Using marginal wins to evaluate the Mariners
Sooooooooo, I’ve seen comments that ask “isn’t there some way to measure how much money the M’s are wasting?” or “Can’t we use salary to evaluate GMs?” and so on.
Yes. Fortunately, the heavy lifting on this has already been done for us, probably best by Doug Pappas, who in 2004 wrote a great essay in that year’s Baseball Prospectus. He proposed that we look at how much each additional win cost a team, compared to a team made up of league-minimum players, who would go about .300 on the season. That team wins 49 games and costs $10.5m to field (I know… I’ll get to that). So if you spend another $10m and get 10 wins, you’re paying $1m/win.
Pretty easy.
Right now, the M’s are on track to win 57 games and pay $118m (rounded!) to do it, for a cost of $13m/marginal win.
The next-highest is the Yankees at $5.6m, followed by the Tigers at $5m, the Dodgers at $4m, the Mets at $3.8m… and at the other extreme, you have the Marlins, paying only $.3m/marginal win, the Rays, at $.7m, and the Athletics, at $1m. The average is about $3m.
The Mariners are on track to pay more than twice as much for a win as any other team in baseball, and four times what the average team pays.
But if you’re skeptical that you could field a team on a $11m payroll budget, I understand entirely. You have to spend on minor league free agents, and bringing non-roster guys into camp, and so on.
Assume then that the Marlins’ budget of $22m is the least you can possibly spend to get a team on the field, and that team would go .300. The Marlins then have to be dropped from the chart, because they’re getting an infinite return on their marginal dollar.
The M’s would then spend $11.7m/win, still over twice as much as the Yankees, and about five times as much as the league average.
That’s an amazingly bad return on their investment, and if the ownership group only looks at one metric, I recommend that: the M’s get half as much for their payroll dollar as any other team, and the people who did it can’t tell you what happened, except to say that they got unlucky. Again.
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oh, hell, all we need is a true baseball savvy and a feel for the game!
Nuts!
That is hard to believe. Not that I don’t believe it. I’m just saying, it’s hard to believe.
I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know it was that bad.
wow. i knew we were burning money, but crikey . . .
is there any way to break it down even further looking at marginal wins per player and then see which indvidual salary was the worst spent (or in our case, rank them in a weird anti-topten).
It galls me to no end how NO ONE in the front office is taking responsibility for anything. The unmitigated gall of them to call us all stupid and act as though this was all a “perfect storm” of “bad luck”.
I would be able to stomach all of this MUCH better if the bigwigs who are lining their pockets with a TAX PAYER funded stadium would even begin to admit that maybe, just maybe, they screwed up.
Instead all we’re getting is the baseball equivalent of “let them eat cake”.
Not enough fans are calling for action. They are still drawing on average 27.000 fans a game. The Blog-o-shpere type tend to be fans than Joe Smoe fan. So while we may know whats really going on. Bob the Mariner fan is busy buying into exactly what the front office says…”We still believe we are just in a super slump and we are going to break out of it and make the playoffs”. They don’t know they real problems, or they refuse to accept them.
And as unfortunate as it is, those are the fans that are taken more seriously than us.
Ahem…The Blog-o-shpere type tend to be smarter fans than Joe Smoe fan.
you’d think after 5 years of this $&^! that the avg fan would start to catch on. I can’t believe that Bavasi has been given so long despite his lack of results. Even given the fact that our FO is infatuated with results based analysis, you’d think that pesky result called playoff appearances would have clued them in.
I still can’t get over the Adam Jones trade. Before this offseason, I knew Bavasi sucked, but knew that there were worse franchises out there, namely baltimore. Then we get absolutely bent over by what I perceived to be THE worst. I guess you could call it a passing of the torch (dunce cap).
You would think, but it hasn’t happened. The Baltimore fans got smart, they learned. but Baseball isn’t a way of life here, and so average fan may care, but they don’t bleed baseball like some of us. They also are stubborn just like the FO and refuse to learn new analysis and math. These are my experiences. They people giving the Mariners the most money are the average fan. Thats not good.
what do we need to do? Buy billboards to inform the ignorant masses? We are now the WORST franchise in MLB, and I’m not even talking about wins. Even Sabean seems like an upgrade. At least he isn’t drafting relief pitchers in the first round.
As much as I would love for us to ahve the #1 pick next year with Strasburg looming, I worry that this FO would go and draft another catcher or a LOOGY, or something similarly stupid rather than take the right choice . . .
