The Phillies had a 2009 payroll of nearly $128 million, fifth highest in Major League Baseball. With Ryan Howard and Raul Ibanez signing big money contracts in the offseason, Brad Lidge signing an extension last July, and Chase Utley’s $85 million 2007 extension beginning a sharp increase in annual payout, it’s not hard to see where the money was going. But what spots provided the most return on the investment? Obviously Ryan Howard had a productive season, but one has to consider the $15 million he made in 2009 and weigh it against that finished product – .279/.360/.571 with 45 home runs, and a defensive performance that was much improved over his 2008 leather work. There are a few ways to do so, but a good jumping-off point would be Wins Above Replacement (WAR).

There are several formulations of WAR depending on who you talk to, but the big-picture summary is that takes into account all facets of a player’s game, offensive and defensive, and measures how many wins that player was worth above a replacement-level MLB player of the same position. Chase Utley’s WAR in 2009 was 7.7, the highest on the team. This means that if the Phillies had fielded a replacement-level second baseman (think, for example, around .252/.310/.400 with below average defense and decent base running) instead of Chase Utley in 2009, they would have been expected to win around eight less games. The same figure can be measured for pitchers. You can find a much more detailed explanation here. For our purposes, it’s a great way to measure all of the contributions of a player in one number, as a component in our measurement of payroll efficiency. The other component, obviously, is salary. I have to again stress how invaluable Cot’s Baseball Contracts is for information like this, in addition to ye olde Google machine. I collected the 2009 salary figures for all pitches and position playesr and added any performance incentives that would have vested, as well as any signing bonuses, prorated for this season. And that’s all we need; divide WAR by salary, use some suitable units (I found that WAR per $100,000 earned was easiest on the eyes), and behold the player values. Let’s look at position players first, on the left.

The red line marks the average for the entire team, pitchers and position players. Now, before you go flying off the internet handle at me with things like “Paul Bako and Miguel Cairo worth more than Howard? Coste more than Werth?” keep in mind the notion of “value” that we’re talking about here – return on investment. Coste, Bako, and Cairo were all making at or just near the league minimum $400,000, and they played positions which only require below average offensive production for the player to be valuable. Take into account the (relative) pittance they were earning, and their serviceable defensive contributions, and it’s not surprising that simply being adequate made them above average in terms of payroll efficiency. Obviously Howard made a greater overall contribution, he was just paid disproportionately more for it.

That being said, there are some unexpected revelations here. In particular, it’s pretty stunning just how valuable Carlos Ruiz was in 2009. He had a decent start to the season, but by the summer he was once again an offensive black hole at the bottom of the lineup. Through July 12th, he was stumbling along at .235/.335/.367 with 3 home runs, and myself and many other Phillies fans were pining for the Lou Marson era to begin in earnest, having long suspected his vaunted “game-calling” skills to be overrated. What happened next would be fodder for a separate Fire Ruben Amaro post, had I any idea what actually did happen. But I don’t. For some reason, from July 16th to the end of the season, Ruiz caught fire and hit .276/.375/.487 with 6 home runs, to finish the season at .255/.355/.425 with 9 home runs. That’s actually 3% above league average, downright respectable for a catcher, and downright excellent for Carlos Ruiz. It earned him a WAR of 2.2, and all that the Phillies paid for his services was a measly $475,000. To put it into perspective, this kind of efficiency is the equivalent of paying Chase Utley $1,662,500 for his 2009 season. The Phillies put 0.73% of their payroll into the catcher position, lowest in the MLB, and got 7% of their positional WAR out of it. It’s a better deal than the Louisiana Purchase.

On the flip side of this is giant, bearded, ever-burning money pyre that is Eric Bruntlett. Why the Phillies decided to throw $800,000 his way after a .217/.297/.297 2008 is a mystery to me. This is actually part of the reason why understanding replacement level is so important for MLB front offices. Manuel (and I suppose Ruben) were probably in love with Bruntlett’s ability to play most positions on the field (although he plays none of them particularly well) and his serviceability as a pinch runner. But the front office probably didn’t realize (or didn’t believe) that none of these things brought him above replacement level in 2008. Replacement level guys are ones you can find on the waiver wire or rotting in your AAA organization and slap them on the 40 man roster for league minimum. Bruntlett was making twice that, for less production. The Phillies could have stocked two replacement level players for the same investment and positional versatility. Instead, they penned him a new contract, and he took the misplaced faith and hit .171/.224/.238 in 118 plate appearances, a season so abysmal that Baseball Reference seems unable to even display it. It made him the least efficient expenditure on the Phillies, and earned him more than a few dedicated detractors. Fortunately for them and all Phillies fans, Bruntlett will definitely not be offered another contract by the Phils, unless he has some damning photos of Ruben Amaro stashed away in that glorious face-kerchief.

Between those two extremes are generally satisfactory results for the Phillies. Shane Victorino (.292/.358/.446, 10 home runs) and Jayson Werth (.268/.374/.503 with 35 home runs) both put together better-than-expected seasons, with Jayson’s maybe qualifying as a breakout year. Victorino was signed cheaply for one year to avoid arbitration, and Werth was in a $2 million year of a $9 million contract, so both of those were extremely efficient from a payroll standpoint. Chase Utley being only a little over the team average does not bother me in the slightest. I could go on for paragraphs about how underrated he is (maybe not as much after the recent World Series performance), but sufficient to say, there are only maybe 2 or 3 players in the entirety of the MLB more valuable than Utley, and one of them is Albert Pujols. On the open market, he could make much, much more than he does now, and he’s part of the core of players developed in-house that this team is built around.

I was unsurprised to find Howard in the middle of the pack here, as I was of the opinion (and still am) that his contract was an overpayment. But, as with Utley, there are mitigating factors. Howard had more years of arbitration remaining, in which he certainly would have won and received more than he is being paid according to the contract right now. The deal cost-controls Howard for the rest of his arbitration years and gives the Phillies the opportunity to bid a fond farewell should his production be in pronounced decline come 2012. In addition, his 2009 was a somewhat hopeful upswing as far as the factors of his prior 2 years of performance that were cause for concern. At right, let’s revisit a chart I made in a previous post to illustrate what I thought might have been a typical age-related big slugger decline after 2008, adding his 2009 numbers.

Following the 2008 season, nearly all of those indicators were in the midst of a three year decline. In 2009, Howard’s BB/K ratio and isolated power held steady, and his OBP and SLG improved markedly. This, along with his BABIP regressing back to his career average, all contributed to the final column of the table: a 27 point increase in weighted on-base average (wOBA). His significant weight loss following the 2008 season may have helped him put a halt to the sort of decline that comes in the fourth decade of hitters with a big frame like his. His defense also improved quite a lot, meaning, from a WAR perspective, that his bat need not carry as much of the load as it did in 2008. Given all of this, it’s important to note that when I call his contract an “overpayment,” I’m not necessarily saying it was a bad overpayment to make. We won’t know that until after his 2010 and 2011 seasons.

Later this week I’ll post a similar analysis of the 2009 pitching staff. As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve revamped the look of Fire Ruben Amaro. It’s best viewed on a widescreen monitor in the Firefox browser, at a resolution of 1440×900 or similar. E-mail me if you see any glitches or unreadable elements caused by the new stylesheet.

One note on the above: For players that joined or left the team midseason, such as Ben Francisco, only the WAR that they contributed to the Phillies was taken into account. Accordingly, only the money paid to them by the Phillies, and not any other team, was included in the calculations.