THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Cool! 

How do you get that figure?  I’m interested in the logic more than the number.

You could estimate by taking current total payroll divided by total number of players.

Of course that isn’t completely accurate but it’s probably not too far off.

Right.

By my logic, the league (as a whole) is going to spend rationally.  So, 90MM$ in payroll per team, or about 77MM$ above the minimum.

Wins above minimum is defined at +.200 x 162 = 32.4

So, that’s 2.4MM$ per win.

I don’t know that it necessarily makes academic sense.  But, it let’s me sleep at night.

So, roughly, in a free market for players, everyone gets paid like an arb.

Right.  A bit more.  Say like an arb with 2 years of service.

My contention is that teams overpay because they made a “profit” on the slave players.

Rays, Twins, A’s, et al… even if they are in the “sweet spot” of being contenders, they STILL don’t pay for free agents.

That’s because they have budget constraints.

I think this is just how it works.  The team gives you a budget, and you spend to that budget.

"Finley was about the only baseball person other than Marvin Miller who realized that the advent of free agency could work to the owners’ advantage if they allowed all players to become free agents every year, thus matching supply with demand.”

http://espn.go.com/classic/biography/s/Finley_Charles.html

Charlie Finley contended (as I recall, back in the 1970s) that universal free agency was the correct solution--because it would hold player salaries down...Of course, since Finley proposed it, the idea went nowhere; the village idiots in the game did not listen.

But we don’t know whether universal free agency will increase or decrease TOTAL payroll, do we? 

We know that universal free agency will decrease FREE AGENT salaries.  But maybe that will be offset by the increases in former slave salaries.

However, if you assume that the MLBPA is concerned only about established player salaries—since next year’s “slaves” aren’t part of the union yet—then Miller’s strategy does make sense.