Wall Street Journal says the Orioles won the MLB offseason
February 24, 2011|By Matt Vensel  I've got another interesting
and possibly worthless study for you (I should just make this a
daily afternoon feature). The Wall Street Journal examined every
offseason move and ranked each MLB team based on "the volume of
moves it made and the net quality of the players it ended up
with."  The Wall Street Journal has a bunch of statheads over
there -- and there's nothing wrong with that -- so authors Scott
Cacciola and Jared Diamond used projected Wins Above Replacement
(WAR) to evaluate each offseason transaction.  What's WAR?
Fangraphs explains it with a hypothetical: “If this player got
injured and their team had to replace them with a minor leaguer
or someone from their bench, how much value would the team be
losing?” So if a player's value is 2.3, he is worth 2.3 wins to
his team.  Based on the additions of Mark Reynolds, Vladimir
Guerrero, J.J. Hardy and Derrek Lee and the loss of Kevin
Millwood, the Orioles wo