The Biz of Baseball created this composite graphic from snapshots within the Bloomberg Sports Fantasy Sports product showing Ryan Theriot and Stephen Drew's defensive metrics

They say a picture is worth a 1000 words, but will it work for making part of a salary arbitration case?

During the Baseball Winter Meetings this past December, members of the media were treated to a sneak preview of Bloomberg Sports advanced analytics application (see the review Bloomberg Sports Making Push to Be Heavy Weight in Baseball Analytics ), and now the consumer application for fantasy baseball is available for the upcoming season. With Bloomberg giving us a test account to play with, we thought it would be fun to use the “Comparison” tool on defensive metrics as part of Cubs shortstop Ryan Theroit’s salary arbitration study. If a settlement is not reached beforehand, Theroit will be the final salary arbitration case of 2010.

As we did with a brief snapshot earlier in the week, a key player to compare Theriot to is Stephen Drew of the Diamondbacks.

Drew and Theriot are both within the same service class (3 years), who has also reached settlement. The other key thing about Drew and Theriot is this: Drew settled on a $3.4 million deal with the Diamondbacks on Jan. 19th. How much is Theriot asking in salary arbitration? $3.4 million. What are the Cubs offering? $2.6 million.

Playing with Bloomberg’s tool, we’re providing defensive metrics into the equation from a graphical perspective. The graphing, something that can be done in Excel, but was done through the Bloomberg tool in a matter of seconds, really allows you to see how Theroit and Drew stack up defensively over the course of the season.

Select any of the images below to see in a larger view.

Errors	Double Plays
Put Outs

When looking at these graphs, along with the data from our initial snapshot on offence between the two comps, Theroit beats Drew in nearly every category. While we won't be reporting as extensively as we did for Wandy Rodregiuz for Theroit, we believe that if Theroit's case goes to hearing tomorrow, he wil beat the Cubs in salary arbitration.

There are only 3 players left in salary arbitration, with rulings on Angels' catcher Jeff Mathis' and Washington Nationals reliever Sean Burnett being announced Friday. If Theroit's case were heard tomorrow, an announcement on the panel's decision would come on Saturday (see The Biz of Baseball's salary arbitration scorecard for details).

Maury Brown is the Founder and President of the Business of Sports Network, which includes The Biz of Baseball, The Biz of Football, The Biz of Basketball and The Biz of Hockey. He is available for hire or freelance. Brown's full bio is here. He looks forward to your comments via email and can be contacted through the Business of Sports Network.

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Comments (3)

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Is a single comparison enough?
written by berselius, February 19, 2010

This is what Theriot's side would argue, but what about Theriot's other comps? Hardy and Bartlett made a lot less in their first arb year but their values were just a notch below Theriot's.

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More to Theriot
written by Maury Brown, February 19, 2010

Hey berselius,

Yes, there would most definitely be other comps, such as the ones you mention (I'm messing around looking at Aybar right now, as a matter of fact).

We did two key arb case studies this year, and probably won't be doing more in-depth on individual players. We're focusing on a ma*sive report encapsulating the entire 2010 cla*s of players.

This was more having fun with the Bloomberg Sports application and seeing whether it would be useful for visual representation. I'm sure we'll be using it a bunch next year.

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Thanks for the response Maury
written by berselius, February 19, 2010

It has just seemed in the past week or so that many have seized on Drew's settlement as certainty that Theriot will win. Honestly I think the best argument for the Cubs settling is that the arbitration process seems so arbitrary in general. It's like trying to pick who will win a baseball game - even if one side is much much better than the other it still seems like the other side wins too often.

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