Worth Their Weight in Gold (WTWIG)

Matt Santaspirt writes with a brand new statistic that we all need to jump on, right away:

I have created the advanced player evaluation stat to end all advanced player evaluation stats. I present to you, Worth Their Weight in Gold (WTWIG). Gold is hot right now. And what better way to evaluate baseball players than to put them on the Gold Standard. WAR, homeruns, wRC+? All they do is measure how well a guy played. WTWIG measures how much a guy weighs and then converts that into the value of gold.

His full post is here at Mattyball, where he figures out which players came closest to being worth their exact weight in gold in 2013, with value measured by WAR and by salary. By WAR, the closest was Victor Martinez. By salary, the closest was Denard Span.

(By actual gold, I think it’s David Ortiz. See the picture at the top.)

So I think we’ve got a new stat to track here at NotGraphs. I would put my money on Adam Dunn for 2014, except his infinite weight means he is worth infinity in gold, and that’s a lot of home runs he’s going to have to hit.

[Incidentally, if we measure who is worth their weight in silver ($19/ounce as opposed to $1,294/ounce for gold), the answer is the rest of us, who do not play baseball.]