Trust me Sabean isn’t a upgrade.
But we will have a whole other crew running the draft next year.
FWIW, the M’s should win about 41% of their games vs. league average competition, so they’ve underperformed even what their stats indicate thus far this season. The vast majority of MLB teams fall between 40 and 60%, so 41% is really pretty horrible. Only the Twins at 40% are worse in the AL. The Gnats and their 35% mark are conjuring up images of the 2003 Tigers. Is this series really going to draw 100 thousand people? LMAO!
First of all, for real fans there’s more to this game than win or lose, or even how the game is played. The father and son thing, or the kind of obsession that has people who are not tied in any other way to analyse the team in myriad ways. Baseball, even stinky baseball is a good way to spend time. Readers here know this. But it’s the Bob the M’s fan kind of fan that is the first to fall away. Bandwagon fans that annoy the hell out of you during the good times don’t come long after hope fades. Furthermore, there are those who come just to see the talent playing in grey.
But that is the other component of this argument. The M’s are losing opportunity income as well as overspending for results. $75M spent to no good end on salary PLUS another $100M or more for income not recieved in gate money, merchandise, and lowered amounts for radio and cable income when those contracts renew. Not only are the owners losing income, but the bonds on Safeco will not be paid off in as timely as fashion, so the taxpayers also lose out in the pocketbook as well as in civic pride.
Perhaps too many people are still coming to the games for the effect to be pronounced, but one thing that can be done is for those of us who are going to the games is to start chants- “Lincoln must Go” “Bavasi must go”, and so forth. Knicks fans did that all last year, and it made the newspapers, and the pressure was increased. We need to learn some of that New York rudeness and apply it.
Well discount the Adrian Beltre Bobblehead crowd
Just because the FO comes out with a cover story doesn’t mean they expect everyone to buy it. People in their position are generally more cynical than that, hoping to sway as many of the multitudes as possible. So if it’s any consolation, we needn’t feel insulted by it–they assume it’ll just roll off us. Or maybe I’m as jaded as they are for thinking so. I prefer to think of it as evidence that they’re running scared a little bit.
Gotta like the chants-from-the-stands idea. Add Armstrong to the list along with Lincoln and Bavasi.
And, yeah…I grew up watching these guys play .400 ball. Sometimes you have to just love baseball anyway. Even Bavasi isn’t deleterious enough to the game to make it vanish completely. He just makes GOOD baseball disappear.
Except, you can’t. The team drew 36,000 on Beltre bobblehead night, against a terrible opponent with no local fanbase or big star players. Today they drew around 32,000. Tomorrow is Father’s Day, which will draw another big crowd.
Say what you want about the team’s performance, and what it means to ‘smart’ fans, but at least this weekend, against the Washington freakin’ Nationals, the M’s continue to be a very big, and very big money-making, attraction.
I for one don’t buy into the ‘they don’t want to win’ mindset (they are, after all, spending a lot of money on players this year.) I do think that, as an organization, they aren’t SMART ENOUGH to win. They spend money well, but not wisely.
As long as they continue to lose, but make money doing so, the whole ‘we’re terribly unlucky, nobody could have seen it coming, it’s all the fault of bad chemistry/lack of accountability’ bugbear may be enough to keep the largely absentee ownership group off of the backs of the likes of Lincoln and Armstrong, and that thought depresses me.
Oh, and the really scary flipside of the $/marginal win analysis is that some REALLY smart businessman might someday buy a team, hire a brilliant front office, and then plead poverty. The team will get a Marlins-like (or A’s-like) amount of cheap marginal wins, see stadium-generated revenue jump, franchise-value appreciate at rates that destroy what those millions could do elsewhere, and sell for massive profits.
What kind of money could the M’s have raked in if after, say, the 2001 season, they’d switched front offices with the A’s, but kept player payroll at something like $75 million per year?
In the final analysis, you’re probably better off keeping your money in the market, and any number of esoteric investment vehicles, but man, for the random billionaire out there, who wants a little more use value out of his money for a few years…
Oh sure, when you frame it that way, the Ms FO looks bad. But when you frame the situation this way:
It’s clear that marginal wins theory is flawed because it dramatically undervalues versatility and giving the manager options etc.
Really, if “stat heads” really wanted to contribute to baseball, they’d develop better metrics to measure leadership and heart-the true last frontier. God has taken care of the talent part. The Ms know the talent evaluation part (heck Morrow is a perfect example-how many teams can brag that they’ve duplicated what the Ms have accomplished with Morrow?????). It’s just that last frontier left….
