THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Do away with all signing bonuses in MLB and if kids are smart they will do their best to be two, or more, sport athletes in college and enter any draft they are eligible for. If they happen to be drafted in another sport that offers a draft bonus they will go there.  Otherwise they will fall to MLB. 

During college or early in their pro career if they suffer a severe injury they could probably still fall back on baseball (see Bo Jackson; who’s birthday happens to be tomorrow).

Eliminating draft bonuses would also encourage student athletes to stay in college until graduation and put more efforts towards being a student.  As the cost of flaming out in the minors would be quite high without a signing bonus acting as a security blanket.

Overall you may lose a few stars along the way, but you could gain four years of free development across the board.  The on field product should remain largely unchanged, if anything a slight dip in league wide offensive out put as a majority of two sport athletes will be non-pitchers.

If the owners really wanted to go hog wild teams could retain the rights to players that decide not to sign and go on to college or play another sport instead.  If that player then decides they want in to MLB they go to the team that originally drafted them effectively doing away with all sign-ability concerns.

Well...your last statement is the one I’m grabbing on to the most:

“And explain to me the impact of making players pay (like NBA and NFL effectively are making them do by making them go to college).”

If you mean literally pay, as in use their own funds, it would alter the racial and socioeconomic background of the sport dramatically.  MLB would be like polo or golf - a sport that kids really only get exposure to as a kid if they are from fairly wealthy backgrounds.  Not too many inner-city kids, already impoverished, could front the cash necessary to further their “career” in baseball. 

If you are saying “pay” as in “go to college” to further your baseball career, it would still have a dramatic effect racially.  College baseball scholarships are not close to as valuable as football or basketball ones.  New rules in 2010 require college baseball teams to give every “scholarship” player at least a 25% scholarship.  And they only get 11.7 scholarships for the entire team, by NCAA rules.  So, you are spreading 25-50% scholarships across 27 young kids.  The parent/family of the player needs to come up with the rest, or qualify for loans.  Very few inner-city kids are going to be able to come up with tens of thousands of dollars to cover this difference.

So, all of those kids - literally, all of them - are going to pick the football or basketball “full ride”.  The NCAA has 85 full football scholarship maximum and 13 men’s hoops scholarship maximum. 

So, you would lose practically every Domonic Brown-quality athlete to college football or basketball.  Your best hope would be that that kid would sign with a university that allowed him to play baseball and football in college.  He couldn’t really do the hoops/baseball combo because the seasons overlap too much.

I don’t think it works.  I think you need signing bonus, at the current $1Mish range, to attract elite athletes into playing baseball out of high school. 

Paying Josh Bell $5M was probably an overreaction of the market that did indeed need to be slightly corrected, and the new CBA reflects that.  But doing away with signing bonuses altogether would, IMO, have some devastating effects on the socioeconomic/racial makeup of the sport. 

Golf, polo, etc. are forever limited in terms of their worldwide popularity due to the perception that their “barriers for access” are too great for poor kids.  Baseball tiptoes that boundary too, and certainly doesn’t want to cross over it.

I also think it’s interesting that several articles I’ve read, including this one by the Fangraphs author and Tango’s follow-up, point to how few players this would actually impact...that it would only steer away, say, 1-5% of players from baseball.

My counter would be that, it is steering away the most important 1-5%.  You would be replacing the game’s most athletic players with an additional 1-5% of Willie Bloomquists - ordinary scrappers. 

The problem there is that Willie Bloomquists don’t really grow the game, or bring in the casual fan.  Casual fans want to see truly amazing feats - Barry Bonds’ power, Griffey Jr.’s grace in CF, Tim Raines or Rickey Henderson’s speed.  Imagine if those 3-4 guys had picked a sport other than baseball.  We would’ve all lost out on seeing what they achieved, and the void wouldn’t be adequately filled by an additional 1-5% of guys who are comparatively mediocre in the athleticism department.

How far can this conversation proceed without considering team spending inequality? On some basic level, the value of any prospect is relative to the value of the players you already have (or, a second consideration, the value of the players your opponents don’t have), but a team’s ability to spend (and spend differently than other teams) should have a major impact here.

The NHL has a hard cap and team spending is relatively tight (reported to be between $50MM and $68MM, a 36% increase from bottom to top, link 1) but the MLB “cap” is tax-weighted and team spending is an enormous range ($36MM to $202MM, apparently not including penalties, a 561% increase from bottom to top, link 2).

Certainly it should be assumed that a player’s options (NBA, NFL, and PGA being more likely for a MLB prospect than an NHL prospect) help determine salary leverage, but if you mean to talk clean slate regarding MLB and prospect salaries, you should probably include in that clean slate both a hard cap and hard floor for player salaries.

http://www.nhlnumbers.com/teams

http://content.usatoday.com/sportsdata/baseball/mlb/salaries/team

Nice post, #2, by Jacob

Jacob: regarding my 5%, I meant 5% of the superstars, not 5% of all the players.

Steve: as for paying, I mean make them pay exactly how much basketball and football players pay.  If all the top prospects in those sports pay zero, then have no MLB signing bonuses, and simply let the players be drafted as-is.  The high schooler’s choice is therefore go to minor leagues, make 50K a year, or take a basketball or football scholarship.

Why would those not be equivalent?

"And you can go even further: what if a player, rather than paying, agrees to give up 50% of his first year salary (if he makes it that far), or 5% of his lifetime earnings?”

