Alright, let me tell you about this Schwarber contract thing I dove into. It was a bit of a ride, not gonna lie.
First off, I got curious. Everyone was talking about Schwarber’s power and how much he was worth. So, I started digging around. I wanted to see if the hype matched the numbers.
I started by grabbing some data. I pulled his stats from a couple of different baseball sites – you know, the usual suspects. I’m talking about batting average, home runs, RBIs, all that good stuff. Made sure I had a few years worth of data to get a decent picture of his performance trend.
Then, I cleaned up the data. It’s always messy, right? Had to deal with missing values, different formats, the whole nine yards. Used some Python with Pandas to wrangle it all into shape. Nothing fancy, just good ol’ data cleaning.
Next, I started comparing him to other players. Looked at guys with similar stats, similar ages, similar positions. Figured that would give me a benchmark for what his contract should look like. I focused on recent free agent signings to see what kind of money was being thrown around.
- I listed out the comparable players
- And then I looked at their yearly averages
- Finally I averaged out similar player contracts
Now, time for some number crunching. I built a simple model in Excel (yeah, I know, not super fancy, but it gets the job done). I factored in his age, his past performance, the going rate for similar players, and a bit of “potential” – you know, the chance he gets even better. I even tried to factor in things like his leadership and clubhouse presence, even though those are harder to quantify.
I played around with the numbers a lot. What if he keeps hitting 40 homers a year? What if he regresses? What if he gets injured? I ran a bunch of different scenarios to see what the “reasonable” range for his contract would be. It was quite the balancing act.
After all that, I had a range in mind. My estimate wasn’t too far off from what he actually signed for. I was pretty happy with my analysis. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave me a good understanding of the factors that go into valuing a player like Schwarber.
Ultimately, it was a fun little project. I learned a lot about player valuation and got to flex my data skills a bit. Plus, now I have some good ammo for arguing with my buddies about baseball!