I agree with the analysis. But, to be fair, the Mariners FO can claim they did not get unlucky last year, in fact.
Sure, the Mariners have gotten terrible terrible return on their dollar, but my issue with this analysis is usually summarized by the blogger who says “we can afford to overpay for some wins” or similar sentiment. Which is that basically year in and year out, I’d much rather be a fan of a team that normally does “bad” at this. i.e. I’d rather be a Yankees, Tigers, Dodgers, or Mets fan than a Marlins, Rays, A’s (well maybe not A’s) fan.
Or to put it another way, I’d rather have my team spend and not succeed than not spend at all and do well in cost per marginal win.
The two teams that did “best” last year were the Rays and Marlins also, and they lost 99 and 91 games…
Ah.. but if we spent the same amount and were as good at it as the A’s… why we’d win 156 games!!!
Yet the Marlins have two championships since the last time the Tigers, Dodgers, or Mets won one.
and from Larry Stone this morning, quoting Larry Beinfest:
“You try to be as productive as possible with each dollar,” Beinfest said. “But we’re hopeful in the future that a new stadium would increase revenue, and some of that would be funneled into payroll. In the interim, we’ll deal with what we have and try to be as productive as possible, like we always do.”
There are a lot of season ticket holder or multi-game package holders that were suckered into buying packages this year who will not be back next year, not at any price, or not at current prices.
These poor devils have sunk costs that they unload. If they sell them its at a steep discount and a seat gets a butt, and if they give them a seat gets a butt.
So they (or someone) go the to games rather than hold a ticket bonfire on the beach.
I hear this lament on KJR all the time, but the fact is people don’t want to walk away from that big of an investment. There is always something to see at the park, and every once in a while even a blind squirrel finds a nut and the mariners some times win. People will use their tickets.
It would be interesting to see actual box office sales for current games or near future games broken out from game-package sales. But I don’t know where to find that data.
Next year’s season ticket sales are going to be decimated.
I’ve done the math before on simple $/win and the M’s are the worst over the past 5 years in the aggregate, too. There is absolutely no doubt that the M’s are the worst at converting dollars in to wins.
That said, they are still pretty good at converting a baseball team into profits for the owners. Imagine that the Mariners were a Microbrewery rather a baseball team. They’d be Full Sail, most likely. Pretty bad, at least in comparison to their competitors (e.g. Deschutes, Bridgeport), but for some reason still profitable. It’s tough to argue with that kind of success.
Very nice post. Thanks for the great info DMZ.
I wonder what the marginal win cost looks like if you include the stadium subsidy.
I’ve been saying it for a while…Full page ads in paper with excellent analysis such as this. Gotta educate the masses before you can incite the revolt.
“Mariners Spend $12 Million Just to Get a Win.”
That will catch some eyes.
Whoops. Should read “the papers.”
I wasn’t really trying to revert to cave-man dialect.
Yes, this is a good point. The first dollar spent should be more effective than the $200MMth dollar spent. Cheap-o teams tend to ignore free agents because of money and thus have roster spots to hand to above-replacement-level youngsters who are paid at replacement level.
The best solution is to use a non-linear sliding scale for $$/win. A basic one would be assume up to $30MM each win costs $1MM, between $30MM and $80MM $2.5MM per win, and above $80MM $5MM per win. Should be too hard to make that much prettier, continuous, and accurate.
Howard Lincoln knows exactly how I feel when it concerns this year’s team.
I sent back a pair of tickets a Boston game with a letter that I would not be spending ANY of my money at the park this year. I told them that anyone with more than a passing interest in baseball could not seriously believe this team was constructed to compete this year and we’d be lucky to see a .500 win team on the field this year. I also hit them with a “we don’t care about your bobble-head giveaways and knitting nights,” and they might “want to join the 21st century” when it comes to evaluating talent.
I received a response from Mr. Lincoln, dated the 30th of May, he says that like me, he’s frustrated and disappointed by our team’s performance, especially given the high expectations we had at the beginning of the season and our high Major League player payroll. Also I’m simply not correct about saber metrics, they employ two people who are highly skilled in all aspects of saber metrics.
Also it was this ownership group that saved the Mariners for Seattle and has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the team here. We didn’t do that for profit… (Really, then why would you do it?)
