Who’s Ripping Off the Mets?

Let’s make a list.  The following people are responsible for effectively stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Mets ownership:

 

The Bernie Madoff story has been told elsewhere – the real effect for the Mets will be noticed when they don’t sign any significant free agents this offseason.

Now, here’s how Omar Minaya gets to rank up there with the perpetrator of the biggest fraud in American history.

Fangraphs has an interesting statistic where they attempt to use a player’s “VORP” and “WARP” to calculate how much their performance has been worth in terms of millions of dollars.  To get there, they figure out the total amount of money being paid to MLB players and assess how much the average team is paying per win.  Then by figuring how many wins an individual player is worth (WARP is wins above replacement player), they can assess a players “value.”

A further explanation can be read here and here.

According to Fangraphs’ assessment of the Mets hitters and pitchers, through 125 games, the Mets roster has been “worth” $68.8 million.  Prorated over a 162 game season, this extrapolates to $89.2 million worth of production.  Problem is, the Mets payroll in 2009 is around $145 million.

I hope Omar has 56 million dollars lying around somewhere, just in case the Wilpons ask for their money back.

But anyway, just to rub salt in my own wounds, I looked up the same numbers for the Yankees and Phillies. 

The Yankees are on pace for $246 million in production from a $208 million payroll.  The Phillies are on pace for $183 million in production from $111 million payroll. 

Best of all may be the Marlins: on pace for $145 in production from the second lowest payroll in baseball ($36 million).

The lesson of the day for me is that the more I look, I keep finding more and more ways to describe how embarrassing the Mets are.