Position Player Wins Above Replacement, 08

As I noted in a fanshot below, Fangraphs has a new total value metric for position players: the new and improved Wins Above Replacement. They won't have WAR on team pages until later, so to save everyone the time of looking up the numbers from last year, here are the Brewers position players Wins Above Replacement for 2008. Kendall is omitted because the formula uses UZR, which doesn't compute a defensive number for catchers.

A couple of my observations:

• Hardy was a win better than the the players who tied for second, Braun and Cameron. Fielder was fourth in value, Weeks fifth. Hardy is ridiculously good.
  
• The "Dollar value" column basically indicates what a player would have been worth, in 2008, on a one-year deal. Doug Melvin signed Cameron for $6 million, he was worth about $18 million. He also gained at least a win of value by moving Braun to left (-3 defense, -7 position vs. -25 defense, +2 position in 2007), so you can add another $5 million to Cameron's "value" to the Brewers. Hall was also almost a win better at third than in center. If we assume all three players would have hit the same regardless of where they were playing, the signing of Cameron and shuffling of those three was worth about $30 million dollars to the Brewers last year.
• It's impressive that Melvin got 3 wins above replacement from his top two bench players. That seems pretty rare. Comparing to replacement, Counsell and Kapler together were about equal to Fielder last year. 
• Oh, and I have to add this here. Chase Utley was 8 wins above replacement this year, valued at $36.8 million dollars. Ryan Howard, MVP runner-up and Haudricourt pick for MVP? 3.4, $15.2 million.

This is really an awesome overall metric because it allows you to compare two position players on the same scale, and it factors in everything. Just go to the bottom of any position player page or click the "value" in-page link at the top.