Sometimes I am so frustrated this year, I really don’t know if I should laugh or cry. This also makes we believe this front office really has no clue how to evaluate or make adjustments in regard to any aspect of the game. ARRRRRGHHHHH
31-
unreal. That last part where they basically said “since we saved your precious team, you need to genuflect at our sight and be eternally grateful regardless of how we run the team.” is really offensive to me. Way to go. Just call us all stupid and ungrateful. Gee, thanks.
Also, if the team does employ people who are gifted at sabermetrics, I get the feeling they don’t actually listen to them. Probably view them as some sort of anecdotal court jester to cheer them up while they count their piles of revenue knowing, deep down, that grit is what wins games more than talent.
The last San Francisco draft choice position player to make an All-Star team was Royce Clayton, who was drafted in 1988. Ponder that for awhile. It can be worse.
Give me a break, Howard. Just because you overpay for a Miguel Cairo or Carlos Silva doesn’t make him worth what you pay, just like trading five players for Erik Bedard (who at least performs) doesn’t make him worth five players. In retrospect, I have a lot more admiration for the general managers who had to struggle here because they were the ones who had to trade away the Phil Bradleys, Mark Langstons and Tino Martinezs of the world and try to get some value out of them, rather than the situation that Lincoln, Armstrong and Bavasi find themselves in, where they’re the ones who are in the position to trade for the guys other teams can’t afford. If you put together a team with superior resources and can’t outperform Dan O’Brien, you really should fall on your sword.
You know it. I would never take Sabean to replace Bavasi, ever. Atonetti would be amazing. I can dream.
This is either the greatest piece of satire I have ever read, or it is the dumbest post in USSM history.
I feel like that analysis is not very fair to high payroll teams. That approach does not distinguish between the difference in value of a 60th win or 90th win. A team like the Mets probably could have fielded an 80 win team fairly easily this year but have spent far more money so that they can try to reach 90 wins (and the playoffs). I’m not saying your conclusions are wrong at all but I’m pretty sure there is a less biased metric to use.
For those that think assuming all wins cost the same is not fair (I hear you), how about this approach:
From a thread at The Book Blog, Tango and Dave Gassko arrived at this approximation for expected win percentage based on payroll, where P is team payroll and L is league-average payroll:
win% = (P + 2L)/(P + 5L)
Using USA Today’s salary info and that formula, here’s each team’s pro-rated wins compared to expectation given their payroll:
Team Dif
Tampa Bay Rays 21.8
Chicago Cubs 18.2
Florida Marlins 16.4
Oakland Athletics 13.9
Philadelphia Phillies 12.6
St. Louis Cardinals 12.4
Los Angeles Angels 11.0
Boston Red Sox 11.0
Arizona Diamondbacks 9.5
Chicago White Sox 5.0
Baltimore Orioles 4.7
Minnesota Twins 4.1
Milwaukee Brewers 3.7
Pittsburgh Pirates 3.1
Texas Rangers 2.3
Toronto Blue Jays -1.2
Cincinnati Reds -2.2
Atlanta Braves -3.1
Houston Astros -3.4
Cleveland Indians -4.2
San Diego Padres -6.8
San Francisco Giants -8.6
New York Mets -9.1
Washington Nationals -10.6
New York Yankees -11.2
Los Angeles Dodgers -11.3
Kansas City Royals -12.6
Colorado Rockies -13.4
Detroit Tigers -13.8
Seattle Mariners -27.9
It’s a similar list to the linear method, but some of the high-payroll teams actually look good (Red Sox, Cubs, Angels, White Sox) while some of the low payroll teams suffer (Rockies, Royals, Nationals).
More importantly to this thread, the Mariners are still dead last. By a lot.
Without any humility, I can claim authorship or neither… There simply is too much competition at both ends of the spectrum and I have become too jaded during the Bavasi regime to have the energy to compete with on the satire side of things. It takes too much energy to post high quality content and frankly it takes even more effort to beat some of the zingers on the other end of the spectrum too.
Basically, I’ve been beaten down to a point where I hope my haikus are appropriately recognized as a cry for help. With that, here is another:
Bavasi bald bold
Bavasi stout tall resolve
Mission accomplished.
37.
Very cool, I think that logistic-type equation is the logical next step after Doug Pappas’s initial Marginal Wins work. However it appears from that thread that they never did settle on the best coefficients; in their formulation (same basic equation but rearranged from the one quoted above) David Gassko suggested x = 0.6 but said that he’d basically just eyeballed it. TangoTiger seemed to favor or at least suggest x = 2, but Gassko thought that seemed way high. And then the thread seemed to end.