First, a disclaimer. This is a guest post - I have not been hired by SBN or anything.

Tom Hicks paid way too much for A-Rod. There's no way A-Rod is worth $25 million a year. Scott Boras used his 2d12 enchantment magic to trick Tom Hicks. The fact that it took a decade for salaries to catch up with A-Rod's contract for Texas is evidence that it was a huge mistake. Gigantic lumberjack Paul Bunyan and his equally Brobdingnagian blue ox formed the Grand Canyon, the Great Lakes, and built Mount Hood. While this may sound like the Sesame Street game of "One of These Things is Not Like the Others," it's not. All of these things are just like the others.

While Tom Hicks may have a well-deserved reputation for haplessly using the team's resources, the most-cited example is also the worst one. A-Rod's 10 year, $252 million contract was actually what a reasonable estimate of A-Rod's expected value from 2001-2010 would be.

Going back into 2001, a marginal win on the open market was worth roughly $2.5 million. A conservative estimate at the time would have been roughly 5% growth of that figure a year. That's actually a bit more conservative than what actually happened over the decade, as 5% yearly growth would result in a win being worth a hair under $4.1 million for 2011, when most estimates have it about half-a-million more. But let's stick with 5% growth as a reasonable guess for the Rangers to make in December, 2000.

The next step is to make a projection of A-Rod's contributions from 2001 to 2010. Using ZiPS, I went back in time and projected A-Rod as of the end of the 2000 season (not a difficult exercise as I'm set up to project any player at any point in their career).

Year      WAR
2001      9.2
2002      9.2
2003      9.1 
2004      9.0 
2005      8.8
2006      8.8
2007      8.3
2008      7.6 
2009      6.5
2010      5.5
--------------
         82.0

A-Rod didn't quite hit that figure (BR and FG average at 68 WAR), but he did lose some WAR from his move to 3B when he was still a competent SS (average of UZR, TZ, and BIS has him at +5 runs a year on average while in Texas at short). Add in the marginal win value and you get:

Year      WAR     $/Win     $TOT
2001      9.2     2.5       23.3  
2002      9.2     2.6       24.3 
2003      9.1     2.8       25.4 
2004      9.0     2.9       26.3
2005      8.8     3.0       26.9
2006      8.8     3.2       28.2
2007      8.3     3.4       27.9
2008      7.6     3.5       27.0 
2009      6.5     3.7       24.1 
2010      5.5     3.9       21.7 
--------------------------------
                           254.9

ZiPS isn't exactly known for being aggressive, either - I get a lot more e-mail grumbling about how mean ZiPS is than complaining about over-sunny exuberance.

Simply put, the reason A-Rod's contract was an outlier was because the circumstances surrounding A-Rod in the free agent market suggested that any contract given should be an outlier.

As a result of A-Rod breaking in at an extremely young age, he hit the market after his age 24 season. Teams simply don't get to bid very often on players on HOF trajectories at age 24. In most situations, when you're signing a player to a 10-year contract, you're looking at paying for seasons in which they're pushing 40, which greatly reduces the expected future value of the contract. Just to illustrate the difference age has on the value of a contract, here is what ZiPS expected for A-Rod's 2001-2010 assuming different ages:

2001 Age       10-year WAR
25             82.0
26             71.5
27             62.7
28             56.6
29             50.5
30             46.9
31             40.6    

Essentially, if, in 12/00, you're offering a 10-year contract to a player 6 years older than A-Rod that played exactly like A-Rod, the expected value drops in half.

While ZiPS projected A-Rod to be worth his Ranger contract, it projected A-Rod, at the time of the new, 10-year, $275 million contract with the Yankees, to be worth less than half the cash he would earn from 2008-2017.

While A-Rod was in Texas, the team spent $68 million on replacement level players and if you add full-timers at 0.5 WAR or less, the team spent $139 million in 3 years on players that weren't pushing the team towards the playoffs. If I buy a great house for $300,000 and pay $200,000 to a drunk guy with a flamethrower to burn it down, it's the second transaction that puts me into the poorhouse, not the first.

Dan Szymborski covers baseball for ESPN Insider. He has written about the sport since 2001 for the Baseball Think Factory, where he is an editor. He is the developer of the ZiPS Projection system, and has also worked as a reporter and a consultant. You can find his ESPN archives here and follow him on Twitter here.

