JotCast | 2025 Trade Value Series Chat | 7/25/2025

2025 Trade Value Series Chat

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Ben Clemens

10:58

and the return was pretty good! James Wood, CJ Abrams, MacKenzie Gore, Robert Hassell II, Jarlin Susana

10:59

i think that's at least borderline top 10 trade value

to be fair, that was for Josh Bell too. so maybe lop off Hassell (who was a top 100 guy at the time) for a 1b rental

Bob

11:00

Kyle Tucker is not in the top 50?

Ben Clemens

11:00

nah, I HM'ed him, I think teams are not going to pay these kinds of prices for rental hitters

rental pitcher MAYBE? if they were Tucker-level as a pitcher

but as someone astutely pointed out in the comments yesterday, pitchers get big postseason leverage. the % of innings handled by your aces goes up meaningfully in October

11:01

hitters don't really. so if you're grabbing someone based on a few playoff runs, it'll probably be a pitcher. hitters rack up their value over time more so

J

11:01

I saw some people suggesting in the comments that this should look at estimated surplus value of players, but that gets at the wrong thing because teams care about far more of the value distribution than the mean outcome right? I would assume teams would rather pay a player with a 50% chance of being a 8 WAR guy and a 50% chance of being a 0 WAR guy rather than a slam dunk 4 WAR player (to take an extreme example)?

Ben Clemens

11:01

yeah look, we published the ZiPS. you want to do a model-based surplus value evaluation, go nuts. the contracts are public

(not you personally obviously)

what I'd say is that baseball GM'ing obviously has more dimensions than merely managing surplus value

11:02

it's not just like 'well we did more surplus value so we win'

it's a really complicated equation with a ton of conditions to satisfy and things to optimize for. broadly speaking, you're just making constraint tradeoffs when you pick one type of player over another

11:03

like, if you think of it in terms of a Pareto frontier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front), but maybe in 3d, there's a lot of nonsense that goes into this

maybe it's like distribution of wins, concentration of wins, surplus value

11:04

all of those matter

but no one builds the whole team out of surplus value. the idea of getting the surplus value is that you then have extra money to spend on the stars to fill out your team

and they're scarce too, and having Ketel Marte instead of Trevor Story (sorry Trevor, just a totally random guy, I wanted someone with an aav in the 20s)

like.... that's a big game

11:05

so anyway, I think that teams both value distributional stuff (like your extreme example) and concentration stuff in addition to surplus value stuff

11:06

and that's a reason why Cris Sanchez is so valuable and Ezequiel Tovar less so

Tovar's projected ZiPS surplus value clears Sanchez's for sure. but he doesn't have the war concentration or star value levers

Jewish Pache

11:06

Thanks man. My favorite articles every year

Ben Clemens

11:06

Thank you very much! Honestly if I sound like I'm frustrated, it's just b/c I'm tired. I love writing these, and I love getting feedback on them

11:07

It's a fun challenge trying to communicate my views every year. And it's also fun b/c there's probably no way to get a list that people won't disagree with, just b/c of the nature of preferences

Like, just listening to you guys, Zack Wheeler probably had a 30-slot range from off the list to 20s

11:08

so obviously you can't take any one piece of feedback too hard. by the nature of the exercise, some of the stuff is going to be controversial

11:09

I will say this. I spend a lot of time thinking about this. I'm a pretty smart guy. I definitely don't get every ranking right but I think I do a good job both trying to line up my views of baseball with how the economics of the game work in a broad sense, and writing about those things

sadtrombone

11:09

the list is out but it has been probably 2 or 3 weeks since you settled on the final order. Would you change anything? Move anyone up or down?

Ben Clemens

11:09

believe it or not, the last edit was Sunday

11:10

it's pretty hard to do it far in advance because the draft is only a week before release now, and I'm not going to get a lot of team eyeballs on this silly side project they do as a favor to their chatty convention friend when they're on the clock

That said, to reiterate what I said above a little bit, the spots where I see the most anchoring are over-grouping tiers (Kirby, catchers) and Nick Kurtz's rise/Jacob Wilson's fall

11:11

I started the machinery for the list in June. I started seriously ranking people July 5. I got it down to like 60 candidates probably July.... 12?

the biggest thing is that if you just keep looking at it, turn the brain crank a few more times, I feel like the incremental improvements never really stop

CFH

11:11

If surplus value were a GM's primary consideration, by definition no GM would ever sign a free agent, as they sign for market value. A team wins by maximizing value, and maximizing surplus value can help with that if you're on a budget, but you still have to get the very good players to win

Ben Clemens

11:12

right, yeah, I think that this is possible to overstate

because surplus value is clearly very important

but the point of the game is to win

this is a thing that happened a lot in finance, I thought, and that is why I've brought such an emphasis on this here

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