Let's talk about . . . o wait, Bonds was indicted . . . damn.

I'm certainly not so self-involved to imagine that I can fight the news cycle.

ESPN has been running the story to lead off their coverage since the Bonds indictment broke.  Will Carroll discussed it at Baseball Prospectus.  I'm sure the story is going to be littered throughout the news media for the next several weeks. [update] I missed this diary on the topic -- there's more specific details about the indictment there.[/update]

There's an element of schadenfreude here.  I understand that Barry Bonds comes off as something of an arrogant and overly priviledged individual.  It's easy to dislike someone from a distance.  The only real perception we have of him is through interviews and his website.   His public relations manager should have been fired long ago -- if he has one at all.

That said, this whole situation is an unfortunate black eye for baseball.  Barry Bonds is, arguably, the best baseball player in the history of the game.  He's certainly the best of our generation.  To have him indicted some 3 months after he broke baseball's most important record is tragic.  Setting aside the argument of whether he actually used performance enhancing drugs, there's a very serious charge being leveled here.  Federal prosecutors don't just get indictments because they think its fun.  There's a conviction rate well over 90% for the Feds.  Major League Baseball has a fiasco on their hands and somehow I doubt that Bud Selig is going to be delicate or eloquent in his handling of this.

I'm largely ambivalent towards the hidden charge here -- that Bonds used PEDs.  I really don't care.  To think that a large number of individuals in baseball didn't use PEDs is naive.  To think that we have a good grasp of who did and didn't use PEDs is also naive.  Leveling accusations has become something of a game for some people and there's no real repercussions to deal with when that happens.  It's the same tired story that we've been listening to for the last several years.  Hopefully, this indictment and the Mitchell Investigation is done and over with by the time baseball starts next year.  I don't think it will be but I can hope.

In any event, I'd spent the previous couple of days adding some functionality to the market forcasting tool I used to guesstimate David Eckstein's contract.  This time I'm not using it to find out what the market rate is but simply to see who the best bargain is.  You'll remember that the spreadsheet takes a weighted 3-year average of VORP and UZR (or a defensive estimate since the 2007 UZRs aren't out yet) and tries to give a baseline for what the players is going to be worth in terms of runs the next year.  I'm not here to argue it's accuracy (although I was pleased with how well it tracked MORP) but merely to get a rudimentary baseline that I can play with easily.

The changes that I've made this time are an attempt to more accurately reflect player production.  I normalized all the stats for a full seasons worth (600 plate appearances and 150 defensive games) but now added a playing time factor.  We can reasonably guess that if Barry Bonds plays next year, he isn't going to play full time.  He's accumulated over 400 PAs the last few years so I can set the Playing Time column to .67 to scale the number of runs he's actually going to produce.  The first "Runs/Million" column estimates the number of runs we expect them to output per million based on playing time for 2008.

That's a single year estimate though.  When players are over 30 (as most free agents are), the aging curves are headed down and we know that players are going to command multi-year deals.  Players still can be valuable and have career years but for the most part you expect them to slow down from year to year when they get older.  I added "Yearly drop-off" column to reduce the number of runs produced after the next year.  So for example, if we think that Andruw Jones will lose about 5 runs a year between his offense and his defense combined the spreadsheet will accumulate that over the life of the expected contract. In 2008 it takes of 5 runs, in 2009 10 runs, etc.  You can plug in the average value of the contract ("AV") and the length of the contract ("# of years") to get an idea of how many runs that player will produce per million over the course of the contract.

I've got the current spreadsheet loaded up with a few outfielders.  I've taken some stabs at their contracts and the amount of money that they might land. You can download it to play around with it from here.  The estimator really likes Barry Bonds and Milton Bradley but isn't so much a fan of the other big name outfielders.  If the Cardinals want to move one of their young outfielders and sign a stop gap, Milton Bradley seems like the best bet.  Given the media frenzy that will surround Bonds for the next few weeks, I'm not sure it's a good idea to really try and sign him despite the fact that he will probably be undervalued.  As a pure baseball decision, it makes sense but from every other angle it will cause endless problems.  I'm an advocate of thinking outside the box in roster construction but forgive me if I don't want to read 20,000 Bonds columns in the local papers next year.