Star Baseball Player's Salaries - ROI?

[Peremensoe]

@RickJay

More money = more people willing to stick it out in the minors.

This is a very good point. And it’s applicable not just to the call-ups that the big club will actually use. Major league salaries work as a necessary incentive for guys who will never earn even one day’s worth of the minimum. As I said in another thread,

@spark240

The player pool is relentlessly whittled as you go up the [minor league development] ladder (the whole system is really dependent on an enormous reservoir of unrealistic optimism among young players, and their resulting willingness to work very hard for little money).
…
In a way the differences are all small things, but there are a lot of small refinements that players make as they climb that ladder. The Crash quote is accurate, of course, but it doesn’t acknowledge how hard it can be to make up each additional tiny increment of improvement against ever-tougher competition. The most telling single fact is how rare it is for players to succeed in the major leagues without time at every or nearly every level working up. It happens for an occasional phenom, but rarely enough that the whole structure is clearly necessary to develop typical modern-MLB-quality players.

The whole development system is required to produce modern major league teams, even the bad ones.

In a sense, all of a major league organization’s revenue is dependent on the prospect of a big paycheck to people who will mostly never be paid that much. Because the guys who will be, both stars and journeymen, needed to play with and against all those other guys to get to the point where they could first occupy that major league roster spot.

Now, personally I’d like to see some of the major league revenue pool diverted to actually pay minor league players, so that the system could continue without such a degree of unrealistic optimism, and it would become a reasonable choice for a minor league lifer to stick around as long as he wanted to and could keep up. Let the small towns keep a hero around! They are helping to build the major league organization, even if they never go to Chicago or New York themselves.