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How the Mariners rank, according to baseballtradevalues.com




Let's get right to it and show the results first:

According to the cumulative trade values for each team, the Mariners rank seventh in all of baseball. So what does this mean?

First, it does NOT mean the Mariners are the 7th-most valuable team. What it means is that in a hypothetical world where baseballtradevalues.com (BTV) has perfectly valued every major league and minor league player in every organization, if each team were to conduct a fire sale and liquidate all its labor assets (assuming some buyer had the ability to buy everything), the Mariners would end up the seventh-richest organization.

How accumulated wealth translates into success on the field is an open question, particularly since some organizations have enormous payrolls while others operate frugally. An organization like the Yankees can afford to spend heavily on free agency, and spending can overcome farm system deficits.

This method of looking at an organization's stored resources has other limitations as well. If an organization were to acquire a number of free agents that were paid exactly what BTV thinks they are worth, that team would not increase or decrease in value. Yet we know intuitively that the club would be immensely better, especially early on before diminishing aging curves kick in.

These rankings also factor in BAD acquisitions. If a player is owed $20 million, but is judged by BTV to worth $5 million, that player would have a value of negative $15 million. Bad acquisitions might cripple certain small market teams, but can easily be shrugged off by the big spenders.

BTV has three levels of valuations for each player: Low, Median, and High. As it happens, the Mariners rank seventh in each level, and the rankings do not change very much with each level, so I will not delve into this angle.

So according to BTV, the Mariners are the wealthiest (in terms of trade value) among all AL West teams at $589 million, followed by the Astros at $471 million, the A's at $411 million, the Rangers at $367 million, and the Angels at $328 million.

But what if we ignore sunk costs? What if we exclude all negative values, assuming that the organizations with underwater contracts can afford to pay them?

This is the result:

The Mariners drop to #9 in the rankings, which is not all surprising, considering they don't have many underwater contracts on the books. But their divisional rivals did not close the gap very much.

BTV lists every player in either "Majors" or "Minors." This is how BTV ranks the organizations when filtering to Minor league players only: