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Thursday, April 15, 2010
Rational exuberance
The MLBPA strategy has always been to let the owners and GMs create a bubble market. Irrational exuberance, as Greenspan called the stock market. Teams having little to no idea how to value players (how to do value fielding? how do you separate starting from relieving? how do you compare a catcher to a LF?) and how to value wins. In absence of some systematic function, and since GMs get flipped fast, it’s short-term gain city. Daytrading, irrational exuberance. Teams make offers as if they have a gun pointed to their head. A game of russian roulette. (Is that a perjorative term? I’d think it would have to be, no?)
Well, the GMs got something dangerous: information. A systematic process. I played my small part in this. Fangraphs exploded it for the mainstream. We know. But, the players still act as if there’s some sort of conspiracy. Here’s Benjie Molina:
If I had trouble finding a job after five of my best years, what am I supposed to expect? You are supposed to get paid for your numbers. But even if I have another good year, I know I cannot expect anything.
Teams did the one thing that the MLBPA bet against: they got smart. And smart people don’t play russian roulette. The MLBPA now has to beg for the one thing they could never be sold: revenue sharing between players and teams, just like the NHL and NBA has. If they don’t get it, it’s very possible that they will end up with a continually smaller portion of an expanding pie. The MLBPA should ask for a fixed portion of the pie. It’s the fair way to operate.
The only issue there is the accounting practices of having related-party transactions taking revenue off one book and putting it in another, thereby shielding it from the MLBPA. That’s a legitimate concern, and one that has been at least tested with the NHL and NBA. I’d like to hear what those unions think of those arrangements.
Oh, and you’ll have to teach them about escrow too, because a good portion of NHL players are clueless about that.
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