Then teams would have no player development costs - minor leagues would be funded by MLB salaries.  Then teams could afford to spend more on MLB players, and we’ve always seen that if they can afford to spend, they will spend.

So we’d wind up with the same % going to players and owners that we do now.

“It’s no different from college, right?  I had to pay to go to school, as it was a gateway to getting a job in the real world.”

What percent of drafted players actually make it far enough to see those riches?  3%? 5%?

I can’t see a regular college convincing anyone to pay them 25,000 per year for a 5% chance of getting a better job four years later.

I don’t know how things would play out in the US, but here in the DR if you take away signing bonuses, you will no longer have to deal with buscones skimming players money. That would certainly be a good thing, and I do not think the quantity of players that get yearly signed would be highly affected, since the great majority of these young boys do not have any other choice considering that most of them leave school early in order to practice in the buscones` facilities.

I know that FA international signings are a whole other issue, but if you analyze the fact that the salary rate for a lawyer or a doctor here in the DR is about 500 dollars per month, you would realize that getting an opportunity to make it in baseball (even in the Minor Leagues) is enough incentive for the 99% percent of these young boys.

Rally/7 - “I can’t see a regular college convincing anyone to pay them 25,000 per year for a 5% chance of getting a better job four years later.”

2 1/2 years out of grad school and I wish I had even a 5% chance at a better job because of it. I’m actually quite convinced it’s hurt my chances.

Rally #7, have you looked at the prices of colleges and universities? It is a classic fat-tail distribution. Most of the students go to low-cost institutions and a few of the students attend a significantly higher-cost institution. While I think the basic economic argument is flawed (you pay more for a “better education” that yields a higher-paying job), it is very hard to argue that this should not be presumed true.

This article touches on a pet peeve of mine; most every scouting-heavy baseball pundit you read says the same thing about signing bonus reform:

“The new CBA will drive multi-sport players away from baseball.”

I ask simply, where’s the proof of this?  Has anyone ever interviewed (say) Bubba Starling, Joe Mauer, Carl Crawford or whoever else and asked them about the topic?  Does anyone know if Starling would have turned down (say) $3.5M instead of the $7.5M package he got, in order to continue to play baseball? 

I mean, lets say he goes to college.  Its no guarantee that he’s even starting as a college junior, let alone competing at a high level, in order to guarantee himself even a fraction of the money he got in baseball.  One bad hit in football and your athletic career is over (as is the case in baseball of course, but the likelihood is 100-times lessened in our non-contact sport). So why is the assumption that its an apples-to-apples choice these kids have to make? 

I’d love to see some science behind this question, instead of pundits all just stating platitudes as if they know the truth.

Evidence and thesis are for when they went to college. 

Now that they graduated, the columnists realize they don’t need to be held to high standards to make a living.

Top baseball talent is completely relative to the entire body of players.  If you lose the top 5 pitchers and the top 5 hitters in every draft due to the lack of signing bonuses, then the next 5 hitters and pitchers down the talent spectrum simply become the superstars.  Willie Bloomquist is only an “ordinary scrapper” in comparison to the players in the league better than himself. He’s still in the 99th+ percentile of baseball talent everywhere.  I think you could lop a large portion off the right end of the talent curve without noticing an effect.  Eventually, of course, you’d basically end up with little leaguers booting routine ground balls - obvious lack of skill on display.  But that’s a good ways down the line.

Baseball was played quite successfully and remained popular for decades in conditions that were far worse for attracting top talent than they would be with the current system minus signing bonuses.  For every Bob Feller that wandered into camp straight from the farm, how many more of the most athletic kids never made it due to lack of upward mobility in the early part of the 20th century?  Scores of gifted players were too busy keeping food on the table from a young age to develop their gifts, or if they did play in high school or college, scouting networks didn’t exist to the extent they do now to catch talent in obscure places.  It ultimately didn’t and doesn’t matter.

"2 1/2 years out of grad school and I wish I had even a 5% chance at a better job because of it. I’m actually quite convinced it’s hurt my chances”

You might be right.  I felt that way 15 years ago.  Things eventually got better, and I hope they do for you too.

I do read a lot of horror stories about people who got a degree and wound up with a lot more debt and no improved job prospects.  My estimate was that 60-70% or so of people do wind up with better careers than they would have, but I don’t know if that’s right.

It can also mean better conditions if not better pay.  An accountant may not make more money than an auto mechanic, but at least they get to work in an air conditioned office and are less likely to hurt themselves on the job.  But I don’t know if that trade off is for the better long term.  Perhaps working white collar jobs is more dangerous when you consider the long term effects of not getting any exercise sitting in a cubicle all day.

Todd/11 - The argument that the elite two-sport stars would turn to the NFL or NBA has irritated me over the last week too. The people who say this, I’m afraid, don’t really understand what the old system was. Bubba Starling received the $7.5 million bonus because the old system allowed it. The new system won’t. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that guys like Starling won’t sign in the future. They won’t get as much money, but the reason they’ve wanted so much money is because it was available. It’s no longer available.

The issue is not getting the stud 18 year olds to choose baseball over the other sports, it is making sure they still part after age 13. More and more kids are choosing to specialize in one sport as they get older. if many choose to abandon baseball for another sport, the affect is mirr drastic than the few who don’t sign pro contacts out of high school. It also serves to decrease the level of competition that those who eventually go pro play in.