Baseball Least Valuable Players

The combination of bad performance and a large salary is the least valuable contribution a player could make to his team. Thus, I have compiled a list of 2012's LVP's; enjoy.

The equation I will be using combines a player's performance, quantified by WAR (wins above replacement) with his salary. The weird thing about WAR is that it is measured differently by different people, so I will be using Fangraphs version of it (Fangraphs is a highly reputable sabermetrics site).

For more on WAR, read here.

I then turned WAR into a dollar number by combining it with $4.5 million, a fairly standard price that a team pays for one WAR. Thus, a player's net value to his team can be shown using the equation:
(WAR*$4.5 million) - Salary. 

As you can see, Ryan Howard of the Phillies was 2012's least economically valuable hitter.

As for the pitchers:

Johan Santana took the cake for the pitchers. 

A common trend, especially amongst the hitters, are the aging veterans being overpaid to underperform. Every single hitter was above age 30 during the 2012 season except for Delmon Young, who was a number one draft pick in 2003, and hasn't done anything notable since then. The reason Howard won last year's LVP was because of his poor WAR (-1) and his gigantic, $20 million salary. A-Rod actually had a positive WAR in '12, at 2.2 (which is hardly productive given his ridiculously large salary) but was paid $30 million, which dragged him all the way to number 3 on the list. 

Will teams ever stop paying aging veterans? Or stop tying up 29, 28 year old players for 7+ years and $100 million+ ? The world may never know...