How expensive have the Tigers runs been this year? Depends who's at bat.

A few days ago, APIAS's TheGoldfishCowboy posted a table analyzing how much value each Tigers player has this season.  There were two glaring problems with his analysis, however.  First, he used the ESPN fantasy rating, which gives an inordinate amount of weight to essentially meaningless statistics.  Second, he multiplied this fantasy rating by each player's salary to obtain his "value."  This multiplication makes no sense to me, as it gives players a value bonus for making more money.  When assessing value, division (not multiplication) is necessary in order to understand how much production the Tigers organization is getting per dollar spent.

With these deficiencies in mind, I set out to do my own assessment of the values of every player to have an at bat for the Tigers so far in 2009 (the data is a few days old now).

*If I couldn't find a particular player's salary, I just plugged in $400,000 for lack of a better guess (see "Ramirez")

In this table, I used Bill James's Runs Created formula (TECHRC) to get an estimate of each player's offensive contribution so far.  I then divided their 2009 salary by this value to find roughly how much the Tigers organization was spending per run created for that player so far this year.  Small numbers here are obviously a good thing, since it means that the Tigers are getting their runs for a smaller price.

Unsurprisingly, Cabrera leads the Tigers with nearly 41 runs created so far this year, followed by Granderson (34.51) and Inge (29.80).  As far as I can tell, there are very few surprises in the Runs Created category.  When we begin to look at the players' dollars spent per run created, however, we find Cabrera towards the bottom of the list.  This is also unsurprising when we consider that he is one of the highest paid Tigers and is therefore more expensive per run.

There are a few caveats here, of course.  First is the small sample size.  The Tigers have played less than a third of the season, so these numbers could change significantly.  Second, I do not intend for the "dollars/run" values to be an indictment of how valuable a player is.  Even though Clete Thomas has provided the cheapest runs so far, a team of nine Clete Thomas's would not stand a chance at making the playoffs, even though the team would be getting its runs relatively cheap.  Premium run production comes with a premium price tag.  Thus, even though Cabrera's runs are relatively more expensive, he's producing more runs than anyone and hence his value is very high.

In short, these numbers are meant to be more interesting than informative.  It's nice to see Clete, Anderson, and Larish producing runs at small price, and it's good to see Granderson and Cabrera are as good as advertised, but beyond that, the importance of this data is certainly questionable.  Though I think we can all agree that it would be nice to get some more run production out of our backup catchers (0.1 run created combined!).

Any thoughts?