Bargains and Busts: 2010 A.L. Hitters

It doesn't matter how good last year's best hitters were; the market will always spend a certain amount of money on these guys.

Top 10 Salaries, A.L. Hitters

#	Player	$	Sal	+/-	PK	SW	2009
1	Alex Rodriguez	$25	$40	-15	$37	$36	$25
2	Miguel Cabrera	$38	$37	0	$36	$33	$31
3	Mark Teixeira	$25	$37	-12	$32	$33	$28
4	Jacoby Ellsbury	$2	$35	-34	$33	$32	$36
5	Evan Longoria	$30	$35	-5	$30	$30	$26
6	Joe Mauer	$23	$35	-12	$30	$34	$32
7	Carl Crawford	$40	$34	+6	$34	$35	$36
8	Ian Kinsler	$18	$31	-13	$31	$29	$26
9	Kevin Youkilis	$21	$30	-9	$27	$22	$25
10	B.J. Upton	$25	$30	-5	$26	$27	$19
	Average	$25	$35	-10	$32	$31	$28

Thirty-five dollars per hitter is actually a $1 per player pay cut from 2009. But the 10 best hitters in 2009 "only" earned $31 per player, with a mere six players cracking the $30 barrier.

If someone told you that the 10 most expensive A.L. bats in 2010 cost $35 per player, you might expect to see some N.L. imports in the mix here. But no, every single one of these players plied his trade in the A.L. in '09. In fact, only half of 2009's 10 best hitters make the chart above. The $7 per player pay raise means that the market is speculating a great deal, or expecting a bounce back to more "normal" levels of earning for the best American League hitters on the whole.

Peter Kreutzer (a.k.a Rotoman) and Sports Weekly also expect these hitters to improve over 2009, but unlike the market are hedging their bets somewhat. And this isn't because PK or SW likes different players; both overlap on eight of these 10 with the market.

As a result, the market would clean up here in a three-way battle with PK and SW. PK ties the market on Kinsler, SW gets Crawford outright, and the market gets everyone else, spending $279 for eight players.

You and I can't do that. But since the market has $3,120 to "spend" (and can't go over) it most certainly can.

Do you want to take a $10 loss per player?

No, of course not. But you do want stats. Nick Swisher earned $25 on the nose and was the 19th best hitter in the American League last year. The 10 hitters above, on average, were as good as the 19th best hitter in the American League.

If you spent big bucks here, though, you'd better hope that there are some bargains in the next chart.

Top 10 Earnings, A.L. Hitters

#	Player	$	Sal	+/-	PK	SW	2009
1	Carl Crawford	$40	$34	+6	$34	$35	$36
2	Josh Hamilton	$38	$18	+20	$15	$22	$11
3	Miguel Cabrera	$38	$37	0	$36	$33	$31
4	Jose Bautista	$34	$4	+30	$5	$1	$7
5	Robinson Cano	$33	$28	+5	$26	$28	$27
6	Juan Pierre	$33	$19	+14	$17	$21	$20
7	Paul Konerko	$32	$15	+17	$12	$15	$18
8	Alex Rios	$32	$21	+11	$23	$23	$16
9	Ichiro Suzuki	$31	$27	+3	$32	$26	$31
10	Adrian Beltre	$30	$19	+11	$17	$16	$11
	Average	$34	$22	+12	$22	$22	$21

Bautista is the guy owners hit the jackpot with; he's the second cheapest American League player on this chart since I started doing this in 2007 (Carlos Pena in '07 at $1 holds the record). On the whole, though, this is the cheapest average salary of these players since '07.

Average Salary Top 10 Hitters: 2007-2009

2007: $26

2008: $30

2009: $27 

The lower the average salary of the best hitters, the more unpredictable they were. You don't even need the average salary to tell you this; you can simply look at the players on the first two charts. Only Cabrera and Crawford show up on both charts.

The result is that spending big wasn't necessarily as important last year as spending correctly. If you only had a 1-in-5 shot of getting one of the best players by spending big bucks, it meant that a wise acquisition elsewhere was far more likely to give you a shot at a $30+ earner. There were also more $30+ earners. In addition to the players on the chart above, Shin-Soo Choo and Longoria also cracked the $30 barrier.

