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January 29, 2009

Prospectus Hit and Run

Manny's Five Easy Choices

by Jay Jaffe

The most boring standoff in baseball history continues. Manny Ramirez and agent Scott Boras still seek a four- or five-year deal worth at least $100 million working in a bleak financial landscape that has teams looking to cut costs while players prepare to settle for lesser deals than they'd have received via arbitration. Dodgers General Manager Ned Colletti hasn't budged beyond an initial two-year, $45 million offer (plus club option), posturing with All-Star form at Boras' failure to dignify his advances with a response. Boras claims to be negotiating with several unnamed and probably fictional teams (the Gas House Gorillas' GM could not be reached for comment), having failed to lure Giants' GM Brian Sabean, the rare exec to publicly express interest in Ramirez, into sparking a bidding war. Yaaaaaawn.

With spring training rapidly approaching and Baseball Prospectus 2009 in the pipeline, we can use our fresh PECOTA projections to estimate the marginal gains several teams would make if they signed the free-spirited free agent. The PECOTA forecasting system (invented by Nate Silver before he began predicting the outcome of presidential elections) compares a player's track record, age, and body type to the most similar players among a database of more than 20,000 major league player-seasons dating back to World War II, generating a range of performance possibilities which are expressed as percentile scores and centered around a weighted mean.

Ramirez's weighted mean forecast for 2009 is 4.3 Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP), a figure that encompasses his offensive and defensive value (or on that latter score, at 13 runs below average, his lack of same) relative to a high minor leaguer or bench player. That may seem like a conservative figure given that he totaled 7.8 WARP last year between Boston and LA, but keep in mind that he'll turn 37 in May—and age carries injury risk as well as the strong probability of a more gradual decline—and that he accumulated just 7.3 WARP in 2006 and 2007 combined due to injuries and poor defense. His 90^th-percentile forecast for 2009—a best-case scenario, if you will, and essentially the equal of what he achieved last year—calls for a .324/.417/.609 performance with 38 home runs, good for 6.9 WARP, while his worst-case, 10^th-percentile performance comes in at .257/.356/.444 with 17 home runs and 1.5 WARP.

Bearing in mind that great players are more likely to beat the odds of a system like PECOTA, thus increasing the gains estimated by this relatively simplistic approach, here are five potential landing spots for Ramirez:

• Dodgers: Still the favorites to re-sign Manny given the huge financial advantage they enjoy over the Giants and their NL West brethren, the Dodgers could easily fall back upon free agents Bobby Abreu (forecast for 3.2 WARP in 2009) or Adam Dunn (3.8 WARP) if Ramirez signs elsewhere. For the moment, however, their left fielder is punchless speedster Juan Pierre, who hit .283/.327/.328 last year, and who is owed $28.5 million over the next three years thanks to Colletti's insane largess. Pierre won't go away easily unless the Dodgers can restructure his contract along the lines of recently-released Andruw Jones, spreading out that sunk cost over a series of deferred payments which lower the team's 2009 payroll. Failing that, Juan-Be-Gone forecasts for a more-of-the-same 1.7 WARP, meaning that Ramirez would be worth an additional 2.6 wins in a division where the races have been decided by two games or less in four of the past five seasons.

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