Win Budgeting?

An interesting post about having a team budget their salary around expected wins (h/t baseball musings). Personally, I disagree about his start point for the figures (54 wins, 54 losses and the rest depends on the players), but I like the 2 million per win figure.

Now, if we were to follow the reasoning laid out by U.S.S. Mariner, then a logical process for Theo would be to figure up the teams present win shares, then subtract them from the goal of 95 wins. Using the 2 million per win he could then base his free agent acquisitions etc to build a team. Will have to think about this but I think that Dave is right in his reasoning and this could be an interesting way to follow the trades this year.

Just a real quick look at the present starters, remembering that 95 wins equals a total of 285 win shares:

Pos.	Player	06 WS
1b	Youkilis	22
2b	Loretta	16
3b	Lowell	18
C	Varitek	8
DH	Ortiz	29
LF	Ramirez	29
CF	Crisp	10
RF	Pena	8
SP	Schilling	16
SP	Beckett	12
SP	Wakefield	7

These 12 players total 175 win shares, which would leave them 110 shares short. The question is how good do we expect Papelbon to be as a starter. I would put him in the Beckett category and for rounding sakes will say 10. Wakefield has had 8 shares, 16 shares and 7 shares the last three years. So let us put him at 10 also, this now leaves us 97 short.

Tavarez has averaged 6 the last 3 years, Timlin has averaged 8 in the same time period but 2005 he spent the last 2 months as the closer so lets go with 6 for him in our computations. DeLcarmen had 1 in 05 and 3 in 06. Will he improve? I say yes so let's go for 5. These 3 will leave us 80 short with a total of 16 of our 25 man squad supplying points.

As you can see we can easily reach that win share total of 285 needed for 95 wins without really killing the payroll. From now on, I think that I will use the Win Shares for my basis on approving or hissing future moves made by Theo this year.

All win share information found at The Hardball Times.