CEs

Did you add mine to the list? Ty

I still need to do final statistical percentages, but it looks like these will be the top CE numbers for the different positions. I didn't check C, 2B, or RP cause there were no requests. I didn't list 3B cause Longoria was the only request. His ARB+15% was just a shade under the average for the Top 5, and I know his numbers will be better than their average. And even if they're not, screw you Tracy! LOL

SP: 12.477 (Top 15 instead of Top 5 used)
1B: 13.114
SS: 7.866
OF: 10.009 (Top 10 instead of Top 5 used)

Moving Hanley Ramirez from SS to 3B made a huge difference - $10.861 would've been the number if Hanley were still listed as a SS, without his $20.16MM salary, the fifth highest paid SS with a guaranteed contract that doesn't have a CE inquiry was Elvis Andrus, with a salary of $2.542MM. But since the rule is that we go by most games started at a position the previous season, Hanley is a 3B now.

I really liked the drop in the max CE for SPs. If I had stayed with just the Top 5 (Sabathia, Lee, Halladay, Peavy, and Zambrano) the Max CE would have been 14.714. This way drops it by about 2.25MM. I don't even have to figure Wainwright's CE number though, since the minimum increase over ARB is 15%. For everyone else though, I am going to play with the statistical numbers and see if I can get a broader range of salaries for the other 10 SPs that got inquiries.

Damnit, shows how much I pay attention to Burnett. I guess there is one RP.

I can already guarantee you that you're not going to accept his CE though. All RPs are treated as Closers. So unless you want to pay a middle reliever Closer money, there is never any reason to ask for a CE on a middle reliever. It will almost always be cheaper to keep an RP through their ARB years and then re-sign them in free agency with the discount.

And we should break them down close and setups

CEs are done. Rosters are updated. You can get it all from my signature here on the message board. Next project is to update all the team pages with the correct Message Board link, correct contact information, etc.

As for CEs, I changed things up a bit to get better numbers. For pitchers I used the average of the top 15 NSBL salaries, but when it came to figuring out the top pitchers, I ignored who NSBL paid and I went through and picked basically the Top 5 SPs by FIP in baseball last season (Top 15 statistically lowered the bar too much, and I wanted it higher). Due to the CE candidates now being compared to the best of the best, we had a wider range of CE values. I liked how they came out. Only one player "maxed out" and that was Kershaw, but really... anything less would have been wrong. When I figured Top 5 SPs, I had to take the next guy cause Kershaw was in the mix. Josh Johnson got a big CE number as well because he always has stellar peripherals, even if it doesn't always translate to W-L or ERA.

I did similar stuff at the other positions too. I tried to go with the highest paid NSBL players, but there are some players that just don't belong, so I took other players IRL instead. This moved the statistical number much higher, meaning less players hit the Max CE. I think only Kershaw, Votto, and Longoria hit the max at their position... and no one is going to complain about them making max contracts, they deserve them.

Hope you all like the changes to the formulas.

Please email me your CE decisions by January 31. This will give me enough time to get the rosters updated before Free Agency on Feb. 4. Any CE decisions I do not hear from will be an automatic "no". Remember, once players are given their CE, they have a NTC for the year. But they are still tradeable for now, until we get that yay or nay.

It's all because of defense. It drives their numbers down. Kemp is basically a COF playing CF, so his defensive numbers are horrible which drives his fWAR down. Cargo's fWAR totals were fine, but moving to LF last year knocked it down by about a full win. Bruce's low batting average and high strikeout rate hurt his wOBA, plus he has never been a good defender either.

But I agree, they are a little low, I would have preferred all of them to be 1-2 million higher, but GMs here like to see numbers lower rather than higher, so I left it as is.

The only change I made this year was the players I used as the Top 5. In year's past, whatever five players had the five largest contracts, I would use an average of their numbers. But because those contracts rarely dictated the actual best five players at that position, it drove the average of the Top 5's statistical numbers into the "just better than mediocre" range. For example, the top five SP contracts in the NSBL are being paid to Sabathia, Lee, Halladay, Peavy, and Carlos Zambrano. Those first three are okay, but the last two, especially Zambrano, would really lower the bar for what it would take to reach Max CE amount.

So, what I did, is I sorted all 2012 pitchers by real life FIP (qualified SPs only to get rid of small sample size issues), I then got the numbers for the Top 15 SPs that were A) Not being offered CEs (Kershaw, Johnson, etc) and B) Had three years worth of stats to use (so no Miley or Darvish, etc).

I collected all the data for them, which is the last three years worth of FIP and also last season's CERA from the sim. I use a weighted average to come up with one number for each pitcher that looks like an ERA. What I noticed is that by using 15 SPs to do this, it made the numbers worse, so lots of the CE eligible players were coming close to maxing out. So I went through and grabbed the Top 4 numbers from above. The four pitchers with the best weighted average of those numbers (Cliff Lee, Felix Hernandez, Verlander, and Greinke) and then I added in Strasburg because he barely missed the cutoff by 3 innings.

Using those five I got a very low average number. Kershaw's was still better than the average for all five of those players. He really has been the best LHP and one of the best five pitchers in baseball over the last few seasons. But anyways, based on that number for pitchers, I then compared all the CE eligible pitchers to that number.

Really, the only change that was made to the whole system was that instead of using the players with the Top 5 contracts, I tried to just use the Top 5 players in real life. Like for outfielders, the Top 5 contracts are Joey Bats, Zobrist, Braun, Hamilton, and Werth. For statistical numbers though, I threw out Zobrist and Werth and added in McCutchen and Holliday.

I am using both, salary and statistics. I used the average of the Top 15 pitchers to come up with a Max CE amount, and the average number of the top 5 pitchers' statistics to get a base amount for what top pitchers perform at.

Going through and finding the five best comps would require me to do this for every pitcher in baseball, and I am not interested in that amount of work.

It's really the same thing as we've done the past few years, except I used the average salary of the top 15 pitchers and top 10 outfielders, instead of five. This made the average salary lower.

Then instead using the stats for those players, I used the stats for the best at that position, making the benchmark higher, driving down CE amounts even more.

I believe it is the top 15 Sim Salaries averaged together. That is the max CE amount.

Then the top 5 real life pitchers stats. Say this year it would be Kershaw, Verlander, King Felix, Price, and Gio Gonzalez. Use their stats as the standard.

Then if get the pitcher you want to extend's real life stats, measure them against the real life standards, and get the % of the standard. If you had say, Ian Kennedy, his stats would be at 50% of the standard, so he would get a CE number at 50% of the Max CE amount.

I may be wrong, but that is how I understand it. Sim salaries of top 15 sim contracts. Real life stats of top 5 real life pitchers. Real life stats for the pitcher you want to CE.