ZiPS Profile - Garrett Jones, RF (28)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Year     AB    R    H  2B  3B  HR  RBI   BB   SO  SB    BA   OBP   SLG   OPS+ 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                            TRANSLATIONS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2002    226    5   31   6   0   6  20     9  100   2  .137  .169  .243     6 
2003    413   20   70  10   3  13  48    22  125   3  .169  .213  .303    35
2004    525   29  129  29   1  21  69    22  144   9  .246  .280  .425    82 
2005    493   39  107  19   1  20  59    29  117   4  .217  .261  .381    63
2006    532   43  112  28   2  17  75    40  130   2  .211  .266  .367    65
2007    405   38  101  28   2  11  58    26   89   2  .249  .296  .410    82  
2008    533   50  134  29   2  19  76    41  106   7  .251  .302  .420    91 
2009    279   29   76  18   0  11  43    17   51  11  .272  .313  .455   107 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                            MLB NUMBERS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2007     77    7   16   2   1   2   5     6   20   1  .208  .262  .338    60
2009    214   32   63  14   1  18  34    23   49   9  .294  .363  .621   159
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                            PROJECTIONS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2009r    99   12   26   6   0   4  14     7   20   2  .261  .313  .461   105
2010    548   72  152  36   2  26  91    44  118  12  .277  .331  .493   111  
2011    516   69  142  32   2  24  83    40  104  12  .275  .327  .484   108
2012    507   67  138  30   2  23  79    40  101  11  .272  .325  .475   105
2013    492   63  131  29   2  21  74    37   99  11  .266  .317  .461   100  
2014    485   61  127  28   2  20  71    37   98   9  .262  .313  .452    96
2015    475   58  122  27   2  18  67    36   97   9  .257  .308  .436    91    
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Top Comps:  Ruben Sierra, Mike Davis, Candy Maldonado, Wally Post
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  ODDIBE (ODDS OF IMPORTANT BASEBALL EVENTS)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Overall Offense for Starters
Top Quintile     18%
2nd Quintile     25%
Mid Quintile     18%
4th Quintile     17%
Low Quintile     22%

OPS+                    OBP                3B              Hits
160+             1%     .400+      1%      10+     0%      200+    0%
140+             10%    .375+      8%      5+      15%     150+    55%
130+             23%    .350+      26%
120+             35%    .325+      57%     2B
110+             54%    .300+      85%     45+     15%
100+             73%                       30+     76%
90+              86%
80+              94%
60+              99%

BA                      SLG                HR              SB
.350+            1%     .550+      18%     50+     1%      70+     0%
.325+            6%     .500+      49%     40+     7%      50+     0%
.300+            23%    .450+      79%     30+     34%     30+     0%
.275+            53%    .400+      95%     20+     78%     10+     59%
.250+            83%    .350+      100%    10+     99%

I'm not quite sure if this is kosher, but there were a lot of questions about ZiPS and Kevin Frandsen in a recent thread and I was out of town and unable to give responses. Well, I could have on my cell phone, but my phone doesn't have a swanktastic fold-out or slide-out keyboard and I'd rather take a bath with a toaster than write long sentences without one.

First off, one has to take into account (I'll drop David a note) that the rest-of-season projections on Fangraphs do not take factor in the seasonal minor league performance, simply because David doesn't yet have a mechanism for minor league translations. I recently provided him something for him to turn into such, but he's had a lot to do in maintaining the website before saving me my coding work. When I do RoS projections as part of entries on BTF or Twitter, I do use minor league translations. The Fangraphs RoS projection has no way of knowing that I have Frandsen's 2009 translation at 305/344/415.

There are also a few reasons why Frandsen's 2009 projection was better than his 2008 one. First, a missing season isn't as serious for a hitter as it is a pitcher. Also, SF's expected park factor went up a bit and some less-stellar performances, moved farther into the rear-view mirror.

Here's what I get for Frandsen's performances (minor league translations plus major league statistics)

Year            Overall
2004        255/290/314    
2005        292/337/372    
2006        274/326/375
2007        275/341/381
2008        000/000/000 

So there wasn't a huge shift in his projection. It would have been higher without him missing 2008 (274/332/385 rather than the 269/325/370 actually predicted).

            Majors Only        Translation Only       Majors and Translation
2009        071/161/071             305/344/415                  247/295/344

It helps to think of a projection not just as a seasonal line, but an array of probabilities. ZiPS and other projection systems simply see the midpoint as the likeliest. ZiPS knows there's a chance that Frandsen will have a .900 OPS and also a chance that he'll have a .600 OPS. If you picture a large curve loosely resembling a bell curve, imagine every bit of new data hitting the curve from one side or the other, moving that curve to the right or the left or crushing it down. (This is essentially a really simple way to think of Bayesian inference).

Without the minor league data, all ZiPS on Fangraphs sees as new data is that 2-for-28 stretch. Small sample, sure, but Frandsen's missing 2008 already increases the uncertainty to begin with, enough to make the best guess move from 269/325/370 to 258/316/353. Add that to the numbers already "in the bag" and it's not a great season line.

It's less bleak when we see have his minor league performance for 2009 included. It's a better line, but a larger sample size, so the RoS projection becomes 262/316/361.

You can't not expect the projection to drop off a bit. You take an uncertain player with a .695 projected OPS and give them a little less than half a season of a .639 OPS and you have to lower your expectations (in this case, to .677).

Player       Rest of Season          Total
Olivo        245/268/417       241/262/408
Butler       277/344/426       271/343/411
Callaspo     283/338/372       297/349/394
Aviles       282/313/414       272/301/393
Teahen       273/345/432       280/352/441
DeJesus      286/358/432       278/349/423
Crisp        269/340/399       268/346/416
Bloomquist   265/332/317       268/336/319
Jacobs       260/316/488       260/316/494

Pitcher      Rest of Season          Total 
Greinke      11-8, 3.71         15-8, 3.14
Gilgamesh    10-9, 3.95        11-10, 3.78
Davies       7-12, 5.37         8-13, 5.29
Ponson        3-8, 5.97         3-10, 6.12

Soria              2.29               2.25
Wright             4.56               4.14
Cruz               3.15               3.06
Mahay              3.79               4.09
Farnsworth         5.00               5.71
Ramirez            5.09               5.57

2009 ZiPS Projections for Alex Gordon and Mark Teahen

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