This is a nice article. It lays out the 5 or so ways teams acquire talent, and compares the value (using dollarized WAR - you may not like it, but at least it is consistent and transparent) over the cost of acquisition for each major league team. It is pretty complementary the Angels and a few of the usual suspects.
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/where-does-production-come-from/The 5 ways - draft, international amateurs, trading, waiver/rule 5/minor league FAs, and FAs. Here are a few interesting and relevant to the Nats quotes:
4. The waiver wire, Rule 5, and minor league free agency
Statheads like me tend to geek out over these "free" ways to acquire players. It's exciting to find a diamond in the rough, even if it isn't much of a diamond. The upside of the waiver wire is the price; the downside is that it's rare to find a major contributor there. If you're relying too heavily on bargain-bin pickups, you're probably not building a contending team.
The story of JimBo. The table in the article shows the 2009 Nats were still good at this, probably due to Flores's good 30 games, MacDougal's 20 saves, and JD Martin's average performance. But the bottom line, more or less that you can't build a contender this way, rings true to me.
5. Free agency
You can always buy players at retail. That's how the Angels got Fuentes, Guerrero and Hunter. Good teams all have to fill holes this way, and the best general managers find ways to do so inexpensively, as Tony Reagins did in picking up Bobby Abreu on a one-year deal for $5 million. Unless you're the Yankees, you can only fill so many holes with free agents.
Using this method of evaluation, the Nats actually were negative this year. That is because of the well known (and disputed) downgrading by WAR of Dunn, due to his defense, and Livo, due to his blow up games. Dunn's fielding whack takes more out of him than his offense contributes, leaving his value as less than even his $8m contract. I'm not saying I buy it, but it explains the number. [edit - WAR actually liked Livo - $3.9m of performance for minimal $$]
Stockpiling value
If you had to pick one of these five areas for your front office to master, which would it be? To me, it's a no-brainer: I want my front office to be the best drafting crew in the business.
There's simply no better way to get lots of value on your roster without spending too much money. Sure, everything here is important, but you can get by with mediocrity in the other categories if you knock the ball out of the park with the amateur draft every June.
Zimmerman, Zimmermann, Lannan, and Detwiler were worth about $52m over what they were paid, using WAR.
There is a comparison table for all 30 teams.
Angels do well in every phase.
Twins lead in draft and development surplus value, followed by Boston and TB. Seattle and LAA lead in international signings (hello, Ichiro and Kendry), SD (Adrian and several others) and TB in trades, waiver etc... CWS and FLA, with several teams close, and FAs St L and PHI, with a big * due to mehodology. The author counted internal draftees as FAs once they reached past 6 years of MLB service if they were signed long term, thus this is where Pujols fits.
NYY do not do all that well in any area, but, as the author points our, if you spend $200m+, you just need to be mediocre in your FAs in order to have a team that wins a lot.
I found this observation compelling:
The teams who received the most benefit from trades are often those who have recently held fire sales. No surprise there, with the Indians, A's, and Padres near the top of the list. The team with the most marked trading savvy may be the Rays, who acquired Ben Zobrist, Jason Bartlett and Matt Garza this way.
This gets back to a huge failing of JimBo - in 2007, when we had Chad heading into his 2d year of arb, and we had a surprisingly good performance out of Dmitri and Belliard, and even Rauch, he did not trade any of them. A 2007 fire sale could have brought in a lot of talent.
