The price of performance: Calculating the most "valuable" player on the Cardinals

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Value is a tough concept to quantify. There are plenty of statistics in baseball that can help one find what a player contributed on the field, but to me, value can best be described as getting the most of something for the lowest cost. When grocery shopping, I find the most value in shopping at stores like Sam's and Costco because I can get the most amount of a product for the best price.

In baseball, one of the most all-encompassing statistics when evaluating players is Wins Above Replacement (WAR). Both Baseball-Reference and Fangraphs produce their own WAR statistics, and both can be useful for player evaluation. It is a simple equation to find out which player provided the most value using WAR and that player's salary.

Dividing a player's salary by his WAR total can give you how much one Win Above Replacement cost that team that year for a particular player. Whichever number is closest to zero indicates the player with the most value. The greater the number above zero, the worse value that player provides. If a player has a negative total, then they lose the team money based on their performance.

I decided to put this into practice to evaluate which players on the 2023 Cardinals' roster were indeed the most valuable. Typically, the younger the player, the less they cost a team due to arbitration and pre-arbitration salaries; older players may garner more WAR, but their salaries make their value much lower. Therefore, we will find that young players were the most valuable, which explains why teams are eager to trade for young, controllable players.

Here's another graph that may help. The closer to zero without being negative makes you the most valuable player. #STLCards pic.twitter.com/kvH9KdFNge
— Thomas Gauvain (@thomasgauvain) December 14, 2023

All salaries are pulled from Spotrac and all WAR statistics are from Fangraphs. If you would like to explore my math and charts more closely, here is a link to the spreadsheet that I created. In order to make it the most accurate, I used players who had exceeded 100 plate appearances as a position player or thirty innings as a pitcher.

Here are the 2023 most and least "valuable" players for the St. Louis Cardinals.

The Least "Valuable" Players

To probably no one's surprise, Adam Wainwright was the team's least valuable player. He had a negative fWAR total (-0.4) and he was paid $7.5 million in 2023. That means that Wainwright had a -$21 million price tag for every win above replacement. Wainwright's 2023 season was tough to watch as a fan; he had a memorable career in St. Louis, so it was tough to watch him struggle as much as he did last year. He may have been the least valuable, but Waino was the most memorable.

Drew VerHagen (-$17.5 million value), Andrew Knizner (-$11 million value), Andre Pallante (-$7.29 million value) Drew Rom (-$7.2 million in value), Jake Woodford (-$1.23 million in value), Masyn Winn (-$0.9 million in value), and Alec Burleson (-$0.721 million in value) round out the remaining negative players.

Giovanny Gallegos accumulated just 0.3 fWAR and he was on contract for $4.75 million last year. This means he was valued at over $15 million per WAR last year. The average value of one win above replacement is around $10 or $12 million. Paul Goldschmidt and Miles Mikolas, despite both being worth over 3.0 fWAR, were the 24th and 25th most valuable players out of the thirty-six that I analyzed.

While underperformance and high salaries are typically a dangerous combination for a player's value, underperformance carries the most weight. Pallante, Knizner, Woodford, Rom, Winn, and Burleson were all paid the league minimum last year, but they had a negative value for the team. This isn't to say that these players can't turn it around (excluding Woodford and Knizner -- the Cardinals' non-tendered players of 2023). All of these players are young and have plenty of potential, but they need to show that improvement next year.

The Most "Valuable" Players

Most of the players on this list are young, cheap, and talented players. That explains why so many teams chase and/or hoard prospects and other young players who have shown promise; they provide the most value for a team. When a player hasn't reached arbitration and is making the league minimum for their first three years, they are at their physical peak, and they provide a lot of value to a team.

Once a player hits arbitration or free agency, regardless of his WAR total, his value on a per-dollar basis decreases significantly. Therefore, some of the most valuable players on the Cardinals last year were younger players who performed well while still in pre-arbitration or arbitration.

The most valuable player for the Cardinals last year was Lars Nootbaar. He cost the league minimum of $732,000 and he racked up 3.2 fWAR. The Cardinals paid about $228,000 per win above replacement for Lars last year. The next most valuable player was Nolan Gorman; St. Louis paid him just under $300,000 per win above replacement.

Brendan Donovan ($347,000 per win above replacement), JoJo Romero ($600,000 per win above replacement), and Zack Thompson ($659,000 per win above replacement) round out the five most valuable players for the Cardinals in 2023. Some of these players have been labeled as "untouchable" by the front office throughout this offseason and this past Trade Deadline, and we now see why.

Willson Contreras was the most valuable non-arbitration-eligible player for the Cardinals last year. He was paid $10 million dollars, and he accumulated 2.4 fWAR, placing his value at $4.17 million per win above replacement. Due to Nolan Arenado's deferrals and Colorado paying part of his salary still, he was the 19th most valuable player on the team.

Using a WAR-per-dollar calculation, we can see which players provided the most for the Cardinals last year for the lowest amount of money. The team's young core provided the most value, but even their older, more expensive players provided the team with decent value based on their salaries.

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