Perhaps I’m not fully familiar with the vagaries of MLB contracts. But I do know that Ken Griffey Jr. makes a few million more per year than Wendell Magee Jr. (he’s a reserve outfielder on the Detroit Tigers, by the way), and the reason is Griffey has way more prolific numbers.
Players would never do anything that would limit the statistics they can post, because it would have a direct effect on what they earn – if not immediately, then soon enough.
A baseball player can’t have a contract where he gets paid X amount of dollars in base salary and then Y dollars extra for every RBI he gets or Z dollars for every hit.
He can have a contract where he can get paid X dollars in base salary and Y dollars more if he appears in 150 games or has 550 plate appearances or if he keeps his weight under a certain level or wins the MVP award.
It’s a pretty narrow distinction, but it’s supposed to prevent players from trying to pad their stats during games and keep official scorers from getting heat from players.
The problem is that when the players go to salary arbitration the arguments all come down to something like this:
Player: I had 105 RBI last year. That was second among all players of my position.
Team: Yes and because of that you should make less money than the guy who had more.
Obviously the players get paid for what they produce on the field, they just can’t have their contracts structured in certain ways.
No one has mentioned what a forfeiture ruling would do to players’ career statistics. This, in the long run, is a more compelling reason not to have such a rule. As I mentioned in my earlier post, a pitcher’s ERA might be blown all to hell simply because of one forfeit. Compile enough forfeits in a career, and your numbers are all skewed. If anything, baseball statistics should reflect reality as much as possible.
While I agree with DAVEW0071’s point of view (that games should not be forfeited), I’m not sure about the point he’s trying to make above–if forfeited stats don’t count, a pitcher’s ERA would only be “blown to hell” if he happens to be pitching a good game–and also if he doesn’t have many innings pitched in his career (basically, he’d be “backing out” several good appearances). For a pitcher to lose “brownie points”, as it were, on a significant scale, he’d have to be on the winning side in several blowouts. Unless some totally unusual situation occurred (like a team scoring 15 runs in an extra inning game), the very worst a “winning pitcher” in a forfeit could lose is 8 shutout innings. Think about it. This would have to occur multiple times before it had much of an impact on a pitcher’s ERA, unless the pitcher had a very short career.
It is theoretically possible though, that a pitcher could lose a shot at a no hit bid because the other team thought it was less embarrassing to forfeit than to risk being no hit. THAT would really be terrible.
Actually, if you allow a forfeit, the LOSING pitcher might actually BENEFIT in terms of career statistics, because he’d have a horrible outing negated (as if the game were rained out).
DAVEW0071’s point, to me, is actually more valid in terms of the winnng team’s HITTERS losing some of their good performances, and they would be the ones more likely to suffer a detriment to their career statistics.
Thanks for your input, DRY. You make the point I was trying make much better than I did. My main point was that career statistics are very important for players (while other posters were concentrating on the impact forfeited games might have on contract negotiations). A player who is making a drive for the Hall of Fame would never stand for a game in which he hit 5 for 5 or struck out 15 batters being stricken from his career stats. Compile enough of those games, and your career numbers are skewed and not representative of your total career.
While nothing can be done about rained out games not counting, I see no reason why MLB should create a situation in which 18 or more performances should be treated as if they never happened. If the game is that big a blowout, then more than one or two players on the winning team are having career games that day and deserve to have it reflected in their lifetime numbers.
I’m sure that “never works” is not true, but I’m too lazy to look it up.
For the record, in a baseball forfeit, all statistics are counted if the game has gone past five innings. If the team that is losing forfeits, the winning and losing pitchers are recorded as if the game was finished. If the situation is reversed, there are no winning or losing pitchers.
If the game is forfeited before it becomes official or if the team behind has the game forfeited to them, the final score is recorded as 9 to 0.