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One-Season Stand, dept.

As you know, when you go buy a new car for $20,000 the dealer "shows" you $9,000 on your tradein.  Your car + $11,000 for his car.  How's that for square.

If he shows you $9,000 on the first offer, he would probably buy your car outright (without you buying his) for $6,000 or $6,500.  This is the Actual Cash Value (ACV) of your car.  He's "showing" you $9,000 on your tradein because he would actually sell you his car for $17,000.  And that's what he'll put in the books:  That he sold his car for $17k and he has $6k into your used car for resale.  

It's a little slimy, but that's what we as the buying public want him to do.  We feel a lot better doing it his way.  Truth hurts, buddy.

(If you want to outsmart him, make your best deal on his car, and then ask about whether he'll take a tradein.  Make sure your car is as cherry as it can be, and you'll need to keep it off his lot until this point in the negotiation.  There y'go amig-O.  Would Ken Rosenthal do that for you?  I think NOT)

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"Second sticker," the price for public consumption, is one thing.  Any resemblance to cash value, hard on the barrelhead, is strictly coincidental.  By another strange coincidence, any resemblance between Crowdsourced Contract Estimates, or Crowdsourced Prospect Value, is little more than a happy accident.

One school of Shout Box thought has it, that Justin Upton for 1 year isn't worth much.  Totally understandable that people would feel this way, about a specific team or player.  Not countering my homies here, who have been consistent about this, and probably right.  

But they're a coupla buttons shy of a London Fog on this one :- )

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My own view is:  one season of a real impact player, that does and should cost a lot in prospects.  Billy Beane, whose colossal brain pan is a given, just coughed up a top-5-in-baseball 'spect for the Jeff Samardzija rental.  He figured the 2014 pennant run was worth something, too.

Sullivan had an article recently, demonstrating that this is more the norm than the exception.  Just recently:

• Tyler Skaggs (#12 prospect, SP) was traded merely for Mark Trumbo
• Wil Myers, an epic prospect, brought back 2 years of James Shields
• Shelby Miller for Jason Heyward
• Doug Drabek (at the time worth Walker at least) brought back a Roy Halladay 1-year rental
• Casey Kelly, worth approximately Walker, was packaged with a top-100 spect for 1 year of Adrian Gonzalez (with an inside track to sign him)

You can say that you're not giving D.J. Peterson or Taijuan for Upton, but then you are (typically) saying that you don't want Justin Upton or his ilk.

The 2015 pennant is worth something, too.  Fangraphs loathes, with the burning fire of a Betelgeuse cosmic event, the idea of ever taking back the worse $-per-WAR player.  As a matter of principle.

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But this dogma has been cracking at the foundation, and the 2014 Kansas City Royals were the death knell. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee, saberdweeb.

Gordon had said, at my second site Detectovision, in response to my Q about whether he'd play Brad Miller in RF over Andre Ethier:

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Short answer: I’d go get Upton and Gattis and win a pennant, trading them a bat instead of an arm. It’d probably take DJ, but I believe in Kivlehan, Wilson, O’Neill and Alex Jackson enough to do that. If it cost Guerrero + Diaz, that’d be even better.

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G-Money didn't waste anything like as many words as is Dr. D's wont, but that's 3rd-order thinking.  Would you give up D.J.?  Well, what exactly do you think about Patrick Kivlehan and Alex Jackson?  It depends on that.

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Here's the punch line.  The Braves have apparently relented on Taijuan Walker.   It's actually kind of odd that they would.

Saber commenters reach for the #2 pencil and the back of the napkin.  Upton is $15M of net value; Taijuan only has to be worth 1.5 WAR per year to be worth $29M.  QED.

Hold on, full stop.  Flip the napkin over, Einstein.

So the M's have no SP below Taijuan Walker who gives them the same 1.5 WAR?  Roenis Elias and Danny Hultzen can't be figured as deltas here, rather than 0.0 WAR?  SSI is getting zero traction on this simple point.  Use the actual delta rather than an abstraction.  

Abstractions are placeholders.  When you have specific data, c'mon up to speed why don'cha.

Hey, if people wanna stay dumb, here's another doob.  Light up, kid.  SSI stays in front of the national saber curve without even having to keep up with what's new :- )

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Now, in fairness, Taijuan Walker is -- in a vacuum -- worth about twice what Justin Upton is worth.  ACV helps us out again.  If this were the Premier League, how much could you sell each player's contract for, outright?  In a vacuum:

• Upton:  maybe $20M (find out why this number is different from net $/WAR)
• Taijuan:  probably $40M, maybe a bit more (Taijuan's FA contract would be pretty good)

But!  That is because this is Taijuan Walker, and not because he is a generic 1.5 WAR club controls player.  That's critical; WAR/$ dogma happens to be right to dislike Taijuan-for-Upton, but for the wrong reasons.  It is the scouts, not WAR, that much prefer Taijuan to Chris Taylor.

And don't forget that Upton might be worth $75M if at a particular time and place he is the difference.  KC's run last year was probably worth $50-100M last year, just on first returns.  Never mind positioning them for future gains.

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Now we are down to asking this .... if we wanna KA-CHING! the Upton register, would we give two or three impact bushers who aren't Paxton, Walker or D.J.?  I certainly would.  And the Braves would have every right to grumble about it.  If you don't want to do that, you don't want to trade for a Star, period.

If the Braves will now take quantity over quality?  The M's better have something VERY good in the stead of that one, baby.

You add a Justin Upton to this team, much less a Jose Bautista, well, slap me silly.  I think 365 days' worth of rampant Mariners would be fun.  

Maybe not as much fun as it would be to slobber over a savory John Sickels Top 10 on my computer monitor, but it would still be pretty fun.

Be Afraid,

Dr D