart here:
| Top 10 hitting prospects | $36.5M |
| Top 11-25 hitters | $25.1 |
| Top 26-50 hitters | $23.4 |
| Top 51-75 hitters | $14.2 |
| Top 76-100 hitters | $12.5 |
| Top 10 pitching prospects | $15.2 |
| Top 11-25 pitchers | $15.9 |
| Top 26-50 pitchers | $15.9 |
| Top 51-75 pitchers | $12.1 |
| Top 76-100 pitchers | $9.8 |
| Grade B pitchers (as graded by Sickels) | $7.3 |
| Grade B hitters | $5.5 |
| Grade C pitchers 22 or younger | $2.1 |
| Grade C pitchers 23 or older | $1.5 |
| Grade C hitters 22 or younger | $0.7 |
| Grade C hitters 23 or older | $0.5 |
Once we have that information we can make an accurate assumption of a players value. This isn't a perfect system, but Victor has taken almost everything into consideration when making these values. I'm also fairly confident in the scaling by BA and Sickels to trust it as well.
Teams will each have a different scouting grade of their own as well and some won't look at trades in this style, but making trades that not only match in skill level, but value is very important to teams right now. Let's see how this would work in the Roy Halladay for Clay Buchholz and Casey Kelly trade scenario.
That is based on no contract extension for Halladay and letting him walk for 2 draft picks after that season. I also put him into a slight decline and removed 0.5 WAR. That gives him a trade value of $18.9 just for 2010. If the Sox sign him long term he loses the $5.0 draft pick bonus and is worth $13.9 if there is no raise in 2010.
Buchholz on the other hand with a fairly average projection of 2.5 WAR for the next 5 years would have $38.9 million in value. If we add on Casey Kelly and only value him as a #30 pick in the draft he adds $5.2 million dollars, but he should have gone higher in the draft. (sign-ability questions with a scholarship to Tennessee for football). Even still the pair of players hold $30-45 million in value depending on how positive you are on Buchholz.I understand trying to add any of the available players like Halladay, Miguel Cabrera or Adrian Gonzalez. I also prefer to stick with younger talent who comes at a much cheaper cost. This frees us to make bids on players like J.D. Drew or Matt Holliday and pay a fair value for them with no prospect cost.
Here is the handy excel sheet from Beyond the Boxscore to calculate on your own players values.