And, as a practical matter, nobody in baseball remains a bargain for long.
Mike Trout now has a long-term contract, one he’s ahppy with. IF, by chance, salaries skyrocket in the next two years, his contract will seem like a bargain, but not for long. Because there’s no way he’ll play out a contract he doesn’t like, even though “nobody held a gun to his head and forced him to sign it.” He’ll piss and moan until the Angels pay more or force the Anegls to trade him to someone who will.
Anti-trust exemptions allow for sporting leagues to collude to prevent breaking contracts. That doesn’t apply for other work.
Which is why you use averages to determine how much each WAR is worth. It’s no different than other economic analysis (ie, value of marginal productivity and so forth).
$/WAR is based on the marketplace (it’s why it is has risen with contracts). The reason that no one would pays Trout $65mil per year is because they’d extend out the contract so that his lower performing years later on in the contract would balance out his overperforming years.
That’s the point I’m making about long term contracts. The reason they are more and more apparent is to spread out the far higher per year value of a player early on in a contract.
That’s why you may see a $30mil/year, 12-15year contract or the such for big time players soon enough (Miggy Cabrera has a deal close to that already).
Revenue sharing doesn’t mean that some teams don’t have drastically more money.
I don’t think the specific anti-trust exemptions the leagues have save MLB, speak to the issue of breaking payer contracts.
Either way, that wasn’t the issue. Your contention was that a player can’t leave and play baseball elsewhere, and that is not strictly true. He just cannot play for another MLB team in part because none of them would hire him for a number of reasons.
Similarly, plenty of industries have non-compete clauses, and some just have informal (often illegal) agreements to not poach or hire another competitors employees. Broadly speaking, an athlete has a near similar freedom of movement as many star employees in competitive industries, it’s just that the market for their specific services is more limited.
My point is that one WAR is not worth the same as the next WAR, and it’s again not the same as a WAR for another team. Therefore, it makes no sense to say each WAR is worth $7mm, then multiplying that by the WAR for a star player to arrive at their market value.
You are missing the point. I get the math. The issue is that the calculation doesn’t take into account real world effects. For example, let’s say we make up some composite player with the best stats ever posted. His WAR would be around 22. Would anyone ever pay $150mm for this player for 1 year even if they knew the were guaranteed a WAR of 22? You likely cannot make than much extra money from one player to justify such a contract.
No, not really. No one would pay Trout or any other player $65mm/year because no player is worth that much money given you cannot monetize those WAR numbers to make $65mm+ more for that season.
I get your point, I just disagree because the logic is not sound and it doesn’t coincide with the real world in general.
Which is likely going to blow up in their face. The main reason I think one year contracts would save owners money is because baseball seems to completely overpay their star players.
It mostly does. Obviously they don’t release the numbers, but all teams split the majority if NFL revenue equally. This split only excludes suite, club seating and sponsorship revenues from naming rights and other properties. That is just not that much relative to the TV deal, tickets, and merchandise.
And my point is that it is quite obvious that baseball seems to completely UNDERpay their star players.
You can say in the real world that no one will pay Trout $65mil a year because WAR is not worth the same in different contexts (once again, it is calculated based on accepted economic analysis, such as marginal productivity, which is also subject to people saying well it doesn’t apply on X, Y, Z, but it is the most objective way to determine productivity value of each additional unit), but I can point to Miguel Cabrera getting a $292mil deal over 10 years to indicate that teams and players DO realize that paying what a star player is worth in a short term contract is difficult and therefore teams will add years in order to even out the payment - so the player overperforms the contract early and underperforms it late, and in the end, the production matches the deal. Though I do think that the teams end up winning out - Cabrera will likely overperform his salary by higher early on his contract than underperform his salary later in his contract, IMO.
In addition, saying all WAR value is dependent on subjective value basically means that any interpretation of over or under paying based on long term deals is entirely subjective as well. Putting an average value per WAR is an attempt at an objective analysis of contracts. Otherwise, its just whatever people ‘feel’ is right.
Well, no. Your point was that long term contracts compensate stars in a similar manner to a shorter term contract for more money per year with dead money functioning as deferred compensation. Even if that were true, it doesn’t mean baseball teams underpay their stars.
But such metrics are not actually used. Do you really think a guy worth 1 WAR makes $7mm/year, a guy worth 2 WAR makes $14mm/year, and so on? Of course not. The fact that some agents and GMs decided to use it as a rough calculation doesn’t mean anything. It’s the equivalent of price per square foot in real estate. A 1000 sq. ft house isn’t always a 1/3 the cost of a 3000 sq ft house in a similar area.
Again, such a thing is not really necessary. Teams defer payments all the time, so the length of the playing term is irrelevant to the discussion as a matter of money if you think the money is roughly equal in the end. For example, see Max Scherzer’s contract:
So they point is that the term of the playing contract is largely meaningless in terms of money given your supposition.
Of course. Just like almost every other star who ages normally. That doesn’t really speak to whether he is overpaid.
No. My point is that we can look at completed high value contracts and compare them to actual outcomes. I strongly suspect the number of contract where people outperformed are much lower than the ones don’t.