Chris Young Just Earned His Salary for a Long Time

Boom.

A minute or so ago, there was a curious little exchange in the Mets game against the Miami Marlins. Ruben Tejada had drawn a walk with one out, bringing up the pitcher's spot. Terry Collins sent up Chris Young to pinch-hit, and the Marlins responded by removing starting pitcher Tom Koehler and bringing in right-handed reliever Brian Morris. The Mets' announcers were speculating that this might have been a cagey move on Collins's part: by sending up Young, he got the Marlins to bring their righty reliever into the game, and he could then respond with Bobby Abreu, who is (a) left-handed, and (b) better than Chris Young. Had he just sent Abreu out initially, they would have brought in a lefty reliever instead. Apparently that wasn't what Terry was thinking, though: he left Young in there, for one pitch.

Because Young homered on that pitch. To tie the game.

I immediately commented to a friend on IM that Chris Young had just earned his salary for the month. The thing is, I'm not sure I was wrong. He's being paid $7.25 million this year, and the season is obviously about six months long, so the monthly salary is something like $1.2 million. Now, the current understanding is that the market price of one Win Above Replacement on the free agent market is something like $6 million. One WAR is approximately equivalent to ten net runs, either added on offense or saved on defense (including, obviously, pitching). If we assume that Young's home run was worth +2 runs, that's +0.2 wins, which translates to... $1.2 million. Of course, a replacement-level player wouldn't necessarily have resulted in zero runs in that spot, so we can't really think of what Young did as being worth +0.2 WAR all by itself. Actually, though, FanGraphs says that CY has been worth 0.2 WAR today, so my calculation is pretty accurate.

And if I wanted to get a bit less context-independent, I could say that I was underestimating the value of what Young just did. Right now the Mets are a team that's been struggling all year but which has been playing well of late and has dreams of sneaking onto the fringes of contention at the All-Star break. Moreover, as I said a while ago, there are reasons to think this team should get better as the year progresses. Winning this series against the Marlins is important for keeping that momentum; if they could, for instance, sweep the Marlins, they'd get to just five games under .500 at the break. That sounds a lot better than seven games under, or even nine games under if they lose both of these games. This is, in other words, a pretty important game. And Young added a lot to their chances of doing just that. His blast increased the Mets' Win Expectancy by 35.6%. To put that in context, a team that wins a game has a total Win Probability Added of +50.0% for the day, since they started out with a 50% chance of winning and end with a 100% chance of winning. So +35.6% WPA is basically like adding 70% of a win, in fully context-dependent terms. And that's a win above average, a slightly more stringent standard than mere average. If we give Young credit for adding seven-tenths of a win instead of two-tenths, then that one swing on that one pitch that Young just faced was worth somewhere around $4 million, or over half of Young's salary for the entire year.

Think about that: with one swing, Chris Young may have just justified his presence on this team for the entire first half of the season.

Of course, teams should never, ever pay for "wins" in the WPA-derived sense I'm describing. There was no sense in which anyone, in March or earlier today, could have predicted that Young would hit such a meaningful blast. You pay for what you can expect to receive, and your expectations have to be largely context-independent, except perhaps for relief pitchers and maybe for elite pinch-hitter types. Besides, of course, it's not like that swing was the only thing Young has done this half-season; he's also hit .199/.280/.354 over 233 plate appearances (including that one today), which, combined with poor outfield defense, has been worth -0.3 WAR. (It was -0.4 WAR prior to his pinch-hitting appearance, presumably because of rounding effects.) So it's not like he's actually been worth a net positive amount of money so far.

But even though you can't pay for context in advance, you might be able to use context in retrospect to feel okay about the purchases you made. No matter how much we can't let ourselves think that the home run Chris Young just hit affects his "true talent" or what he's really worth, it was still worth a lot to this team. If the baseball gods had appeared to Sandy Alderson during that pitching change and asked him how much he would be willing to pay for a home run on the next pitch, it's possible that he would've said something in the range of $4 million. Chris Young delivered that value right there, and in a certain sense nothing takes that away. Through yesterday his contract may have been like lighting money on fire, but today, for one glorious pitch, Chris Young was worth every penny.