Sky Kalkman of Beyond the Boxscore has a little gem for the sabermetrics among our readers:

In case you're not following along, Dave Cameron has a stellar series going on over at Fangraphs.  He's running through the most valuable contracts in MLB, which you could also view as a raning of trade value, assuming all teams currently had the same financial and competitive situations. ...

If we had enough data, a project like this could be automated.  We'd need complete contract information and multi-year WAR projections just to start.  Unfortunately, I don't have any of that lying around (if you do, let me know.)  But it's still worth crunching the numbers player by player, especially if you disagree with any of Dave's rankings.  It's really not that helpful to get into a war of opinions, and bringing some data to the shouting match is a great strategy.

In that vein, I've put together a little spreadsheet you can download to help estimate a player's excess value to his team, based on expected future production and salary.  Pick a player, plug in the data, and post the results.  Disagree with someone's assessment?  Simply change the numbers and spit out your own analysis.  The download link and tutorial after the jump.

Now that should be fun. Next time I hear a trade proposal that sounds stupid to me, I'll run it by the spreadsheet.

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