One thing any GM should be aware of is the value of players on his team.  Another important issue is the perceived value of his players.  If other GMs value players differently then the result is a prime opportunity for a gainful trade.  Many of Neal Huntington's move appear to have had this in mind.  For instance, even though Nate McLouth won a gold glove, he's not an elite defensive center fielder.  On the other end he has picked up a lot of prospects that he thought still had value despite the fact that their teams had mostly given up on them.  I believe Ross Ohlendorf is a prime example of a player whose perceived value greatly exceeds his actual value, and for this reason I believe it's crucial for the Pirates to capitalize on that during this offseason.

As I've discussed before, Ohlendorf's defense-independent stats paint a much different picture of his 2009 performance than his ERA (the same goes for things like WHIP or W/L record).  Even though many GMs are more sabermetrically-inclined than they used to be, there are still GMs out there that focus on stats like ERA and W/L record instead of more important stats.  How large then might the difference be between Ohlendorf's perceived value and his actual value?  Well FanGraphs has a method for converting FIP into WAR, and then the WAR can be converted to dollars.  If we substitute ERA for FIP we might get an idea of his perceived value to the teams that ignore some of the advanced stats.

Once we know a player's value in dollars, we can find the difference between that value and his salary, and that shows the surplus value.  We can do this for each year a player is under team-control to find his total surplus value.  Sky Kalkman used this method to develop a trade-value calculator at Beyond the Boxscore.  I'd like to use this calculator to compare Ross Ohlendorf's perceived value and actual value.

Rather than doing a real projection, I'm going to simplify some things with a few assumptions.  I'm not as interested in being precise as I am just getting a ballpark idea.  According to FanGraphs he was 11.2 runs above replacement, but his ERA was 0.8 lower than his FIP.  That 0.8 runs/9 discrepancy translates to about 15.7 runs in the playing time Ohlendorf had (176 2/3 innings).  So to get his perceived value we can add in those 15.7 runs prevented to the baseline of 11.2 to get 26.9 runs above replacement.  By ignoring a bit of context (including park factors and personal run environments), we get a perceived WAR of 2.7 in 2009 whereas his actual WAR was 1.1.

Now let's suppose that Ohlendorf can up his innings-pitched total to 200 next year.  If he were to keep up those respective paces from 2009 in 2010, the assumed increase in IP means that we can multiply those WAR values by about 1.13.  Ohlendorf has already celebrated his 27th birthday, so let's suppose that he can increase his performance by 10% for 2010, maintain that level for 2011, and then proceed to decrease by 10% per year.  I'm taking some real liberties here to simplify things rather than doing a real projection.  If I'm reading Cot's Contracts correctly, it appears that the Pirates have Ohlendorf pre-arbitration for 2010 and 2011, and then arbitration in 2012, 2013, and 2014.  Using the assumptions and calculations as described above, we get the following trade values: