You need to knock some money off of what the players are worth because of the draft pick compensation. The picks can have a dollar value hung on them as well. The owners say:

we’re getting Hudson who will give us 2.5 wins. we should be paying out about 9 MM a year for that. but, we also have to pay a draft pick valued at $(draftpick). 9 MM/yr – $(draftpick)/(length of deal) seems like a valid deal from our point of view.

of course, that’s screwing over the player because he doesn’t get anything from the draft pick, but that’s a huge reason for why Hudson and OCab’s dollar valuations are so divergant from their actual contracts.

I mean, there are some valid reasons, but also some non-valid ones.

money is kind of important there.

and won’t until next october. obviously that’s a limitation of their valuations, at least as to how people use them. people tend to like to pick a value – the fashionable one early this offseason was $4.8 million but you could shorthand it to $5M – as to what they thought the price of a marginal win on the free agent market would be. if mr. superanalyst is right about that and right about what the guy will produce in 2009, he’ll know the value. of course, it’s pretty clear that the price isn’t going to be $4.8M. and you tell me whether these people are correct with their performance projections.

also, on defense, it’s not good. we can debate all day long what defensive stat is good and what isn’t. bottom line, if you have to have that debate, none of them are that good. especially for the win value ascribed to them. i’d pretty much ignore one years valuation for that and try to look at a three year (or longer) average. obviously impossible for some players and when players start to decline you run into more issues.

Perhaps it is harder to “catch” than any other position – either because it takes a greater skillset and/or mindset to play it.

$8MM/yr. for Burrell does seem a bit much when Abreu signed for $5MM, to say nothing of $10MM/year for Dunn (but it was Jim Bowden’s “eff you” to MLB as he departed- he had to have known his time was nigh).

In 2008, the league-average wOBA of catchers was .323. For corner outfielders, it was .341. That .018 point difference is about 18 runs over a full season, or 1.8 wins. So, given a left fielder and a catcher who hit the same, the catcher is 1.8 wins more valuable. At pre-2009 offseason rates, that costs about $8MM on the free agent market.

There are reasons that judging positional difficult based purely on offense isn’t ideal, but there aren’t any big problems for these positions.

here

The relative value of the others positions were determined by comparing how players rated when they moved between positions by things such as UZR. Since catching is a whole different beast, Tango and Fangraphs basically use an offensive adjustment, comparing how well catchers hit compared to the average hitter. They’re 12.5 runs worse over a full season (or whatever), so they get a 12.5 run position adjustment.

Also, we need to be careful about using “valuation” to mean two different things. A player’s value could be his WAR or it could be how much he’s worth in terms of dollars. I’m mostly using it to mean WAR, here (or as a generic term that’s measuring production). So Zaun’s contract is irrelevant to determining his WAR, it’s irrelevant to determining how much he SHOULD be paid, but it’s quite relevant to determining what you’d actually want to sign him and other catchers for, since MLB teams are a bit off on valuing (in both senses of the word) catchers.