Getting what you paid for
How well does a high-priced vet have to play to justify his contract? Plus: Why were the Giants going after Judge and Correa? And why did the Brewers have Walkmans and an iPod in their dressing room?
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Giants fans, be thankful for what you didn't get
“In this world, there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
— Oscar Wilde
No fan base endured a more disappointing offseason than the Giants’.
First, they were told — via Twitter, the world’s most reliable source of information — that right fielder Aaron Judge would be playing for the Giants. That was short-lived. There was no deal, and Judge signed to stay with the Yankees.
But another free agent deal was in the offing. The Giants announced they had a 13-year, $350 million deal with shortstop Carlos Correa shortly before Christmas. Right before the press conference — and the papers were to be signed — the Giants backed off, explaining that Correa’s physical revealed something that made the team leary.
So the Giants wound up with their big winter deals being the acquisition of Mitch Haniger and the retention of Joc Pederson. Not a lot to get excited about for 2023.
Giants fans, you dodged a bullet. Even healthy, Correa would likely be an above-average player for three or four more years at best. That would have meant the Giants would have spent a decade paying top dollar for a has-been.
Any deal with Judge would have had a similar downside.
The Giants don’t have a roster that is just a star player away from making the club a contender. Even with a healthy Correa, this team would have likely been fighting it out with the Rockies and D-backs for a distant third in the NL West.
In 2021, the Giants surprised everyone, including themselves, going 107-55 and winning the NL West crown.
Last season they went 81-81.
One of those seasons was a fluke — and it wasn’t 2022.
This is a club that is looking at a couple of years of vying with the Rockies and the D-backs for third place in the NL West.
Signing a player who would be pulling down $30 million-plus into the next decade, would only cement the Giants’ also-ran status for years to come.
Can Aaron Judge play well enough to justify a $40 million salary? Can anyone?
Aaron Judge is coming off a historic season — an American League record 62 homers, and leading the AL in slugging (.686) and on-base percentage (.425); he was voted AL Most Valuable Player, and credited with an MLB-high 10.6 Wins Above Replacement— that earned him a historic contract.
The Yankees signed him to a deal that will pay him $40 million a year through the 2032 season. He is heading into his age 31 season.
Judge was a good bargain for the Yankees last year. The 10.6 WAR came at a cost of reported $19 million, a mere $557,895 per WAR.
Although the Yankees didn’t get as much bang for their buck from Judge as the Mariners did from outfielder Julio Rodrigeuz led MLB in value with 6.2 WAR and a $700,000 salary, $112,903 per WAR.
Because of the way players’ bargaining works under MLB's agreement with the players association, younger players are underpaid, and established stars are overpaid.
You are not going to get a Julio Rodrigeuz-type return from any veteran who has earned free-agent status.
To clarify, by earned, I am distinguishing between the type of veteran free agent such as Judge, who qualifies for free agency because of MLB service time; in other words, a star going on the open market. That is opposed to veterans who have been released or non-tendered. They are also free agents, but they are seldom in high demand.
Judge himself has been quite a bargain for the Yankees. He delivered 8.0 WAR for $544,500 in his rookie year. In his next two seasons, he missed substantial time with injuries but posted 5.9 and 5.6 WAR while making less than $700,000 per season. The COVID-shortened 2020 season, when he only appeared in 28 games, is the only season he hasn’t delivered great value for the money.
Return on investment
So what constitutes a good return on investment in the free agent market? That would vary from team to team.
In a pure business sense, it is difficult to determine. Baseball teams do not win prize money. What is more, sports business, in general, is murky. Professional teams do not make their profits and revenues public.
News media, bloggers, and academics piece together figures that are reported (players’ salaries, TV and radio rights contracts) and guestimates, usually from Forbes in its annual valuations.
Ask any baseball executive about Forbes’ valuations and you are guaranteed to draw a laugh.
Oh, lest I forget. The finances of six teams from 2009 - — audited, no less — were leaked to Deadspin.
Other than that, the only people outside the teams who see the books are union officials. They are contractually forbidden from disclosing any specifics, but they like to let us know that the clubs paint a more pessimistic picture of the sport’s economic health than the books show. Not that the union has an agenda or anything.
