How Well do the White Sox spend their money?

If you've been a Sox fan, especially one who visits the message boards over at White Sox Interactive often, you've heard the endless grousing of fans complaining that the current ownership won't spend the money that big-market teams should. The White Sox ownership claims that they aren't a big-market team, despite playing in one of the largest markets in the country. Because they play second fiddle to the Chicago Cubs, they see themselves as a small to mid-market club. So, Sox fans complain every year that the team won't go out and spend the money to bring in the big free agents.

For the past few years, the White Sox have had an annual payroll that has fallen somewhere in the $55-70mil range. What I've been wondering is how good the contracts the White Sox signed have been for them. Luckily, Studes over at the Harball Times has created a useful tool to measure a player's worth by taking into account a player's salary, contract status (free agent, arbitration eligible, etc.), win shares, and replacement levels. The result is called the Net Win Shares Value. A value of $0 means a player played exactly what his contract was worth. A positive value means the player played above the worth of his contract, and therefore was a bargain for his team. A negative value means the player played below his value, and the team "lost" money on his contract.

So, what I've done is put the majority of White Sox players this season into the Net Win Shares Value calculator. I used Dugout Dollars as my salary reference point. In the case of traded players, such as Garcia, Everett, Contreras, Loiaza, etc., I tried to figure out how much the Sox paid them in 2004 by calculating how much they had already been paid by their old team. If there were cash considerations as part of the deal, I subtracted those from whatever was left of the player's salary. It won't be exact, and if my numbers are wrong, please e-mail me with corrections. The idea is to see who the Sox signed to good contracts, who they signed to bad contracts, and how they did overall. On this table, black is positive value, red is negative value.

PLAYER	SALARY	NET WIN SHARES VALUE
Adkins, Jon	$301,000	($1,000)
Alomar Jr., Sandy	$750,000	($1,124,732)
Buerhle, Mark	$3,500,000	$3,713,667
Contreras, Jose	$1,800,000	($936,690)
Cotts, Neal	$301,000	($1,000)
Crede, Joe	$340,000	($1,938,381)
Davis, Ben	$750,000	($913,801)
Everett, Carl	$700,000	$1,226,735
Garcia, Freddy	$3,680,000	($1,363)
Garland, Jon	$2,300,000	($473,797)
Gload, Ross	$302,000	$2,318,244
Harris, Willie	$318,500	$825,225
Jackson, Mike	$500,000	($335,823)
Konerko, Paul	$8,000,000	$1,941,457
Lee, Carlos	$6,500,000	$5,620,253
Loaiza, Esteban	$3,370,000	($1,073,368)
Marte, Damaso	$500,000	$3,596,763
Olivo, Miguel	$160,000	$983,725
Ordonez, Magglio	$14,000,000	($4,969,273)
Perez, Timo	$850,000	($343,453)
Politte, Cliff	$800,000	$320,564
Rowand, Aaron	$340,000	$8,819,113
Schoenweis, Scott	$1,725,000	($1,311,718)
Takatsu, Shingo	$750,000	$5,835,999
Thomas, Frank	$6,000,000	$2,768,515
Uribe, Juan	$350,000	$6,277,938
Valentin, Jose	$5,000,000	$650,000
Wright, Dan	$340,000	($672,794)
Wunsch, Kelly	$800,000	($312,230)
TOTAL	$65,027,500	$30,488,775

Conclusions...

With a total payroll of $65mil, and a Net Win Shares Value of approx. $30.5mil, the White Sox were a $65mil team that played like a $95mil team. While that may sound impressive, I haven't done this test yet on any other teams, so I don't know exactly what the impact of this data is. Suffice to say, the Sox are finding more value in their contracts than they are losing value. Still, they aren't winning any division championships either...

Out of the 29 contracts listed, the White Sox "lost" money on 15 of them, or aprrox. 52% of the contracts.

The best contract was Aaron Rowand, who played $8.8mil better than his near league minimum salary of $340,000.

The worst contract was that of injured Magglio Ordonez. The White Sox "lost" nearly $5mil this year on Maggs. On Frank Thomas' contract, they were still able to get nearly $2.8mil of value from only a half a season of production from Frank.

The most "Valuable" player (salary + net win shares value) was Carlos Lee, at $12,120,253.

The least "Valuable" player (salary + net win shares value) was Joe Crede, at ($1,598,381). This is amount is also far and away from the next least valuable player, which was Sandy Alomar Jr., at ($374,732). Perhaps the Sox better be thinking about a replacement, or Joe better start paying the White Sox to let him play third base for them. Though somehow I doubt Joe has $1.6mil lying around.