Nationals Best and Worst Pitching Values

Fangraphs have added win value ratings for pitchers to their player pages. There's a whole series of "Pitcher win values explained" posts on the Fangraphs blog, but the basic idea is to quantify a player's contributions in dollar terms. That way, you can get a very clear sense of how effectively teams are using their resources. For pitchers, it's notable that they are basing pitcher value on FIP (fielding independent pitching, a metric that measures run prevention minus a set of factors outside the pitcher's control, like the quality of the fielding behind him).

(I had a similar post when Fangraphs added a similar stat for hitters, which you can read here.)

By not spending on basically anyone, they guaranteed themselves that no pitchers would cost them much. But here were the Nationals best values in 2008:

• Saul Rivera: $6.4m value; $436k actual salary
• Odalis Perez: $5.9m value; $900k actual salary
• John Lannan: $5.2m value; $400k actual salary
• Tim Redding: $4m value; $1m actual salary
• Joel Hanrahan: $3.2m value; $400k actual salary

Also notable were Scott Olsen, who was a $4.8m value each of the last two years but is likely to get maybe half that in arbitration. Daniel Cabrera was a $6.1m value and signed for $2.6m.

All that looks good, but while you're feeling good about your team, let me remind you about these guy:

• Armando Gallaraga: $12m value; $400k actual salary