We do know some things. Big market teams tend to have greater revenues than smaller market teams.
But we don’t know how much the return of on-field performance translates to revenue and how much it varies from team to team.
Teams tend to draw better when they compete for a championship. But not always.
For example, the Cleveland Indians went to the World Series in 2016 and finished with the third-lowest attendance in the American League. The Tampa Bay Rays have been to the postseason eight times since 2008 and still are among the worst-drawing teams in the AL every season.
The New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers not only have the resources to afford high-priced free agents, but their large markets with passionate fan bases allow them to reap greater benefits than other clubs when the team succeeds on the field. They probably get a better return from high-priced free agents than say the Guardians, the Rays, or the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Then again the Yankees and Dodgers always draw well. So maybe they don’t need to make a splash in the free agent market.
The San Diego Padres usually draw noticeably better when they contend. So spending millions on Manny Machado, for example, can transform the local market’s perception of the team.
Taking a good team and making it better would increase revenue in most markets.
High-priced free agents offer the most direct way to improve your roster. The Florida Marlins and Arizona Diamondbacks proved that in the 1990s with lavish spending on free agents. The Marlins won the World Series in 1997, their fifth season; the D-backs won the Series in 2001, their fourth season.
Teams make a lot of money off sponsorships and local TV/radio streaming and broadcasting rights. Having a good team helps, but those deals usually run for multiple years. A big free agent signing might help garner more money from a media rights partner — if the contract is up for renewal.
And finally, there are the complicated “payroll taxes” for exceeding certain thresholds in the team’s spending for its roster.
They can make it back on apparel sales, right?
Let’s disabuse ourselves of the notion that MLB teams can make a significant portion of a free agent’s salary back through merchandise sales.
First of all, the licensing fee for merchandise is split equally among all 30 teams.
So in 2019 when Bryce Harper signed a record contract with the Phillies, and the team set sales records for jerseys and T-shirts with Harper’s name on them, the Nationals, Pirates, Rays, and everyone else got the same royalty payment as the Phillies for a Harper jersey.
The royalty payment is 12% of the wholesale price. So let’s say you buy a Harper jersey for $100, the wholesale price is say around $20 bucks. So MLB teams get 12% of that figure, around $2.40, to split 30 ways, giving each club 8 cents for each Harper jersey sold.
Licensed Sports Blog ran the numbers — with what I think is too high a total for MLB merchandise annual sales ($5 billion) — and pegged the revenue per team around $10 million a year before expenses from the MLB merchandising operation.
It’s a nice chunk of change, but it isn’t going to pay a big free agent’s salary.
So what is good value from a free agent?
This is the first time I have delved into this topic — and surprisingly few others seem to have tried, at least in a methodical, easy-to-understand way.
Boardroom. tv took the top free agent signings from last off-season for position players, starting pitchers, and relievers and figured the cost per WAR from each player’s reported contract. (Boardroom.tv used WAR from FanGraphs; I use WAR from Baseball-reference.com. So you could call it an apples-to-oranges comparison. I see it more as a red-delicious-apples-to-Mcintosh-apples comparison.)
The average was $5,380,791.93. for positon players, $5,430,383.41 for starters, and $5,916,335.98 for relievers.
That is lower than some previous seasons — even without figuring in inflation,
Although teams have seemed to be overly optimistic at the time of signing (the Angels and Albert Pujols, the Twins and Joe Mauer leap to the forefront), by now they must have some way of calculating the backend of the contract.
It is unlikely Judge will have a season that approaches his 2022 output. The Yankees know that. What do they need to get $40 million of value from Judge?
I realize this is just writing-numbers-on-a-napkin-kind of reckoning, so bear with me.
Let’s say that teams on average are happy with paying $5.4 million per 1.0 of WAR and believe that gives them a break-even deal.
That means Judge would have to produce 7.2 WAR to justify his salary next season. That is doable, with a good season.
But businesses don’t usually make risky investments with the hope of breaking even. They want to generate surplus value So I am guessing teams on average value WAR higher, we will say at least $6.5 million or $7 million per 1.0 of WAR.
If the Yankees value 1.0 of WAR at $6.5 million, Judge would need to post a 6.2 WAR next season.
With 1.0 of WAR valued at $7 million. Judge would need 5.7 WAR total to make the deal a break-even for the team.
Nothing succeeds like success — or is it excess? As a business, the Yankees seem to have plenty of both. If the team values each 1.0 of WAR as being worth $8 million, then a 5.0 WAR next year would justify his salary from the team’s perspective.
Judge should be able to deliver 5.0 of WAR in a season — at least in the early years of the deal.
The most thorough study I have seen on this subject was done by John L. Solow and Anthony C. Krautmann and published in the Journal of Sports Economics in 2020.
Solow and Krautmann looked at 153 players on MLB rosters in 2010 who were on contracts for three or more seasons. They also took into account the benefit for each franchise from added success on the field.
What they found should cool the fervor of any GM looking to land a high-price free agent: Only 11 percent of the time did the player generate surplus value for the club over the life of a contract — and then only on the shortest deals.
So either the owners and the clubs’ front offices are complete idiots, or we are not coming close to calculating the value of signing big-name free agents.
It is certainly possible that after making millions and billions in other businesses, baseball owners occasionally get caught up in the heat of competition and say, “Aw heck with it! Let's spend a few hundred million and see if we can get to the World Series!”
Still, this free agency thing has been going on for almost half a century. If almost 9 out of 10 of these contracts — large investments for the team — are a bust, would they still be doing this?
I guess I will end this with the tagline used in many a social science paper — the subject requires further study.
Sal Bando’s passing and the ASU connection with the A’s
On the inside back cover of the August 1968 issue of Baseball Digest was a photo of Oakland A’s third baseman Sal Bando.
“Quarterback at third base —” the lead-in read. The caption explained that Bando had been a high school football star who had scholarship offers to play football but chose to play baseball at Arizona State University. He was now a rising star with A’s.
The unthinkable was happening in the 1960s. Baseball was losing athletes to football. So Sal choosing to play baseball was good news for those of us who revered the great game.
It had even more significance for me. My father had taken a position on the ASU faculty and I was about to move from a small town on the Puget Sound in Washington to Tempe, Arizona. So I made a special note of Bando and checked on him regularly in the box scores.
Bando, who passed away on Jan. 20, was one of the building blocks — along with Rick Monday and Reggie Jackson — the Oakland Athletics dynasty of the early 1970s (World Series titles in 1972, 1973, and 1974). And before that, Bando, Monday, and Jackson served as the foundation of a college baseball dynasty at ASU (five College World Series titles and numerous appearances in Omaha between 1964 and 1981).
Monday and Bando played the ASU team that won the 1965 World Series. Jackson, who came to Tempe on a football scholarship. He played only one season of baseball with the Sun Devils (1966).
Bando is the least remembered of that trio.
Jackson became a Hall of Famer, “Mr. October,” hit 563 homers and was completely full of himself. He feuded with the media (one of my friends says Jackson told her numerous times he wished she was dead and would scream at her for no reason), managers, and team owners. In many ways, Jackson had the epitome of a sports star in the 1970s.
Monday was the first pick of the first MLB draft, rescued an American flag from a spectator who tried to burn it in the outfield during a game at Dodgers Stadium. After his 19-year MLB career ended, Monday became an announcer with the Dodgers. He’s still at it.
In 1968, the A’s were in their first season in Oakland and Bando was in his first full season in the majors after call-ups the previous two seasons. He hit a fairly pedestrian .251 with 9 homers. But he drove in 67 runs (13th best in the American League). His OPS that season was a seemingly meager .688. But that was an OPS-plus of 108, meaning he was better than the average hitter that season. It really was The Year of the Pitcher.
Bando went on to become a four-time All-Star with the A’s, and he led the American League in total bases (295) and doubles (32) in 1973. He was captain of the team and, according to Society for Baseball Research, had the highest WAR of any MLB player from 1969 through 1974. He drove in more than 100 runs in a season twice. RBIs no longer carry the cachet they once did. But the stat still carries some weight with me (a topic for another time.)
