skyking162

My buddy’s girlfriend’s favorite player is Melky Cabrera. She likes him so much that my friend not only drafted him for his fantasy team, he drafted every Cabrera in the American League. Cute, right? Not really, but that got me thinking, how many Melkies would a major league team need to make a run at winning the World Series?

First of all, what’s so special about Melky Cabrera? Well, for one he’s almost exactly average. Some Yankee fans think he has the potential to become a star, but in 2007 he hit .273/.327/.391, which is pretty average adjusting for position. In center field, his range is a little below average, but his strong arm makes for that.

Second, Melky makes the league minimum, about $400,000. I can’t think of two more theoretically pure assumptions than providing league-average production for the league-minimum salary. This type of value is vastly underrated.

League-average position players are about 2.25 wins better than replacement level over a full season (although you’ll often find me rounding it down to an even two). On the free agent market, priced at $4.5 million per win, Melky would cost $10.5 million.

Let’s assume that a team must win 93 games to make the playoffs. Obviously this number varies year to year, but over the past five years the Wild Card team has averaged 95.4 wins in the AL and 90.0 in the NL.

A team’s absolute minimum payroll is $10 million (25 players at $400,000 each) and a replacement-level team would win 48 games. In order to get to 93 wins, teams need to find 45 more wins. With only free agents, that would cost $212.5 million, something only the Yankees can (and do) afford.

But each Melky brought up through the farm system saves $10.1 million season. That money can buy additional wins on the free agent market. Here’s a graph of the payroll required to reach 93 wins assuming our theoretical team consists of only Melkies, free agents, and cheap scrubs:

The good news is that we can theoretically make the playoffs with a league-minimum payroll if we have 20 Melkies. Of course, that’s not actually possible since there isn’t enough playing time for 20 full-time players. 16 is about the maximum (9 hitters, 5 starters, and 2 high-leverage relievers). It’s also not realistic for a farm system to produce 20 league-average players within a three-year stretch (before they start earning arbitration-level salaries). Even with a $100 million payroll, we’d need to bring up 11 Melkies within three years of each other. That’s tough to do.

What if we turned some of the Melkies into Hanleys — players who make the league-minimum, but are twice as good at 4.5 wins per full season. Assuming we can bring an equal number of Melkies and Hanleys up through the farm system, we now only need two-thirds the number of prospects to be as financially efficient, since one Hanley is worth two Melkies.

Now, with a $100 million payroll, you only need seven total Melkies and Hanleys. That’s still over two prospects per year, however. And if you’re the Rockies, Diamondbacks, or Padres, spending about $55 million per year, you’ll need to produce over three per year.

Let’s make one last adjustment to the model. In addition to Melkies and Hanleys, let’s add Bubba Melkies and Bubba Hanleys, players who perform like their namesakes, but are in their first or second year of arbitration eligibility. These players are paid at about half the rate of free agents, or $2.25 million per win. A Bubba Melky costs $5.5 million and a Bubba Hanley costs $10.5 million. (Because players in their third year of arbitration earn nearly what free agents do, I’m counting them as free agents. A good strategy would be for teams to trade these sixth-year players for more Melkies and Hanleys.)

So, to recap, we’ve got Melkies who are paid nothing for league-average production for three years and become Bubba Melkies who are paid $2.25 million per win for two more years. We’ve got Hanleys who are paid nothing for borderline All-Star production for three years and become Bubba Hanleys who are paid $2.25 million per win for two more years. We’ve got free agents, who are paid $4.5 million per win for as long as we want them. And we’ve got scrubs who are paid nothing for doing nothing. Assuming a constant stream of Melkies and Hanleys, here’s the cost of 93 wins given the number of young players on the team:

The slope of this graph isn’t quite as steep as the last one, but we’re allowing ourselves to keep our Melkies and Hanleys for five years instead of three, meaning we can produce fewer of them per season. Given a $100 million payroll, a team would need to produce just under two per year. A $50 million payroll can now compete with 2.5 prospects per year.

Is it easy to produce such a stellar crop of prospects on a yearly basis? Definitely not. But this is 93 wins we’re talking about — it shouldn’t be easy.

Take the Brewers for example. They’ve got ten young guys providing significant value to the team:

Hanleys: Fielder, Hart
Bubba Hanleys: Sheets
Melkies: Braun
Bubba Melkies: Hall, Capuano, Hardy, Bush, Weeks

With a $71 million payroll, a win total in the high 80s is pretty much what we’d expect from the graph.

How does your favorite team stack up? Count the number of Melkies, Hanleys, Bubba Melkies, and Bubba Hanleys. If it’s under five, something is wrong no matter what your payroll is . If it’s approaching ten, you’ve got a good shot even with a below-average payroll. (Say hi to the Indians.) Without any money, you’re going to need 13-15 talented young players. The only team in this category is the Rays, who will perhaps be joined by the Marlins and Athletics in a couple years.

I hope I’ve made my point about the importance of cheap young talent. Yes, you need to sign free agents to fill holes — a farm system can only provide so much. But the foundation of any successful organization is its young players. They provide wins in addition to freeing up money to go spend on those free agents. Moral of the story? You can never have too many Melkies.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.