Posted by Bill Baer on Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 11:24 pm

With one month left in the season, we have a decent amount of data available to analyze the players who were free agents following the end of the 2008 season. I have a total of 67 players, though I’m sure there are a bunch more I missed. However, I’m pretty sure I nabbed all of the important ones, but feel free to let me know if I missed any.

I wanted to see which types of players provided the most value and which teams spent their money the wisest. Some points about the criteria:

• Options — whether player, team, or mutual — were not considered
• Value is prorated as of the games prior to August 30 and the base value is taken from FanGraphs

Let’s start with hitters. We’ll move to pitchers later.
First, here are all of the right-handers, left-handers, and switch-hitters signed.

There were 8 LHH signed, 19 RHH, and 7 SH. So, there’s a lot of margin for error with a small sample size. But the numbers show that the right-handers in the 2009 free agent class provided little bang for the buck while LHH and SH provided a decent amount.

The green and red data points way out on the right are Mark Teixeira and Manny Ramirez, respectively.

The most valuable left-handed hitter is Raul Ibanez, who is making $6.5 million this season and prorates to be worth over $17 million. The least valuable LHH is Jason Giambi who is making $4 million and has been worth nearly negative $3 million.

The most valuable right-handed hitter is Casey Blake, who is making $5 million this season and prorates to be worth over $18 million. The least valuable RHH is Manny Ramirez, who is making $25 million and has been worth over $12.5 million.

The most valuable switch-hitter is Felipe Lopez, who is making $3.5 million this season and prorates to be worth over $19 million. The least valuable SH is Nick Punto, who is making $4 million and prorates to be worth just over $1 million.

Here are the one-year, two-year, and three-plus-year deals signed by hitters in the offseason.

There’s a selection bias, of course, because good and/or young players are more likely to be offered multi-year deals than their mediocre, older counterparts. Still, immediate returns are still seen on multi-year deals. Whether the future value will be properly realized is another subject for another article.

Above are the free agent positional averages for base salary and value. Second basemen were the best value, followed closely by third basemen. However, there were only two of each (Felipe Lopez, Orlando Hudson; Casey Blake, Joe Crede) signed, so once again we are dealing with a small sample.

First basemen provided the worst value. Of the seven first basemen signed, four (Rich Aurilia, Nomar Garciaparra, Jason Giambi, and Kevin Millar) have provided a negative dollar value to their respective teams.

Moving on to pitchers.

When it comes to left-handed relievers (seven signed) and right-handed starters (nine), you give more, you get more. Still, when you subtract their 2009 monetary value from the 2009 base salary, four of the seven lefty relievers come out in the negatives. Three of the nine right-handed starters are negative as well. Money teams spent on RHRP and LHSP did not bring significant returns.

Hey, I wonder who that green dot at the top is. He’s so lonely!

Two-thirds of the contracts handed out to pitchers in the off-season were one-year deals. Relief pitchers got 13 one-year deals (72%) and 5 multi-year deals (only one three-year; that belongs to K-Rod). Starters got nine one-year deals (60%) and six multi-year deals (one each of two, three, five, and seven years, and two four-year deals).

The above graph shows us that there’s not a great deal of significance in value from one-year contracts and value from the first year of multi-year deals. Starters given multi-year deals have provided the most bang for the buck and relievers with one-year deals aren’t far behind.

And that’s about it. There are some caveats with this analysis. As I’ve said throughout the article, we’re dealing with small samples from one year’s worth of data. A more comprehensive study may be done at a later date, but this should suffice for now. Also, there’s a ton of selection biases at work. I mentioned one above, but the free agent class in question may or may not be better than other free agent classes, so we really don’t know where it stands. Lastly, there are a lot of criteria that can be added to further enhance the quality of the study. Options, the various types of options, buy-out clauses, incentives, etc. could all lead to very interesting conclusions about the very specific types of free agents and the value they provide.

Stone-cold, lead-pipe-lock conclusions (as Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic from Mike and Mike in the Morning would call them) cannot be gleaned from this analysis. It’s just an illustration of how well or how poorly various free agents have performed in various buckets. It’s a fun and interesting way to look back at the off-season.

If you have any questions, comments, or criticisms, feel free to leave them here, on my blog at Crashburn Alley, on Twitter, or via E-mail (crashburnalley [at] gmail [dot] com).

Thanks for reading!