The Yanks avoided arbitration with Brian Bruney yesterday, agreeing to a one year contract that will keep them out of the hearing rom this year. Last year the Yanks and Chien-Ming Wang went to a hearing, and if you’re interesting in just what goes on in that room, check out this arbitration primer by Maury Brown. It’s a quick and painless read, and it’ll give you a nice overview of what actually goes into these things. The only official piece of business the Yanks have left this offseason is to renew the contracts of players with 0-3 years of service time, meaning Hughes, Joba and half the bullpen. Baseball season’s a comin’.
The most valuable team in all the game
Via comes word that Forbes has released its annual list of the most valuable teams in all sports. The Yankees are valued at $1.3 billion, a new high for them. The Bombers are the only baseball team in the top five, joining Manchester United, the Cowboys, Red Skins and Patriots atop the list. They are also the only MLB club worth over $1 billion. It’s good to be rich.
Salary cap for the poor, beg some owners
As the baseball owners met quietly in Phoenix this week to discuss the baseball economy and take care of some administrative details, the ever-popular stop-the-Yankees salary cap idea came out for the umpteenth time this postseason.
“I think there’s a lot of owners that would like to have that right now,” Lew Wolff, owner of the A’s, said. “I think the parity is what we’re looking for, and the more ways you can get to parity the better. I think it’s pretty good now, but I think it could be better.” Coincidentally — or not — the A’s ownership has a net worth estimated at $1.5 billion.
Brewers owner Mark Attanansio, who recently paid a quarter of a billion dollars for the right to get into the ownership club, echoed Wolff’s complaints. “I would ask, if it’s such a bad idea, what sport doesn’t have a salary cap other than us?” he said.
The AP, linked above, had more:
The Yankees’ offseason spending spree has sparked renewed talk of a cap, an issue owners haven’t brought up in negotiations since the disastrous 1994-95 strike that wiped out the World Series for the first time in 90 years. But not all owners are critical of the Yankees’ acquisition of pitchers CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett and infielder Mark Teixeira.
“I have no problem with what they’ve done,” [Cubs Chairman Crane] Kenney said. “They’ve done it within the rules, within the confines of our agreement…
Wolff’s team recently agreed to a one-year, $5.25 million year with Jason Giambi, who had bolted Oakland after the 2001 season to sign a $120 million, seven-year contract with the Yankees. Asked if the Yankees’ spending concerned him, Wolff replied, “I probably should say it does, but to me it doesn’t because, frankly, the more visible they are — they are baseball, traditionally. And they’re not doing anything different than they’ve done traditionally for years. I think they benefit all of us more than they hurt us…”
“There’s no sour grapes here,” Attanasio said. “The Yankees are playing within the rules of the system. So you can’t blame the team. You have to change the system.”
I won’t pass judgment on Attanasio, but it’s interesting to see Kenney’s comments make this article. In a way, it shows what the real fight would be if the owners try to hammer out a salary cap. In one corner would be the rich teams, the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, Dodgers, Cubs, Angels of the game. In the other would be the Pirates, Marlins, and A’s of the world. Never the twain shall meet. The players, indeed, have nothing to worry about.
As I said last week, baseball doesn’t need a salary cap, and baseball probably couldn’t even afford a salary cap. These owners are failing to recognize that the Yanks will have a lower or comparatively similar Opening Day payroll in 2009 as they did in 2008, and they are spoiling for a fight with each other that neither side can win. This is one sleeping dog best left undisturbed.
The travails of selling up in a down market
With Opening Day less than three months away, the Yankees have some real estate to sell. Seven of the team’s fancy luxury boxes remain vacant and a quarter of the 4000 highest priced premium seats are unsold as well. To that end, the Yanks have hired Prudential Douglas Elliman, a high-priced real estate firm, to help move some seats.
To me, this seems like an unnecessary move. The Yanks aren’t selling out the new stadium because the seats are disproportionately overpriced considering the current state of the U.S. economy. Once the markets rebound, the Yanks will have no problem selling out their 52,325-seat stadium. For now, though, if the Yanks don’t fill those seats, they may come dangerously close to missing out on that four-million attendance mark during their first in the new digs.
Psst, buddy, how much for a win?
Via Shysterball and Baseball Musings comes a rather interesting, if somewhat flawed, study about the marginal cost per win.
The premise is rather simple. ESPN The Magazine writer Peter Bernstein asks, “Who is really the best in MLB at creating wins from dollars?” The answer — Billy Bean’s A’s — is hardly to surprising and demonstrates the superiority of Beane’s Moneyball approach. The other findings though bear more discussion.
First, Bernstein discusses methodology:
If you look at the correlation between a team’s opening day payroll and their final season victory total over the 11 seasons from 1998 to 2008, some trends become clear…There is a slight positive correlation between payroll and victories as indicated by the line shown in the picture.
We conclude this: for every $7 million a team spends on payroll (at 2008 player salary levels) the team will on average win one more game. A team that spends $125 million, or $35 million more than the 2008 average payroll of about $90 million, would be expected to win five more games than average. That comes out to 86 for the season.
Now off the bat, there’s a glaring problem. In the age of the Internet and free-flowing information, Bernstein doesn’t tell us what that “slight positive correlation” is. If it’s just a slight correlation, then the findings are ultimately meaningless. We just don’t know with the information given. For now, we’ll give Bernstein the benefit of the doubt.
Moving on though, Bernstein runs the numbers on the Yankees and manages to miss the point. The numbers show that the Yankees should win 98.7 games per season. Reality shows the Yanks to have averaged 97.8 wins per season for a difference of -0.9. In other words, the Yankees pretty much win the number of games they are expected to win.
Still, Bernstein’s analysis misses the point. “In the Yankees’ case,” he writes, “despite their success and ability to get into position for title runs, they are in the bottom half of the league over the last 10 years in terms of wins per dollar spent. When they lock up Mark Teixeira at $180 million, a player whose stats are equal to or worse in many cases than Milton Bradley, who the Cubs just secured for a sixth of that total … Well, you get the idea.”
In the Yanks’ case, they got what they paid for. As David Pinto (linked above) writes, “They weren’t terribly efficient, but they didn’t waste money either.”
For the Yankees, that’s just right. They have more money than anyone else. The team’s Front Office wants to — and, at times, has to — spend the money, and by and large, it’s been money well spent. The Yanks have made the playoffs every year except one during the course of this study. The team has made five trips to the World Series, capturing three titles in the process.
Money can win; money can lose. While Billy Beane’s approach and his +11.5 win difference is fantastic, I’ll take the money team with no complaints.
Everyone loves a new t-shirt
Here’s a fun little story that trickled into my Inbox via Google News last night: T-shirt sales for CC Sabathia are far exceeding the usual demand for player t-shirts. According to Crain’s New York, local stores including Modell’s and the Yankee Clubhouse stores have sold out Sabathia shirts three times over. I don’t have a CC shirt yet. I think I’m going to wait for the Teixeira 25 ones to hit.
The small-market argument against a salary cap
As the Yankees have gone on something of a spending spree this winter, netting the team three of the top free agents around, small-market clubs bemoan the spending. The Brewers were unamused with the Yankees. The Marlins’ David Samson voiced his concerns, and the Astros have grumbled about the spending as well.
So with all of these complaints come the inevitable discussion about a salary cap. If the luxury tax, designed to penalize the Yankees, isn’t reining in the spending, should baseball adopt a spending cap? While the Players Union would never agree to a cap, a few good baseball minds feel that the smaller market teams wouldn’t be so keen to take on a cap either. The problem arises not on the upper bounds of the cap but on the lower.
Shawn Hoffman, writing at Baseball Prospectus, elaborates on this argument:
Using 2008 as an example, the thirty teams took in about $6 billion (not including MLB Advanced Media revenue), for an average of $200 million per team. Forty-five percent of that (the players’ share) is $90 million, which we’ll use as the midpoint between our floor and cap. If we want to make the floor 75 percent of the cap (a low-end figure, relative to the other leagues), we can use $77 million and $103 million, respectively.
With a $103 million cap, nine teams would have been affected last year, and a total of about $286 million would have had to be skimmed off the top. Since total salaries have to remain at existing levels, the bottom twenty-one teams would have had to take on this burden, which had previously been placed on the Yankees, Red Sox, et al. On the other end, fourteen teams would have been under the payroll floor, by a total of $251 million. Even discounting the Marlins’ $22 million payroll, the other thirteen teams would have had to spend an average of $15 million more just to meet the minimum. Some of those teams might be able to afford it; most wouldn’t.
Imagine being Frank Coonelly in this situation. Coonelly, the Pirates’ team president, has publicly supported a cap. Had our fictional cap/floor arrangement been instituted last year, the Pirates would have needed to increase their Opening Day payroll by $28 million. Not only would the team have taken a big loss, but Neal Huntington’s long-term strategy would have been sabotaged, since the team would have had to sign a number of veterans just to meet the minimum payroll.
It’s clear to imagine a situation in which teams would not be able to support a minimum payroll. Just look at the economic turmoil that has descended upon our nation and its impact on the sport.
Hoffman notes that the best system is one that redistributes revenue and creates opportunities for more teams to make the playoffs. In fact, his proposed best system is the one baseball currently employs, and he’s right. The current playoff system works.
In any situation, some teams will always emerge at the top of the spending pile. New York City is bigger and wealthier than any other city in the country, and the Mets and Yanks will have a natural advantage that they should embrace. But baseball has developed ways to spread the money around, and smart GMs can put together very competitive teams with limited resources.
In the end, a cap discussion is mostly just sour beans. Other teams are envious, and they’re not as good at putting a roster together under the Moneyball approach. Meanwhile, a salary cap makes for some nice January discussion, but it will never happen.
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