Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

How do you figure replacement value for a position? Any links or explanations would be very helpful.

Well, simply put, the replacement player is your typical bench player. In strat, your typical bench player is usually worth between 0.5M and 1M.

[quote:4a17404622="joekendall"]How do you figure replacement value for a position? Any links or explanations would be very helpful.[/quote:4a17404622]

The rule of thumb according to the Baseball Prospectus guys (baseballprospectus.com, "statistics", "VORP (value over replacement player)" is this:

League-wide average performance times .72 equals replacement value.

Something similar to this is what TSN uses to establish its baseline for players that will be worth .50M. Players with better than "replacement" performance capability receive higher prices.

I'm not sure if either one of us answered your question. Could you clarify exactly what you mean by "replacement value"?

If I wanted to determine a player's value in relation to a "replacement player" value, how would I do it? My understanding from reading about VORP is that you can use it to determine a player's value. I would like to understand better how it works and how I might use it to value players on TSN SOM.

Within the TSN/SOM context, the first thing you must do is equate a run value to each card. This can be done based on converting the probable outcomes on each card into their respective baseball events and converting those events into expected runs. Every card has an offensive runs value plus a defensive runs value. Their are lots of articles both in these forums and online discussing the merits of Linear runs created models.

Once you have all of your players quantified, you must determine the replacement level value. This is the run level that is effectively free (i.e. $500k price online). What you are paying for online is the incremental value of runs above what the $500k player produces.

So the formula looks something like Player A runs creates - Replacement runs created= Runs over replacement level. From their it's just a matter of assigning $ values to each run above replacement level.

Note that because of salary caps and baseball position limitations (only 9 players can play at one time) the process of assigning $ to values above replacement levels is not linear.

The above fairly accurately describes the TSN pricing process in a nutshell.