Best N.L. Reliever: 2010

One of the awards that the Baseball Bloggers Alliance is asking me to vote on is best relievers (their Goose Gossage award). This isn't an award the BBWAA votes on, but I thought it would be interesting to look at this one anyway and compare the relative value of relievers in Roto to their value in real life:

Top 10 2010 N.L. Relievers, Sorted by Patton $

#	Player	$	WARP1	WAR
1	Billy Wagner	$28	1st	6th
2	Heath Bell	$25	3rd	3rd
3	Brian Wilson	$23	2nd	2nd
4	Carlos Marmol	$21	4th	1st
5	John Axford	$18	6th	8th
6	Hong-Chih Kuo	$17	8th	7th
7	Francisco Rodriguez	$16	7th
8	Ryan Franklin	$16
9	Tyler Clippard	$15	5th	10th
10	Francisco Cordero	$14

Other WARP1 Top 10:  Brandon Lyon 9th, Evan Meek 10th.
Other Fangraphs Top 10: Sean Marshall 4th, Matt Belisle 5th, Rafael Betancourt 9th.


Wow. I thought the inflated value of saves in Roto would cause a significant skew in these rankings, but the impact is mostly felt at the bottom of the chart. Baseball Prospectus' rankings almost mirror the Patton $ values 1-4, and the differences at the bottom aren't crazy. It is only when you get down to the mediocre closing options like Cordero where closers start to disappear.


Cordero is losing money in ERA/WHIP, and that's definitely not a coincidence. While there isn't a strong corollary between ERA/WHIP and WAR or WARP1, you're not going to produce a lot of relief value in any system with subpar ERA/WHIP. Another way to look at this is that while a strong ERA/WHIP performer might not score well in WAR or WARP1, the opposite almost definitely won't happen.

Since BP has Wagner first, I'll take the easy way out and go Wagner, Wilson and Bell here. Marmol had a great year, but those walks give me pause.