WIn Shares by Transaction

I've just started messing around with something I think can be a really good tool to evaluate Gm tendicies. One of the big crticisms of Sabean has been his reliance on older talent and the Giants' inability to develop talent, mostly hitters. While looking at the makeup of the team this year I was struck at how many players were aquired through free agency and I compared that to the A's roster.

And though the Giants obviously had more free agents and fewer developed players, I found that the straight numbers of free agents vs. drafted players hid the true significance of the rosters. It doesn't matter that the Giants' have six drafted players on the roster at the start of 2006 as much as how much those six will contribute to the team this year. In fact, in 2005 the Giants and A's had similar numbers of players that the club had originally drafted play in the majors. The difference is Eric Chavez and Rich Harden against Lance Niekro and Noah Lowry.

So I listed every player to contribute a win share (According to hardballtimes.com) to either the Giants or A's in 2005 and found what transaction contributed the most to each team's victories. This is still a rough way to to look at this; a lot of players had zero (only 32 of the 50 players who spent some time with the Giants, and 30 of 41 players with the A's). I may try this again using Bill James' formula, but I'll throw this out there for now and see how it goes.

Here's the results:

San Francisco				Oakland
Type	WS	WS %		Type	WS	WS %
Draft	52	23%		Draft	117	46%
FA	129	58%		FA	14	6%
Trade	37	17%		Trade	123	50%
WA	9	4%		WA	11	5%

The differences between drafted players and free agents I expected, but look at the difference between the trade numbers. This drives home the bad run of trades Sabean has been stuck in. Most of the trade WS belonged to Randy Winn, J.T. Snow and Jason Schmidt, who's off year certainly didn't help. Meanwhile, Danny Haren, Jason Kendal, Mark Ellis and Mark Kotsay all but up decent numbers in Oakland.

This is a little toy I hope to expand. The more numbers to compare thes to the easier to put it all in perspective.