Walks are Refundable

The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, we’ll quickly look and see how much it costs teams, on average, to let a guy reach Super Two status. For an explanation of Super Two, you can go read this. Second, we’ll take a detailed look at how much teams pay for certain types of statistics during salary arbitration, and we’ll build a model to predict a player’s salary based on our findings.

To start, I’ll describe the sample I’m using. Basically, I pulled the data for every hitter between 2012 and 2015 who went through some sort of salary arbitration (Super 2, Arb1, Arb2, or Arb3). That’s a pretty simple sample, I’d say! This sample included 299 player-seasons from 174 players.

Let’s look…