Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
December 03, 2006
Double it and Add Thirty

In their album, Great White North, the McKenzie brothers apply the formula for converting from centigrade to Farenheit to all sorts of metric conversions (double it and add 30). For example, there are 42 metric beers in a six pack. According to Dave Sheinin of the Washington Post, general managers are doing something similar in pricing free agents:

The theorem behind the Times Two principle is simple: Take whatever value you would have assigned to a chosen free agent before this winter's madness took hold, then double it. The resulting figure, with few exceptions, will equal, or at least approximate, the total value of said free agent's actual contract.

For example, several months ago, most observers seemed to believe left fielder Alfonso Soriano -- the erstwhile Washington National whose unquestioned talent as a power hitter and base stealer is mitigated by a propensity to strike out and a pedestrian career on-base percentage of .325 -- to be worth perhaps $70 million on the free agent market. Double that figure, and poof! Soriano, who will be 31 next month, received just shy of $140 million ($136 million, to be exact) from the Chicago Cubs.

Carlos Lee, another outfielder whose flaws are no less obvious than Soriano's, might have been viewed as a $50 million player. Poof! He got $100 million from the Houston Astros. And so on and so forth.

Some teams, however, are not getting involved:

'Some of these signings don't appear too logical in some cases,' Pittsburgh Pirates GM Dave Littlefield said. 'But it takes a lot of discipline to sit back and not jump in.'

That is the beauty of the Times Two theory, as it relates to small-budget teams in a big-budget marketplace: Zero times two is still zero.


Posted by David Pinto at 04:43 PM | Free Agents | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Small budget, big budget - it doesn't matter. The smart ones are passing on the overpriced free agents.

Posted by: sabernar at December 3, 2006 04:56 PM
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