Player Valuation System-1979

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Fun stuff

http://vincegennaro.com/id13.html

How does Gennaro's system work? The process begins by feeding "expectations" about a player's performance (for example, his statistics for the previous season) into the computer. The computer traces the performance expectation through four phases - performance, team winning percentage, attendance and revenue sections. The final result enables the system to estimate a player's value to his team.

To project attendance, the system considers population of the metropolitan area, changes in consumer attitudes, competition from other sports, recent pennants or divisional titles which Gennaro terms "spillover", and winning percentage. By examining recent history, Gennaro measures explicit relationships between attendance and three non-controllable factors (area population, opposing team and weather) and four controllable factors (team winning percentage, ticket prices, promotional dates and weekend vs. weekday games).

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Of course by the time they loaded all the IBM cards and did the calcs it was already 1981.

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Fascinating article! History.

So Catfish's $2.85 mill in 1975... he had to have 20 WAR to be worth it?

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While Hunter has not yet approached his 1975 performance (23-14 with a 2.54 earned run average), Gennaro calculated that Catfish was responsible for attracting 4,150 fans beyond normal attendance every time he went to the mound in '75. In 19 starts at Yankee Stadium that year, he figured Hunter alone pulled 79,000 fans into the park.

So he based it on actual fans brought into the stadium, a solid tangible number (semi-tangible I guess...) rather than now, where it's just WAR per $ average for all 750+ major leagues players.

e: And came to the conclusion that a player's value was different for each team. So much to say about every single paragraph of that article!!! Somebody ELSE rep Corn for this!

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Incredible prediction...

Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, in his address at the winter meetings in Orlando last December, voiced fear that baseball's present collective bargaining agreement will create a group of elite teams with potentially great damage to competitive balance. The approximate player salary, before the first reentry draft, was $50,000. Today it is approximately $100,000, Kuhn pointed out.