I came across an interesting article by Fangraphs' Mike Podhorzer on Twitter this morning, wherein he shows that last year's breakouts typically fail to earn their keep the following. It's well worth a read. But I started wondering to what extent they fail relative to every expensive player. Because - after all - every top-50 list fails in the aggregate to live up to its preseason billing for the simple reason that players outside the top-50 before the year will wind up on it by year's end. There's nowhere to go but down for every set of players in the Top-10, Top-20, Top-x.

So I ran the numbers for the top-75 players, what they cost and what they earned.

Here are the results:

_{*using NFBC auction values in descending order for a couple rounds, then an incremental multiplier as explained in this article.}

_{** using RotoWire's Dollars Earned Calculator  for a 12-team mixed league with a 66/34 hitting/pitching split (per the results I got from the NFBC last year.)}

As you can see, on average every tier loses value in the aggregate. Players get hurt, and others like Aaron Judge, Tommy Pham, Luis Severino and Whit Merrifield come out of nowhere to replace them. The higher the tier, the more money they had to lose and hence the more money on average they lost.

You can quibble with the exact values - hard to see how Jose Altuve didn't earn his lofty price tag - but that's beside the point. The baseline expected loss for a top-10 player is about $13 and for a top-75 player $3.07.

In Podhorzer's piece, he analyzed recent breakouts, and his sample included players whose average ADPs were 102 the following year, and on average they lost nearly $10. In that range, you'd expect only a mild loss, maybe $2, so his findings are significant even if we establish a baseline for comparison.

Keep in mind the dollar values earned are imprecise, and the sample is only 75 players from a single season (in my case), but it does seem likely last year's breakouts are bad values relative to players drafted in their tiers.