Spending those big bucks early cost the market somewhat here. They only get Cabrera and Beltre outright, while tying SW on Cano and Konerko. SW gets Crawford, Hamilton, Pierre and ties PK on Rios. PK also gets Bautista and Ichiro. The unpredictability on the best hitters means that in this hypothetical three-way battle, the distribution of players is split.

The market's big spending early means that they should run out of money at the bottom.

Top 10 Profits, A.L. Hitters

#	Player	$	Sal	+/-	PK	SW	2009
1	Jose Bautista	$34	$4	+30	$5	$1	$7
2	Josh Hamilton	$38	$18	+20	$15	$22	$11
3	Austin Jackson	$24	$7	+17	$8	$4
4	Paul Konerko	$32	$15	+17	$12	$15	$18
5	Mike Aviles	$18	$1	+16	$3		-$1
6	Brett Gardner	$27	$13	+15	$14	$6	$13
7	Jim Thome	$16	$2	+14	$4	$6	$12
8	Daric Barton	$16	$2	+14	$7	$7	$4
9	Delmon Young	$26	$12	+14	$12	$15	$12
10	Juan Pierre	$33	$19	+14	$17	$21	$20
	Average	$26	$9	+17	$10	$10	$10

Sure enough, the market gets beat here on average by both PK and SW. PK adds Jackson, Aviles, Gardner and his share of Barton to his side of the ledger, while SW "gets" Thome, his share of Barton and Young. Even counting the players who were mentioned before, all the market can do is muster a tie on Konerko.

This is not good news in the A.L. if you were spending your money early. As I said before, there is nothing wrong with a $10 loss if you're buying stats. However, you need to make up these losses elsewhere. If you had a savvy owner using Kreutzer or Sports Weekly's prices, you were going to get stuck in an ugly endgame late.

Stars and Scrubs is very difficult to pull off in one-league leagues unless everyone is spending his money. All it takes are 3-4 owners to hang back and patiently wait for the second or third tier of players. If that happens, you need for the market to spend cautiously, the best players to earn a lot or (preferably) both. It isn't hard to see which of these things happened last year.

If you did spend big money on a hitter or two, at the very least you had better hope that they aren't in this group.

Top 10 Losses, A.L. Hitters

#	Player	$	Sal	+/-	PK	SW	2009
1	Jacoby Ellsbury	$2	$35	-34	$33	$32	$36
2	Grady Sizemore	$2	$29	-28	$26	$27	$15
3	Kendry Morales	$9	$27	-18	$24	$26	$27
4	Brian Roberts	$9	$26	-17	$21	$23	$27
5	Chris Davis	-$0	$16	-16	$13	$14	$9
6	Brandon Wood	-$3	$13	-16	$11	$5	-$0
7	Adam Lind	$12	$28	-15	$23	$25	$27
8	Alex Rodriguez	$25	$40	-15	$37	$36	$25
9	Nolan Reimold	$1	$15	-15	$18	$14	$13
10	Dustin Pedroia	$15	$29	-14	$28	$26	$25
	Average	$7	$26	-19	$23	$23	$20

Ellsbury and A-Rod are the only two repeaters, though there is obviously a big difference between Ellsbury's level of failure and A-Rod's.

Most of the hitters on this list are expensive, though. Seven of these players cost $25 or more. While this means most of them did give something back to their owners, taking a $14+ loss is still a pretty big hit to take. You definitely want a bomb that delivered something in return; getting stuck with Davis, Reimold, or Wood gave you zero or less than zero in stats. However, there's no way to put a positive spin on a $19 loss per player any way you slice it.

And there's no way of avoiding the conclusion that PK and SW blew the market away last year. The expert leagues were out to lunch.

The market gets every one of these players except Reimold. Rotoman saved the market the embarrassment of going 10-for-10 on the biggest A.L. busts.

Some of these players were due raises because they were coming back from injury (A-Rod, Sizemore). Remember, though, that giving players a raise this big from the previous year is generally a formula for failure. When the market has historically spent this aggressively, it has not worked out in their favor.