Curtis Granderson's Trade Value

So there's been much scuttlebutt about trading Curtis Granderson. Ian's covered this once before and did so again today. Kurt covered it in-depth today as well. I'm sure Billfer and Lee will chime in with thoughts at some point. This all comes in relation to Lynn Henning writing his weekly "Detroit should trade _____" articles, and he picked Granderson to be the focal point. He's not new to this at all, writing before about trading Granderson and spending many written words about dealing Magglio Ordonez.

It begs the question: Should the Tigers trade Curtis Granderson?

I'm of the opinion that no one is off limits. The closest the Tigers have to an "untouchable" player is Miguel Cabrera followed by Curtis Granderson. But, no one is truly untouchable. Albert Pujols is not even untouchable. It'd just take a package that's too large and franchise-crippling to make a deal for him.

Everyone is down on Granderson this year due to his .248/.331/.457 line. He's also been beyond terrible against left-handed pitching, posting a paltry line of .169/.241/.234. That's awful. I'm not going to defend it. OK, maybe I will try. He's got a .211 BABIP this year against lefties. That's the lowest he's had against southpaws in his career. He had a .296 BABIP against lefties in 2006, .211 in 2007, and .292 in 2008.

What does that mean? He'll probably regress to the good in 2010 and post a more respectable, league-average line against left-handers.

Including 2009, his career BABIP against lefties is .254. So, he's currently 43-points below his career average BABIP against LHP. Let's normalize that up to .254 and assume that they're all just singles. This just adds on 3 more hits, but raises his split against LHP to a line of .188/.259/.253 for an OPS of .512. Still awful and well below the .258/.323/.411 average line for LHB vs. LHP's. The average BABIP for LHB's vs. LHP's in 2009 is .304. Just for fun, we'll normalize Granderson's line out to that league average BABIP for LHB's vs. LHP's. Doing so, we get this: .225/.292/.292 for an OPS of .584 -- again, awful.

What we know for sure is that he's absolutely terrible in 2009 against left-handers. He's also shown to be awful against southpaws in 2007. But, he was average or better in 2006 and 2008. So what do we believe his true talent is? Somewhere in the middle.

This is why the love affair with split stats -- even platoon splits -- are a dangerous game. The small samples lead to misleading results. He's closer to his career .617 OPS against LHP than he is to his terrible sub-.500 OPS this year.

That was a lot of words to basically try to warn of pinning a player's value on his platoon splits only. Because, he's facing about triple the amount of right-handers than left-handers (2146 PA's versus RHP and 659 versus LHP in his career). Remember how everyone, including me, was up on arms about Dusty Ryan not getting the chance to play and how he was better than his 29 PA sample this year showed? Well, Curtis Granderson only has 28% of his plate appearances against southpaws.

So what is Grandy's true value? How about a 3.2 Wins Above Replacement season this year? What was he last year when he was much better against lefties? 3.8 WAR. Granderson's appeared in 140 of 143 Tigers games this year -- 98%. Give him 98% for the final 19 games and we're predicting another 18-19 games played for Curtis. We'll give him 19. We can expect about 0.43 WAR in those 19 games. Add that to his 3.2 already accumulated and he's on pace for a 3.63 WAR season -- not far off from his "much better season" from last year.

His offense is down 15.8 runs from 2008, but his defense is up 10.2 runs over 2008. After all the math gets crunched out, he's pretty close to his value from 2008.

With that said, and in an attempt to wrap up this rambling piece, what is he worth? He's currently 28 and posted WAR's of 3.6 (I'm projecting that out) in 2009, 3.8 in 2008, and 7.4 in 2007. Weight that out and you get 4.42 WAR over the last three years. Let's use that going forward. I think that he'll age well given his body type and work ethic, so instead of knocking off 0.5 WAR the rest of his contract, I'll take off 0.25.

2010: 4.4
2011: 4.15
2012: 3.9
2013: 3.65

If we use Sky Kalkman's Trade Value Calculator, that would look like this:



What we see here is I've projected him for 16.1 WAR over the next four seasons. His 2013 season is an option and there's a $2 million buyout, which essentially cuts his salary from $13 mil down to $11 mil. The projection puts him at $79.1 million in performance value while he'll only be costing the Tigers $34.8 million and that gives the Tigers a surplus value of $44.3 million.

Essentially, he's underpaid, if this back-of-the-envelope methodology is accurate (which I'm not saying it is infallible) by $44 million.

Now, if we know 0.5 wins off each year for aging we get this:

2010: 4.4
2011: 3.9
2012: 3.4
2013: 2.9

What's that look like in value?

Basically projecting 14.6 WAR which is worth $72.3 million in that time frame and will be a surplus value of $37.6 million.

In short: he's under paid and under valued. Even if we start him at 4 WAR next year rather than 4.4, you get the following value:

There's $30.4 million in surplus value.

Basically, Curtis Granderson's surplus value to the Detroit Tigers is too great to be traded. Here's a table of research done by Victor Wang.

To get fair value for Curtis Granderson in the three projections we would need to get back:

First projection of $79.1 million: 2 top-10 hitting prospects (as ranked by Baseball America; $73 million in value) and one Grade-B pitcher (graded by John Sickels; $7.3 million). Total package value of $80.3 million.

Second projection of $72.3 million: 2 top-10 hitting prospects ($73 million in value).

Third projection of $65.1 million: 1 top-10 hitting prospect ($36.5 million), 1 top-10 pitching prospect ($15.2 million) and a Grade-B pitcher ($7.3 million), one grade-B hitter ($5.5 million). Total package value of $64 million.

Here's Baseball America's top 100 prospect list from before the season if you'd care to gander at the top 10 hitting prospects or top 10 pitching prospects.

Basically, Granderson's not going anywhere. But there's no harm in fielding offers for him.