Atlanta Braves Off-Season tread

If a JD signing enables payroll increase might be beneficial

You misread. Marte’s contract has $22 million remaining. I said “that’s what he would cost”. If war is $9 million then 13 war is $117 million in value.

It’s a number that takes all players salaries and divides it by number of players. And a 3 war player is worth that much.

Edit: I misspoke earlier about how war is calculated. In actuality, it's calculated by the total WAR accumulated and divides it by all the money spent on salaries. To explain why it doesn't make sense is because people always look at the high and the low end of the scale, but generally speaking, if you look in the middle, it fits. Think of a bell curve. I also dug a little deep and found out that the value of $/WAR is $8 million, not $9 million.

I'll use this edit to explain how this pertains to Marte's value, if you're the Braves and you're considering trading for him. Marte has 2 club options left at a total of $24 million. That is what the Braves have to pay Marte, but what value do the Braves get for that money? Last year, Marte put up 3.0 WAR, so let's be generous and say he'll do exactly the same thing over the next two years; that's 6.0 WAR. Great, what value is that in terms of dollars? 6.0 WAR at $8 mil per WAR is $48 million. You now need to subtract Marte's contract from his value, which means that Marte's "surplus" value is $24 million.

If you're the Braves you want to give up less surplus value than that, and if you're the Pirates you want to get more value than that. If we go by the old negotiating adage "each side picks the extremes and meet in the middle" then the Braves would need to give up $24 million in surplus value to get Marte. That's even-steven. I won't get into the whole "how much are prospects worth" thing because that'll take a couple more paragraphs, so let's just say that they do have surplus value, and it's based on where each player is ranked, the highest having the most surplus value. Prospects are pure speculation, but everyone buys into it, so the perceived value is real. Real enough for teams to accept the perceived value in lieu of real value. The Braves prospects are perceived value, Marte is real value (to an extent, he could blow his dick out and miss the next two years, for example). 

To put this into some perspective. Drew Waters is a prospect. He has no real MLB value, but he has perceived value. What is it? Well, according to mlb, he's the 23rd rated prospect. Fangraphs has valuated prospects, and a prospect of his caliber has a perceived surplus value of $46 million. Could the Braves trade him for Marte? Sure, but should they? Some teams actually do deals like this. It's why the Braves currently have Swanson on their roster. Other teams, like the Braves, value this perceived value more and keep their prospects. It would be a big gamble to give up that much perceived value, when the past as shown that, on average, a player of Waters caliber puts up that much value once they're called up and under team control. Teams, generally, will gamble on perceived value when either the real value is too great, or when the perceived value is very low.

I really don't know what to think about this.

www.mlbtraderumors.com/2020/01/josh-donaldson-reportedly-sets-asking-price.html

I know what the gnats think of it, since they signed people that could replace him signing elsewhere

Yep. Time to move on to plan B, whatever that is.