JotCast | 2025 Trade Value Series Chat

2025 Trade Value Series Chat

Ben Clemens

10:00

Hey everyone, welcome to the chat.

10:02

I'm going to spend the next hour and change answering your questions about specific players who were on the list, specific players who weren't on the list, general thought process, and anything else Trade Value Top 50 related you can think to ask me. I'm going to dive more deeply into each individual question, since many of them overlap, so I'll answer fewer, but the goal is to get as much info out there as possible

Oh! And if you have non trade value questions, Eric Longenhagen is chatting in two hours. I'm gonna not answer stuff that is unrelated to this list. My regular chat is Monday at 2pm ET if you'd prefer to ask me then.

10:02

Why do you think Ohtani didn’t get more when he signed? I agree his contract is a bargain but it seemed that at the time he signed it too

Sam

10:02

With all the hubbub about Ohtani being the top value, my main question is: Why was he only 7th last year? Sure, his projections have gone up slightly since then, but he was already in the middle of an MVP season. Is it just that the LA Times' (wildly speculative) estimate of his value to the team that you cite came out last December?

The Prospector

10:02

I get that Ohtani deserves to be #1 on the list due to his unique off the field situation, but if you somehow took all of that out and just honed in on his performance and contract, where do you estimate he'd be on the list (if at all)?

Ben Clemens

10:03

Let's start with a broad array of questions about Ohtani, which is a fun category. So, as to his signing, the way I see it is that a few things are going on here

one, he reportedly set his salary

10:04

there's good reporting that at least the Giants and Dodgers offered the same deal, at the Ohtani camp's behest

there's some anchoring going on here too. like, the biggest previous deal was in the $400 million new money range and he asks for 700!

10:05

but with a weird deferral thing. also teams couldn't be sure how it would work to market Ohtani in their big market platform until it actually happened. The reports that I've seen, difficult to gather, are that the Angels were making in the range of 10-20 million in endorsement stuff a year. I'd believe higher, I probably wouldn't believe lower, but anyway, different deal

10:06

Last year, I hadn't quite wrapped my head around how well things would go with the Dodgers. Like, I used that LA Times link as representative of all the different estimates out there I've seen. You'll see some that are meaningfully higher, some lower. And then I discounted it pretty heavily from there. He'd be the number one player even if it were only like 1/3 of the low end of the range of reported amounts

10:08

But if there were no off-field considerations whatsoever? Let's see. In my raw model outputs (adjusted for the concentration of WAR stuff that I'm sure we'll talk about more here today), I had Ohtani in a virtual tie with Judge

Thomas

10:08

How much did the public results from the trade value comparison tool agree/disagree with your list?

Ben Clemens

10:08

Oh buddy, are you in luck. You'll be able to compare your own results to me or to the crowd, me to the crowd, whatever you want, when we release them on Monday

Toucan

10:08

Are you saying that Ohtanis value is predicated on being on the Dodgers? How does that make any sense for a trade value series?

Ben Clemens

10:08

I'm saying that it's predicated on being on like one of five teams

10:09

but that those five teams would offer a lot

like, let's be real, the Brewres aren't winning a 29-team bidding war for Ohtani. So it doesn't really matter to me whether or not they participate as long as multiple motivated buyers do

that's just the reality of how trades work

if this was the average value of each player across all 30 teams, well, I hope you like pre-arb regulars

Syndergaardengnomes

10:10

If Ohtani gets credit for off-field value, how do you ignore off-field value for Juan Soto? Mets attendance is up over 10K per home game this year. If he gets credit for even half that, which is likely conservative, you're offsetting a massive portion of his contract right there.

Ben Clemens

10:10

Well I think that accrues to the whole team a bit more, Mets attendance has been higher before, weird little lull last year, etc. but the point is, I mostly don't ascribe attendance to players b/c that fluctuates a lot and has to do with the performance of the team as a whole. it also has to do with stadium amenities, lots of other stuff

10:11

you could argue, and I don't even think it'd be a bad argument, that some of the 'star bump' that I have in my rankings, which is as a result of the trades for real-world stars, is measuring that

Like, why do teams pay more than the model says for big names? maybe it's b/c they are themselves doing a little adjusting for revenue

but Ohtani is so different from the rest of the cases as to fit in a different category, at least in my opinion

Guest

10:12

Why weren't the Cubs among the teams mentioned in Ohtani's blurb? Chicago being less marketable than NY/LA or the Cubs' reluctance to sign big contracts?

Ben Clemens

10:12

probably just b/c I got tired, to be honest. 25,000 words in a week means that even with Meg's best efforts, I'm probably not at 100% strength the whole way through

10:12

Hi Ben, thanks for doing this series. Even when I disagree with you, I appreciate all the work that goes into it, and I think you do a terrific job.

Do you think you might be underestimating PCA's floor? I get being skeptical of the projection due to the contact rate, but if you do the math, he'd be on a 4 WAR pace this season even if he were around a 95 wRC+ due to his defense and base running. It seems that you buy into his pulled fly ball rate being at all sticky, the upside is huge while the downside is still a first division starter.

Ben Clemens

10:12

Oh, definitely could be. PCA was one of the hardest players to rank

10:14

I think I don't buy the ludicrous defense staying like this, for one thing. And I definitely value it less than hitting WAR, as I mentioned repeatedly. The upside is large, no doubt. Like I mentioned, he'll probably hit 7 WAR this year.

I guess what I'm saying with my ranking is a few things

10:15

I don't think he's going to be consistently peeling off 5's and 6's. I really do think that a bat in the vicinity of league average makes sense here. And I think that, model notwithstanding, there are big bust risks. Like, I mentioned the raw model rankings before with Ohtani

10:16

PCA was #2 behind Julio in those, amazing, raw model clearly values defense

but Michael Harris was just outside the top 10

like, this month

gotta be pretty careful with ascribing too much certainty and value to those projections. Harris, too, had a 137 wRC+ his rookie year. Obviously that's not a MEAN path for PA

PCA*

but the point is that the kind of value you're talking about -- really good OF defense with a maybe balky bat -- the models love it more than the actual teams do

10:17

I think the reason to ignore this is because you specifically like the play with PCA's bat, and I can totally see that

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