Quote:
Originally Posted by CBeisbol
It's not "arbitrary". Not at all
Prior to this year, at any given time during the season, there were 750 players in the major leagues (plus players on the IL, waivers, etc). Then there where thousands more in the minors.
So, we're looking at the (upper) tail end of a bell curve when we look at all baseball players. The players closer to the (upper) tail (the Mike Trout's, Mookie Betts', etc) have the most value. With players having less value as you move away from the tail. At some point, where there are more players than MLB roster spots, is replacement level. At the tail end, one can't just say, if we can't get Trout, we'll get someone else who's just as good. Because there is no one just as good. As you move down the tail, there are other players who are just as good as each other. But there are few of them, they are a scarce resource. As you move farther down they become more plentiful-less scarce. Eventually, you reach a point where there are so many equally valuable players, that any individual player has no value. If you can't get that player, you can get another one who's just as good. You don't need to trade for these players because you have them in AAA or they have just been DFA'd by another team.
Anyone who plays OOTP knows who these players are and has a general idea where replacement level for their league is
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I mean arbitrary in the sense that the actual replacement level value is in many ways picked more so that numbers would scale and look correct, rather than some deep-seeded calculation of exactly the 750 best players in the game at any point in time or anything like that. For example, see this article here which talks about when BBRef and Fangraphs unified that piece of their model:
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/unifying-replacement-level/
Okay, it's not just numbers picked out of the blue, there is certainly some analysis going on to decide the levels and make sure the numbers line up with observations. But the actual value that the replacement level is set at is more of a fixed agreed-upon number rather than something which is perhaps more dynamic in its calculations.