How Much is That Player Worth?

As GMs we are faced with a number of questions about how to run our franchises. One of, if not the most important question we face is "how much is that player worth." this article will attempt to answer that question.

Similar to Alex's recent fantastic articles looking at WAR, I will rely on the concept of Replacement Level players and the VORP stat. Not being privy to the version of VORP that OOTP uses, I am basing my calculations on a Replacement Level player generating or saving approximately 80% of the league average runs. For reference, a Replacement Level team in the ABL in 2012 would score 651 runs and give up 1009 runs for a record of 48-114 - almost as bad as SoCal! (Sorry Mike, couldn't help it!)

The 24 teams of the ABL used 870 players during the regular season. 537 of them earned a VORP of 0.1 or better.

This article assumes that the 343 players at 0.0 or less earned the league minimum $500,000 that a Replacement Level player would earn.

I looked at two pools of money when making these calculations. The first is the league-wide Player Expenses, or how much we actually spent on player salaries. The second is the league-wide income, or how much money these players generated for our clubs. My goal was to divvy these pools to the players based on VORP to see how much we should have payed them or how much value they brought to our organizations.

The Replacement Level calculations that I did showed that in our league every 11 runs (10.85, if you want exact numbers) better than Replacement Level represents one additional win. Based on that I divided the 537 positive VORP into groups according to the additional wins they generated. Breaking out my trusty calculus... well, more like breaking out the simplified version of finding areas under curves, I divided the monetary pools into each of those categories proportionately to find out what dollar value each player represents.

VORP	# of Players	Salary by Player Expense1	Salary by Income2
under 5	119	$708,797	$814,867
5-10.9	99	$1,358,430	$1,794,517
11-21.9	126	$2,236,643	$3,118,865
22-32.9	80	$3,559,897	$5,114,338
33-43.9	49	$4,772,766	$6,943,350
44-54.9	35	$6,060,535	$8,885,310
55-65.9	9	$7,042,869	$10,366,675
66-76.9	12	$8,519,119	$12,592,866
77-87.9	4	$9,679,410	$14,342,589
88+	4	$12,415,892	$18,469,216

¹This is the total of all teams Player Expense lines divided proportionately by group, then evenly between all the players in the group.
²This is the total income of all the teams less twice the Staff Expense lines (since I don't have access to everyone's draft and scouting expenses), divided proportionately by group, then evenly between all the players in the group.

I haven't started to draw any conclusions, other than 55 VORP being our cutoff for the truely elite, but I thought the data was interesting enough to share as we enter the offseason.