Last week’s MORP articles explained that the price of 1.0 WARP3 in 2010 is approximately $5 million. This is in contrast with FanGraphs’ claim of approximately $4 million per WAR. These numbers are even further apart when you considering the fact that 1.0 WAR is worth about 1.16 WARP3, meaning that FanGraphs’ numbers are suggesting that 1.0 WARP3 is worth only $3.5 million. The reason that this analysis is inaccurate is that FanGraphs neglected draft-pick compensation, which ignores about 11 percent of total compensation, and it also looked at only the first year of contracts. Since a number of contracts went out to players unlikely to age well this past offseason, average annual value (or AAV) is a particularly poor way to evaluate these deals. As a result, FanGraphs appears to believe that the price of a win went down over 10 percent during an economic recovery from the worst recession in decades.
