THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I don’t think it’s crazy.  The only caveat I would offer is that the kid should be draft eligible, similar to how the NHL handles incoming youth players from the world over.  It’s a competitive issue to have only certain teams able to snarf down young talents like this.

However - I am not unsympathetic to the flip-side argument, which is that teams risk having a number of undesirable contracts tied up on prospects that never work out, taxing their ability to sign proven talent in free agency or afford their homegrown players.  (At least, that’s the other side as I understand it.  I’m open to correction and qualification on this, since I’ve put it in pretty simplistic terms.)

Imagine that this is 2010, and there are no sports leagues in the world.  The rest of the world is where it is, legally, morally, ethically.

Then, someone decides to create a league, and gets investors to buy teams, who are all independent businesses, as far as the IRS and the Justice Department is concerned.

Would it even be conceivable to have something like an amateur draft?

It always amazes me how many people want to see a major corporation *gain* leverage over a teenager.

hey tom and everyone else.  I’m not sure if you had a chance to catch this article in the Denver Post.  The sabermetrics of basketball are upon us?  I may be out of the loop on this because I’m not a huge bball follower, but it’s an interesting read.  Here’s the link.

http://www.denverpost.com/nuggets/ci_13541239#

"I don’t think it’s crazy.  The only caveat I would offer is that the kid should be draft eligible, similar to how the NHL handles incoming youth players from the world over.  It’s a competitive issue to have only certain teams able to snarf down young talents like this.”

People need to stop looking at it like this, unless you’re including those gritty no money small market Twins, as being one of the lucky few that can sign international players. The Twins are likely to outspend all MLB teams internationally this year after signing Sano and the player from Germany. All teams have the money. Some spend it, some don’t.

This player from Japan is going back and forth between signing with an MLB and a Japanese team because he gets pressure from the local league to stay at home. You think he’s going to enter a draft and risk not getting “overpaid”? No. He’ll stay at home.

That would be soccer anywhere in the world other than the US, as far as I can tell. The only problem there is kids have to sign contracts when quite young, which leaves the teams controlling the rights to their labor in the same way drafts do, but at least the kid had a choice to sign with the team in the first place.

Amateurs being free agents is bad for the sport.
It’s bad for the competitive balance. Teams with greater resources can buy the best prospects, which makes them consistent winners, which gives the more resources… Look at the competitive imbalances in modern soccer or during baseballs bonus baby era. Even in modern baseball, the fact that the Yankees can sign Jesus Montero, or that Rick Porcello can fall to the 27th pick create competitive imbalances. There should be a world-wide draft with hard slotting.

Of course a world-wide draft would make prospects poorer. Their bonuses without the draft would be at least 3 times what they are now. However, the teams don’t sit on the money they save from underpaying prospects. They use it to overpay veterans. I don’t understand why we, the fans, should care if one group of players gets richer at the expense of another.

a worldwide draft hard slotting etc all only works insofar as revenue is also shared between teams--the more the league is a single business entity, rather than competing franchises, the better it is for competitive balance.

but this setup would have its own problems…

Competitive balance is a bore. In my ideal MLB, Baltimore, Washington, and Pittsburgh just got relegated to AAA. Welcome to the Majors, Sacto, Louisville, and Durham!

Relegation would be nice; but we’d need independent minor leagues for that to happen.

Eric/6: I don’t really follow soccer, but of what I do, they get the kids to sign before they 18 on the “promise” to sign when they turn 18.  We talked about this last year.  Kinda of a weird setup.  They do this so they can join their academy.  And what the kids do just before they turn 18, they go into hiding for 2 weeks, so that after they turn 18, they don’t sign with the team.  Very weird.  In any case, since a contract signed by a minor is null and void, I don’t see how this continues to work any way.

AC/7: “I don’t understand why we, the fans, should care if one group of players gets richer at the expense of another.”

It only comes down to a moral issue.  Why are athletes treated differently from other industries?  I suppose they live with it because they see the quick payday eventually.

However, in terms of balancing competitiveness, this can happen with more revenue sharing.  Of course, if you do too much revenue sharing, teams have less incentive at the local level to generate local revenue.

Regardless, if you ask a team if they’d rather be a .530 team and lose a million bucks, or be a .430 team and gain 10 million bucks, well, compettive balance is out the window.

Eric/9: I agree, that there’s no reason that we have to have thirty teams competitively balanced.  That is certainly not the defacto objective.

You basically have to decide if you want something that makes “sense” or something that works.  I myself am constantly conflicted about stuff like this.

How about monopolies?  Think of it one way:  “I started a company and I am so good at what I do that I gained market share, and was able to maintain a huge advantage over my rivals, etc. etc.”.  But we know that monopolies are bad for the people as a whole, right?

I see this as the same way.  Anything but a free market makes no theoretical sense - It seems like we agree philosophically that we should “let things work themselves out”.  But we already have a free-for-all for free agents (and for overpaid players under contract as well).  Do you really think that all amateurs being free agents would be good for the sport? 

I don’t.  But it still is hard to reconcile my philosophical views with the practical implications of them.

