This question comes from a message board dedicated to a specific professional sports team. When it was raised, it got a middling response… or, rather, I should say, it got a whole lot of short replies, mostly of the “yeah, fuck that guy” form, which suggests not a great deal of thought was involved. It’s an interesting question, though. It may or may not rise to the level of a Great Debate, though I think it has potential, depending on how it develops. So I’m starting here and hoping for the best.
The debate: Would it be possible to structure the contracts for professional athletes in team sports around a pure performance model?
To illustrate, I’ll use baseball as an example, because the season is fairly fresh and lots of people are paying attention. I’ll come back to other sports down below.
Let’s say there are two types of contracts, one for hitters/fielders, one for pitchers. (The contract for pitchers would incorporate some hitting metrics, weighted more heavily in the NL, where pitchers always hit, than the AL, where they do only in interleague play.) Every player gets some league-minimum base salary. On top of that, there would be some bonus amount for a single; some larger amount for a double; more still for a home run; and so on. You can also encourage team play over individual stat-pumping, by doubling that number if there are runners in scoring position. For pitchers, you can have an increasing dollar amount per sequential out without a hit or a run scored; a bonus for each win, or save; a large bonus for a no-hitter, or a perfect game; and so on. Same in the field: bonuses would be attached to sequential fielding chances without an error, stealing runners thrown out (for catchers), etc.
Obviously, there would have to be a fair amount of tinkering. Maybe you could start with one of the big contracts held by a star player, and work backward to determine an appropriate total amount that would be earned by someone who puts up those kinds of numbers. In other words, if Alex Rodriguez or Grady Sizemore or Barry Zito is expected to earn X dollars for Y achievements, you have a benchmark from which to extrapolate a pay-for-performance model.
So: would that work?
I say no. It obviously wouldn’t work in the current environment; there’s too much inertia in the present system, regardless of the specific sport, to make it even remotely feasible that pay-for-performance could be instituted at this point. Too many superstars have too much bargaining power, and have too much to lose, to allow such a revolution to occur.
But I say it wouldn’t work even hypothetically, in a start-up sport where everyone has parity at the beginning, and the gifted players emerge naturally over time. For one thing, it would be next to impossible to account for some of the intangible factors that make a player valuable to his team. There’s leadership, to name one example: Jamie Moyer may have decent success on the field, but the knowledge and guidance he imparts to the younger pitchers on the staff is almost irreplaceable. Also, there’s simple fan interest: how do you put a dollar value on the proportion of people in the bleachers who are there solely to see Dontrelle Willis and his springloaded delivery? The number of All-Star votes received would do it, maybe. (On this last point, it could be argued that such a metric would be more or less redundant with the measurable achievements listed above.)
And besides that, in a free market, once somebody is established as a star, they have a lot more leverage at the bargaining table, making it almost impossible to stick with such a rigid contract structure. All the owners would need to remain resolute in the face of such pressure, and as history has shown us, it only takes one maverick (Tom Hicks, for one recent example) to bust open the floodgates. Either those stars would demand a rethinking of the specific performance details, making it basically impossible to find consensus on any value matrix, or they’d ask to be made an exception entirely, putting us back where we are today.
It should be said that this question came up in the other forum because of frustration with the performance (or lack thereof) of a specific highly-compensated player. As happens every single season, a few athletes get rewarded with enormous contracts, some of which pay off (and make the owners look like geniuses) and some of which do not (thus making the fans rend their teeth and gnash their hair with great melodrama). In this context, it is comforting to wail about a broken system, and to fantasize that Rich O’Verpaid should somehow be penalized for the inability to hit in the clutch.
But I would argue that the system is really not all that broken. Sure, every year there’s always some veteran who is rewarded with a monster deal and who immediately breaks down, or a prime-of-life up-and-comer who shines in his contract year and has a pile of money thrown at him as a result but who never measures up to that single season ever again. But at the same time, there’s also always some young player who gets promoted out of the minors and proceeds to hammer the crap out of the ball like he was born for the big leagues, or to blow away hitters with an untouchable slider… and that guy, more often than not, is making the league minimum. To me, it’s a wash.
And beyond that, it seems to me that I’ve heard this argument before, and it always seems to be in the context of baseball, which has the most detailed measurements and statistics of any professional sport, permitting the most granular evaluation of a player’s skill and accomplishments. So while a baseball player could be rated in any of a hundred different easily measurable categories, a basketball player, by contrast, will have, what, a dozen or so? Baskets, three-pointers, attempts, rebounds, steals, assists, blocks, free throws, time on the floor, maybe event-specific bonuses like game-winning bucket at the buzzer or well-timed fouls (which would be subjective), team metrics like win shares, MVP or All-Star selection, and maybe a couple of others, such as setting a new record in one or another of the categories. Football’s a bit better, with perhaps thirty basic statistical metrics, give or take, but it’s still nowhere near what baseball has to offer. (I don’t know enough about European football (soccer) to speculate there.)
But even so, even if you made this a baseball-only experiment, I still don’t think it would work, for the reasons noted above.
Anybody disagree? Want to make an alternative case? And in terms of a Great Debate, is the limitation here basically the same as with any employment arrangement outside of sales (with commissions) or independent-contracted widgeteers (e.g. third-world craftspeople paid for each handpainted tchotchke), in that it’s next to impossible to establish achievement metrics everyone will agree on, and then enforce them?
(Presuming I haven’t overthought the issue, and left nothing for anybody to argue about. :p)