He became a free agent after the 1976 season, signed with Milwaukee, and played the rest of his career there before retiring after the 1981 season.
He moved to the front office, eventually becoming the Brewers’ GM. The club had minimal success during his tenure from 1991 to 1999, an era in which Milwaukee was notoriously budget conscious. The Brewers had only one winning season during that span.
Visions of Gaylord Perry dancing in the outfield
During spring training forty years ago, I showed up at Tempe Diablo Stadium one day late in the morning and watched the Seattle Mariners work out. I was there to snag a couple of interviews for the next day’s paper.
I have never found athletes of any sport practicing or stretching particularly interesting, let alone memorable. But this time stuck with me.
There in right field, the Mariners pitchers were all dancing to some contemporary pop tunes, led by a fit young woman in a leotard and tights. The players were clad in their uniforms, which were rather tight-fitting polyester duds in powder blue.
Aerobics was sweeping the nation. It was most popular with women, but guys were taking to it, too.
I was hardly surprised that Mariners pitchers were doing it. I knew two young women who were taking an aerobics class, and they had mentioned that one of their classmates was Frank Funk, the Mainers’ pitching coach.
The players were putting in a decent effort, but you could tell they were all new to aerobics. So they were a little awkward. Maybe half a beat behind the instructor.
Except for one player. Gaylord Perry was 44 years old, overweight, and seemed to have no sense of rhythm.
Perry, who passed away this last off-season at 84, was about to begin his second season with the Mariners and the final year of his Hall of Fame career.
The season before he had notched his 300th career victory, becoming the first member to enter that club since 1963. It had been long enough that sports writers speculated that the milestone might never be reached again.
Perry had grown up on a farm in North Carolina and had been in the majors since 1962 when there were no powder-blue polyester uniforms, just white flannels for home games and gray for road games.
And I wondered if in 1962 someone had told him 21 years later he’d still be in the majors and he would be taking part in a group dance with his teammates to get in shape for the season, what he would have thought?
Yeah, 25-year-old me should have asked him that and written a story about the scene I have just described. But I decided, as best I can recall, to write a profile on right-handed starter Jim Beattie.
The Brewers need to update their audio equipment
Set aside for a second, the moral/ legal implications here. If you found yourself alone in an MLB team’s clubhouse in the middle of the night, what would you take?
Some uniforms, some memorabilia?
Well, prosecutors in Milwaukee say Justin Bloedorn found himself in that position late last season and, he took not only memorabilia and a jersey, but also the keys to the Brewers’ spring training facility in Arizona, and two Walkmans, and an iPod.
Walkmans? An iPod? What other major sports team in North America do you think has those in their dressing room?
I loved my Walkman in 1983. And my iPod when it came out, too. (Sadly, shortly after authorities say Bloedorn made the heist, Apple stopped supporting iPods of any sort.)
I just think an MLB team could do better.
In Bloedorn’s defense — not of the alleged theft but of the poor judgment in regard to what he is accused of taking — he was really drunk. He told authorities he had at least 10 beers at a game before passing out in the bushes outside American Family Field. After coming to, Bloedorn somehow stumbled into the clubhouse, he told authorities.
All this, I believed, called for a humorous poem. But I don’t write that sort of thing. So asked the ChatBot to do it. Here is what it came up with.
Ode to a Brewers fan
Note this is according to authorities:
There once was a man named Justin,
Who wanted Brewers' gear just for lustin'
He drank ten beers,
Passed out in some bushes, oh dear,
And ended up stealing and bustin'.
He stumbled around and pulled on a door,
And found his way to the clubhouse, for sure.
He took what he could,
Electronics, a credit card, and memorabilia good,
And then hailed an Uber to take him back to his door.
The roommate was suspicious and called the cops,
And they found Brewers' gear in duffel bags and props.
The man was charged with burglary,
And faced the judge with a sense of urgency,
For stealing home, he should have just stuck to bops.
Lesson learned, don't drink too much and pass out,
Or you'll wake up in a jail cell with no clout.
Stealing team memorabilia is not okay,
It's better to enjoy the game and just sway,
And leave the clubhouse for the Brewers to tout.