"Do you really think that all amateurs being free agents would be good for the sport?  “

Yes, though I don’t know what “the sport” means to you.

Exactly what is the argument to treat MLB differently from engineering and computer consulting firms around the country?  Enough that you obligate one person to only deal with one company?

I graduate from a Montreal university in Comp Sci, and then some startup company in Silicon Valley “drafts” me, and I’m only allowed to deal wtih them, because the 30 biggest companies all decided to band together and institute a “draft” of the 1000 best Comp Sci students in the country?

My compensation for this is a ridiculously high starting salary, and so, I prostitute myself out to them.  All the while, I’m at the mercy of being moved from one company to another.

Curt Flood said it best, when he said he wasn’t chattle.

On this point however, the players (in the union) are agreeing to the process, so that’s that.  They agree to it, because they get the most money that way.  Fine.

However, the players not in the union cannot possibly be subjected to this draft.  They don’t say anything, because they will get their compensation eventually.  And there’s no Curt Flood among them.

Anyway, it’s VERY EASY to justify the draft if you close your eyes and pretend there’s no moral issue here.  Very easy.

@13, Compelling argument, tangotiger. I’m glad you work for my favorite baseball team.

Competitive balance could possibly be better achieved in a freer market. And fans would perhaps be better served as well. If a team is in too small a market to be competitive, it could drop to a lower league or move to a better city.

Teams would prosper based on their ability to attract fans, locally and internationally. We’d end up with something closer to the Premier League (which I realize has been dominated this decade by four teams, but hope grows in Tottenham, the City of Manchester, and Aston), which has five teams in London, something like four in the Manchester region, and so on. There’d be a team in Brooklyn, and maybe no major league team in Pittsburgh.

And if this applied to the NFL, you’d never have a city like Los Angeles going without a team for 15 years. (Or maybe you would--look at Leeds.) It’d be more interesting to see this shake out than it is to watch monopolies shake down city and state governments. (Cough, David Stern in re Zombie Sonics.)

Competitive balance could possibly be better achieved in a freer market. And fans would perhaps be better served as well.

Those objectives are fine.  But, the constraint must be that a free human being is given the choice, either as an individual, or as part of a bargaining unit that he joins.

There are alot of things that could be better if we had an emperor.  But, we operate under certain constraints.

Tango #2: The way teams in a sports league allocate talent among themselves should not (morally, legally, ethically....) be treated as if each individual team was a seperately operating, competing business.  The ultimate goal of each competitor in a group of truly separate, competing businesses is to be so effective and efficient as to put all the other competitors out of business, and grab 100% of the available profit in the industry for itself.  But sports teams in a sports league do not and cannot function that way individually. A team that is so successful on the field that it puts all its competitors out of business is itself out of business.  In that sense, sports teams in a common league are really more like divisions of one big business.  They may compete for talent in a limited way, but ultimately the allocation of talent has to occur in a manner consistent with the interests of the business (the league) as a whole.  After all, for the most talent-rich teams in a sports league to be successful as businesses they need their on-the-field competitors to be sufficiently talented that the competition on the field remains compelling. That makes on-the-field competitors something less than true business market competitors.

League mechanisms that seek to maintain an allocation of talent that works for the league as a whole may be effective or ineffective, successful or unsuccessful, in achieving their purpose, but morals and ethics and antitrust law needn’t really come into it.

There is a separate issue of the degree to which the league itself is a monopoly in the “hockey industry” (or “baseball industry”, etc. )that should be regulated as a monopoly for the protection of those who do business with it (players, fans, cities, etc.).  But that real issue is difficult to rationally evaluate if we insist on inaccurately treating the teams within the league as separate market entities, competing with other teams in the league in a classical market-competition sense.

"The ultimate goal of each competitor in a group of truly separate, competing businesses is to be so effective and efficient as to put all the other competitors out of business, and grab 100% of the available profit in the industry for itself. “

This “goal” will never be attainable.  You can work TOWARD this goal, but you’ll never get that goal.  There is always some inefficiency, some gap that a business we’ll leave on the table for someone else to profit from.  That’s the way it is.

The best goal for the Yankees is to sign the 40 best players in the world.  That’s it.  They can’t do better than that.  And in reality, the best achievable goal is to sign the 25 best players.  Since players all want to play, they’ll definitely leave money on the table, and so, the final ultimate goal for the Yankees is to sign about the 20 best players in the world.

So, that’s it.  I have NO problem whatsoever if, because all players are free agents, that you would create a system that would allow this.  None.

But, this can’t happen.  Because in this new league, the Yanks will not “own” their market.  5, 6, 7 baseball teams would operate in the NY market and make it impossible to do that.

But, even if it were to happen, the Yanks are still NOT guaranteed anything.  Their talent level might be say a .750 win team.  But, they will not win all their games, nor will they win more than half the World Series, especially if the league is smart enough to bump the playoffs up to 4 rounds, and make it a best 3-of-5 (or 2-of-3).

So, I see no reason that this “goal” requires teenagers to give up their freedom of choice.