January 30, 2008
Adding Wins
How many wins does Johan Santana add to the Mets in 2008? It depends on who Johan is replacing. If you assume he's pushing likely fifth starter Mike Pelfrey out of the rotation, then it's a huge boost. Baseball Prospects (subscription required) rated Pelfrey at 0.5 wins above replacement in 2007. Maybe over a full season and some improvement, Pelfrey might reach 2.0 in 2008. Santana's WARP in 2007 came in at 9.1. So compared to the fifth starter, Santana is adding seven to nine wins.
But Pelfrey was in the rotation due to the loss of Tom Glavine. Tom posted a WARP of 4.1 in 2007. In that case, Santana is adding five wins over 2007. That's fantastic. The Mets needed those five wins last season. It's also difficult to find players who can make a five win impact. Landing a player like that without losing a major league starter or their number one prospect makes this a great deal for New York.
Update: PECOTAs are not out yet, but Nate Silver unveils Santana's in this BP post. They project Santana's WARP to be 7.5 in 2008, meaning he's adding 3 1/2 wins over Glavine. That would still have put the Mets into the playoffs last year.
Posted by David Pinto at
08:22 AM
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Off Topic - I remember a while back, probably more than a year ago, this blog - I think it was this blog - linked to someone who had put together an 25-year all-star team for the Mets, choosing one player from each season and constructing a balanced team including bench players, bullpen, etc. Anybody else remember that? I was trying to find it but I couldn't turn it up either by googling or searching this site.
David,
In your opinion is 3.5 wins worth 25 mil a year?
You're mixing apples and oranges (or at least comparing non-comparable apples) - either you use Glavine and Santana's actual 2007 WARPs (+5 Santana) or their projected 2008 WARPs - I doubt Glavine is projected to repeat 4.1 in 2008, although he's probably above 2.5, so less than 2007's +5 for Santana, but also more than +3.4. You also have the trickle-down effect, so that instead of a returning Pedro replacing Glavine, Pedro is now replacing Pelfrey/Lawrence (with Maine, Perez & El Duque as constants). Put differently, if Pedro 2008 is roughly equal to Glavine 2007, then Santana 2008 being 5-6 wins above Pelfrey 2008 is the right comparison.
Ray,
If it makes the difference between making the playoffs and not making the playoffs, yes.
Ray, if it lets you make the playoffs *and* gives you a better chance to win once there, it's worth quite a bit.
While I think this is a good question to ask, the answer is dependent on a couple of things:
a. How many extra wins for how many extra dollars? (Assuming that Santana is replacing Glavine, it's 3.5 extra wins for ZERO extra dollars - they're currently scheduled to make about $14M each next year. It's about $14M for 6 wins over Pelfrey, assuming he makes virtually nothing.)
b. What's the value of those extra wins? This depends on how good the rest of the team is ... adding 10 wins to a 60-win club is not that useful, but adding 3 wins to an 85 win club is quite useful.
c. What's the value associated with playing in each postseason game? If Santana adds, on average, 2 extra postseason games, how much is that worth to the Mets? (An analyst ran these numbers for the Yankees and concluded that, because they were going to make the playoffs anyway, Santana wasn't as useful in 2008 to them. On the other hand, one extra win for the Mets in 2007 would have netted them something like $25M in postseason revenue, so you can see how this is a very situational value.)
Anyway, the long and short of it is that if the Mets can get adequate compensation for the length of the contract (and hence the increasing cumulative risk of injury or ineffectiveness), Santana seems like he's worth it to me.