Comments on: More Than They Collectively Bargained For

By: Jay29

Jay29 — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 22:26:20 +0000

But the athletic scholarship is money that is required to go towards their education. Give an 18-year-old athlete the equivalent amount in disposable income and, on average, hardly any will be spend on education.

By: Jay29

Jay29 — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 22:20:46 +0000

Yeah and not to mention guaranteed contracts (MLB, NBA) vs non-guaranteed (NFL).

By: Matt Swartz

Matt Swartz — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:23:19 +0000

Click through to the links above for more detail, but in short, there are a few reasons why the marginal value of a win goes up.

One is that one more playoff game for a team winning the wild card is that much more added revenue for being good.

But the main one is that teams don’t pay for a win directly. They pay for an EXPECTED win. What that means is that they pay to increase the probability that they make the playoffs (in addition to paying for the added regular season revenue of being 1 win better in talent level). The probability of making the playoffs goes up if you are a better team. The closer the race, the more likely that one game will make a difference. Since the spot on the fence is closer to .500 now, the odds of 1 win making the difference have gone up. Another way of looking at it is that since 1996, the 31% of the time a wild card race was decided by one game. However, 41% of the time, the 2nd and 3rd place teams in the wild card were one game apart.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 04:35:10 +0000

Objectively speaking, adding a second wild card does not increase the marginal value of a win. Wild Card #2 (WC2) is only worth one-half of one playoff spot, relative to what a playoff spot was worth last year.

Winning the division means more–IFF you are in the division with WC1. This is because you are now penalized for 2nd place. If you’re in the division with WC2, then the marginal benefit of going from 2nd to 1st means proportionately less (unless both wild cards are in the same division). If you’re in a division without one of the wild cards, then winning the division means the same as it did last season.

The new format won’t make the division title matter more. It will make more division titles matter.

I think you are correct about salaries increasing, but not for the reasons you mention. Hope is a very powerful thing, and even if it is just in contention for a wild card spot, fans will tune in to watch. It isn’t as important how much of a chance a team has of winning the World Series–fans will be riveted as long as the team is in contention at all. So this will encourage owners to spend, as the bar is a bit lower. It will also increase late-season viewership for a few cities.

From a competitive standpoint, it’s not catastrophic. All that’s going to happen is that some Wild Card teams are going to be bumped by somewhat-inferior teams. And that can’t happen if the gap from WC1 to WC2 is 0-1 games. I just wish they re-worked the seeding instead. Just seed it 1-5. I prefer to live in an NBA world where divisions mean squat.

By: Mr Punch

Mr Punch — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:29:49 +0000

I doubt that the economic considerations presented here have much to do with the supposed dearth of African-American ballplayers – the key decisions tend to be made at the amateur level. (I say “supposed” because the relevant stat is not the percentage of African-Americans, but the ratio to white Americans.) And note that in the absence of a significant signing bonus, a high school grad gets roughly equal value from an athletic scholarship and several years in the minor leagues.

By: delv

delv — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:10:45 +0000

“Capitalism is about the endless accumulation of capital, however that happens.” This is pretty wrong…

By your loosey goosey definition of capitalism, feudalism counts as capitalism too. And stealing, for that matter. And state communism.

Capitalism is best defined as either 1) a system characterized by a lot of “private ownership of capital” (whatever “private” means), as Swartz said, or 2) a system in which individuals sell their labor power (as opposed to selling themselves, like an indentured servant might) to a buyer and the buyer uses the surplus labor power to gain wealth for him/herself.

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:00:05 +0000

I had not, it’s true, clicked through to read the whole comment, though I have just now. So he’s talking about some nonsense fantasy about competition rather than free markets per se. Not much difference, rhetorically speaking. I also see your comment in that thread, which is about the same as what you say here. I’m saying that baseball is about as capitalist as it gets. Capitalism is about the endless accumulation of capital, however that happens. It’s definitely about, always has been, about socializing costs and privatizing profit. Public financing of stadiums is standard operating procedure. And it always tends towards monopoly. The last thing capitalists want is competition. Though I know full well that we have been ideologically conditioned to believe just the opposite.