With the deadline approaching, I thought it'd be cool to take a look if a team is better off WAR wise trading a player at the break or keeping them and letting them walk to receive compensation. 
In this post, I ask for ideas and comments on my method so I can get the results as accurate as possible on my final draft. The method to my madness is after the jump.

Step 1: Find all marquee upcoming free-agent eligible players traded or rumored to be traded near the trade deadline since draft compensation began.

Step 2: Tally up the total WAR the return package accumulated for the team. For this step I'll have two options:

1. If the team kept their player, I'll total the WAR of the prospects they drafted in the compensation picks AND the WAR the player accumulated that year while still with the team
2. If the team traded their player, I'll look at the amount of WAR the guys they received in return accumulated

Step 3: Average out the WAR totals from the two options to find out which is typically better.

My thoughts on flaws:

• Teams may trade the player they received in the trade for the first player so I'll have to factor that in
• The value of winning that may come from keeping a player
• Financial issues that hamstring a team and force them to have to trade a player for an underwhelming return
• WAR
• If the sample size is too small, one superstar may throw off the results

Please help me out with ideas and suggestions and I hope the results will be interesting. If I had to guess, I think a team would get better value in a trade but then again that leads back to how the value of winning is pecieved.
Thanks in advance, Miketrout!