Bargains and albatrosses
The Signal Gap measures the distance between what a hitter is paid and what we see, in percentile points inside his own service cohort. This is the same distance in dollars. Take the men on one service clock, sort them by salary, and read that list at the rank our engine gives him: that is what his cohort pays at his rank. The difference from what he is actually paid is the bargain, or the albatross.
Read this before you read a row
Nobody is paid the implied figure. It is not an offer, not a valuation, and not a claim about what anyone should earn. It is what the men in his cohort are actually paid at the rank we give him — a fact about the cohort, held up against a fact about him. The two are read strictly inside one service class, never across three: a pre-arbitration win costs roughly a tenth of a free-agent win, so one dollar ladder over all three regimes would be a service-time ranking wearing a dollar sign.
It is an order statistic, not a fitted curve — the cohort’s own real salaries, read at a position. That is the whole defence of it, and it is also its limit: it cannot return a figure outside the range the cohort actually pays, and it makes no attempt to.
Measured on two different clocks
Our rank of him— batted balls through . It moves every night.
The ladder— club sheets as old as . It was set last winter and cannot move until the next one.
Which means a man’s residual moves because our read of him moved. It is not a pay cut and it is not a raise; nobody’s salary changed.
The widest ladder on the board is under contract, which pays from $780,000 to $61.9M. At the top of it the engine ranks Ke'Bryan Hayes, who is paid $7.0M; at the price end sits Juan Soto at $61.9M. Half this cohort sits within $8.7M of what it pays at their rank, which is the number to hold the tails against.
Arbitration
89 priced · median distance $3.0M
89 men, paid from $264,706 to $24.2M. Every implied figure below is a rung on that ladder and none can leave it.
| What he is paid | What this cohort pays at our rank | The distance | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hitter | Club | Salary | Implied | Residual |
| Edmundo Sosatop | PHI | $4.40M | $24.17M | +$19.8Mowed |
| Luke Raley | SEA | $2.05M | $19.00M | +$16.9Mowed |
| Matt McLain | CIN | $2.30M | $19.00M | +$16.7Mowed |
| Matt Vierling | DET | $3.25M | $18.50M | +$15.2Mowed |
| Jarren Duran | BOS | $7.70M | $22.02M | +$14.3Mowed |
| Adolis García | PHI | $10.00M | $22.02M | +$12.0Mowed |
| Riley Greene | DET | $5.00M | $15.65M | +$10.7Mowed |
| Garrett Mitchell | MIL | $0.95M | $10.00M | +$9.1Mowed |
| Jo Adell | CLE | $1.53M | $10.20M | +$8.7Mowed |
| Francisco Alvarez | NYM | $2.40M | $9.47M | +$7.1Mowed |
Showing the 10 largest of 89 in this cohort. The middle column is not a salary and nobody is paid it — it is what the men in this cohort are actually paid at the rank our engine gives him. Teal means the cohort pays more than that at his rank; oxide means it pays less. The colour follows the same ten-percentile-point cut as the Signal Gap, because it is the same judgment in a different unit — and the word prints too, so the read never travels on colour alone.
Under contract
91 priced · median distance $8.7M
91 men, paid from $780,000 to $61.9M. Every implied figure below is a rung on that ladder and none can leave it.
| What he is paid | What this cohort pays at our rank | The distance | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hitter | Club | Salary | Implied | Residual |
| Ke'Bryan Hayestop | CIN | $7.00M | $61.88M | +$54.9Mowed |
| Will Smith | LAD | $12.93M | $42.50M | +$29.6Mowed |
| Brent Rooker | ATH | $8.00M | $37.12M | +$29.1Mowed |
| Bobby Witt Jr. | KC | $14.11M | $40.00M | +$25.9Mowed |
| Lawrence Butler | ATH | $3.68M | $26.83M | +$23.2Mowed |
| Samuel Basallo | BAL | $1.63M | $23.81M | +$22.2Mowed |
| Ezequiel Tovar | COL | $5.21M | $23.25M | +$18.0Mowed |
| Victor Caratini | MIN | $4.00M | $22.00M | +$18.0Mowed |
| Jackson Merrill | SD | $2.11M | $18.00M | +$15.9Mowed |
| JJ Wetherholt | STL | $0.78M | $16.50M | +$15.7Mowed |
Showing the 10 largest of 91 in this cohort. The middle column is not a salary and nobody is paid it — it is what the men in this cohort are actually paid at the rank our engine gives him. Teal means the cohort pays more than that at his rank; oxide means it pays less. The colour follows the same ten-percentile-point cut as the Signal Gap, because it is the same judgment in a different unit — and the word prints too, so the read never travels on colour alone.
180 hitters priced across 2 cohorts · no WAR anywhere in it
Why there is no pre-arbitration board
The largest cohort in baseball is missing from this page, and it is missing on purpose. A pre-arbitration salary is set by rule rather than by a market, every published figure for it is the source’s own estimate, and it is prorated by how long the player has been on the roster — across that cohort a salary correlates 0.43 with games played. Ranking it would rank playing time.
Changing the unit does not change that. A pre-arb “bargain” in dollars is the same estimate, prorated the same way, wearing a dollar sign instead of a percentile. So the ladder is not built for that cohort at all — not built and hidden, not built. The Signal Gap still prints those men with their engine rank and their salary as a plain fact, which is as far as the evidence goes.
What the top row is really saying
When our engine ranks a man at the very top of his cohort, the implied figure beside him is the largest salary in that cohort — because an order statistic read at the top of a ladder has nowhere further to go. That is honest arithmetic and it is easy to misread. It is not a claim that anyone should pay him that. It is the sentence: this cohort pays its highest-ranked bat that much, and it pays him this much. Those rows are marked, on the board, in the row itself.
Every term here is defined at the legend, and the whole board — every figure, its source and its clock — is at /api/data/business.