I'm interested in taking an early look at where the team might sit on the expected win curve over time
First some preliminaries before looking at things year by year. With a steady influx of talent about half the team going forward is likely to be within their arb and pre-arb periods, and the other half acquired at market price. The pre-arb group costs very little. The arb group on average half of what their market value is. These two cost controlled groups together will cost about a quarter of what the market price group will cost. This means overall payroll is split about 20% for the group that is cost controlled and 80% for the group that is market price. For a mid-market team with a payroll of say $150M it would mean 120M for market priced players and 30M for the cost-controlled group.
For 120M you can get about 15 wins above replacement at the going rate. A team of replacement level players gets you 48 wins. So a mid-market team that is "average" in terms of picking out market priced players starts out with about 63 wins. The rest come from the cost controlled group. And this is where I want to focus year-by-year. What I'm going to do is list the players currently within the system who might be on the ML team as a cost controlled player each year and also give an estimate of what they might produce in terms of WAR as a group. It will give us an idea of how we might move up the expected win curve over the next few years. Note that just because I list a player doesn't mean he will be on the ML roster. There will be busts. There will be trades. But I'm giving an expected WAR (or equivalent contribution if traded) of the group that with normal development might be a cost-controlled ML player each year.
2017 Teheran, Vizcaino, Inciarte, Simmons, Peterson, Olivera, Banuelos, Smith, Castro, Perez, Blair, Folty (Projected WAR 15. My projection, obviously open to discussion)
2018 Teheran, Vizcaino, Inciarte, Simmons, Peterson, Olivera Banuelos, Smith, Castro, Perez, Blair, Folty, Newcomb, Sims, Gant, Jenkins, Ruiz, Swanson (projected WAR 18)
2019 Vizcaino, Inciarte, Simmons, Peterson, Olivera, Banuelos, Smith, Castro, Perez, Blair, Folty, Newcomb, Sims, Gant, Jenkins, Ruiz, Swanson, Albies, Davidson, Toussaint (projected WAR 18)
2020 Inciarte, Simmons, Olivera, Banuelos, Smith, Castro, Perez, Blair, Folty, Newcomb, Sims, Gant, Jenkins, Ruiz, Swanson, Albies, Davidson, Toussaint, Allard, Soroka, Riley, Yepez, Acuna, Dykstra, Minter, Herbert, Graham, 2016#1 pick (Projected WAR 24)
2021 Olivera, Banuelos, Smith, Castro, Perez, Blair, Folty, Newcomb, Sims, Gant, Jenkins, Ruiz, Swanson, Albies, Davidson,Toussaint, Allard, Soroka, Riley, Yepez, Acuna, Dykstra, Minter, Herbert, Ventura, Wilson, Baez, Cruz, Pasche, 2016 #1 pick, other 2016 draftees (Projected WAR 26)
2022 Smith, Castro, Perez, Blair, Folty, Newcomb, Sims, Gant, Jenkins, Ruiz, Swanson, Albies, Davidson, Toussaint, Allard, Soroka, Riley, Yepez, Acuna, Dykstra, Minter, Herbert, Ventura, Wilson, Cruz, Pasche, Draftees from 2016 onward, Maitan, Guttierez (Projected WAR 28)
I'll stop now since it is a lot to digest. But I think the contour is interesting and consistent with the way the talent is distributed in our minor league system. There should be a significant improvement over the 2019-2021 timeframe. Prior to that materializing, we are mostly going to be a sub-.500 team.
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