Do these same people want to keep guys like Ryan Howard and pay them 5/$125M while they produce negative fWAR over the life of the contract and guarantee that the team is awful for the next decade+? Of course they don’t. They only want to sign players for hometown discounts and with the impossible foresight that those players will outperform the contracts. And I can prove to you that even then they’ll bitch and moan about it (see: Votto outperforming 10/$225M).
I’m not exactly sure what the point is supposed to be here. Is it that football and baseball are fundamentally different sports in terms of the way player value is structured, i.e., positional wins above replacement? Because that’s what’s happening. The reason teams aren’t letting top NFL QBs walk in their primes is because they are exactly the singular scarce resource that is impossible to duplicate or compensate for.
A baseball equivalent of Joe Burrow would need to produce somewhere around 40 WAR per season. At current rates, that level of production would be worth about $340M per year, a salary that exceeds the highest team payroll in baseball by $80M. Instead, the greatest player of all time (Trout) produced only one quarter of that win equity in his very best seasons. Lindor’s projected value is yet half of that, while costing the Mets nearly as much, and he underproduced in the first year of his mega-contract by about $20M. A much more relevant comparison to Lindor in terms of impact would be an offensive tackle or tight end.
I should also point out that this isn’t true and that nothing is close to certain. Thinking that a historically cheap dumpster fire franchise is a lock to re-sign an MVP-caliber QB is delusional. The price for that player is $50M/yr and rising in addition to the franchise not having an indoor practice facility. Like, I could have just as easily argued that there’s no way the Cavs would have let the most valuable player in NBA history take his talents to South Beach because no team is that cheap / stupid.
So I’m still trying to understand exactly what it is that the fans who make these complaints want, because it sounds an awful lot like “we drafted / developed this guy so we should get to keep him while continuing to pay substantially less than market rate.” Because if I’m being honest, that sounds like a Make America Great Again vision for sports that hasn’t existed for forty years. Let’s imagine for a minute that the Indians were spenders like the Phillies. Do they want a smart front office that’s always angling for value like the Rays, or do they just want to be able to resign the Ryan Howards and Lindors to megacontracts with tons of downside?
I think the answer is that they want something like a salary floor, so that they know the team has an obligation to spend the money on someone, and so presumably would direct that money to the most popular players.
That doesn’t seem clear to me at all from reading this article. I’ll point out again that these arguments are often built on completely false premises, so it’s difficult to tease out exactly what point is being made:
Let’s do facts though:
2022 Cleveland Guardians total payroll: $40,410,000
2022 Cincinnati Bengals total payroll: $201,342,734
The Bengals number will be higher at the start of the season with $18M in cap space and needing to sign more players. Anyone trying to frame this as two “small-market teams not inclined to spend” is being obtuse.
Also, I’m gonna call bullshit on this part too:
Meanwhile, as a Guardians fan, he knew pretty much from the start that Francisco Lindor was too good and that Cleveland definitely would not keep him. The clock was always ticking. He could love watching Lindor play, sure, but he could not love Lindor, not in the same way, because the arrangement was always temporary.
Can I get a list of every player that this guy “knew” was too good from the start? That’s going to be as silly as his Karen take about needing to love a player. The fact is that great players leave in sports frequently. That’s the nature of professional sports, and it’s been that way for a real long time. Davante left, Tyreek Left, Lebron left, but sure, let’s compare Francisco Lindor to a franchise NFL QB on a team spending over $200M.
And he (Posnanski) just completely loses me on the Freddie Freeman stuff:
Freeman is a beloved figure, a famously good guy, an admired clubhouse leader, an Atlanta icon. Freeman is what we would call in the baseball card world a “major star,” while Olson, at best, would be considered a “minor star.”
But, of course, baseball people, more of them all the time, don’t concern themselves with such things. The question for them is value, real value, and the truth is that when it comes to pure value, many things point away from Freeman and toward Olson.
If you are making a cold value appraisal — which the Atlanta front office has become famous for doing — you choose Olson and don’t even think twice about it. Freeman is a 32-year-old free agent who will draw $30 million a year for the next few seasons.
He also points out that Freeman’s 7th season was a breakout year where he jumped from very good player to superstar (this will be Olson’s 7th season) and that Olson is considerably younger and cheaper. And, of course, the takeaway from all of this is supposed to be that these analytics bro bean counters doing cold value appraisals is bad for baseball. Very bad.
It’s incoherent. Why should Atlanta pay a premium for Freddie Freeman when they can acquire a younger player with nearly identical value projection for much less? I don’t understand that part. Why is it that Atlanta should pay more and not Freeman should take less? Why is Atlanta the bad guys here when they are the ones shrewdly maximizing the team’s $/WAR? Shouldn’t Freeman take less if he LOVES Atlanta as much as the fans love him?
I’m not seeing an argument for salary floors anywhere here. It honestly just looks like an argument that teams should re-sign their players for REASONS, and failure to do that is due to value-calculating analytics bros who are simply trying to pocket an extra buck or two. But why would you pay more for less? Atlanta spends considerable money, but they don’t have unlimited salary to throw around. Why would they not try to maximize the number of wins their ~$150M can buy? Knowingly overpaying players means that you are, by choice, trying to win fewer games, and the only reason I can think that you might wanna do that is to make more money. Salary floors only solve the problem of huge disparity between teams–it makes no guarantees about players sticking around. That’s why I really want to know if the core issue from the casual fan perspective is actually the spending or just spending in the context of overpaying star players to keep them.
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I think this is a compelling post - thanks. I’m generally a Posnanski fanboy, so I kind of blindly take his premises for granted. Are there any stats on the relative frequency of “stars” being traded in MLB vs. other leagues?
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Is Posnanski good at writing about historical aspects of the game? Usually I find that those guys are bad at swallowing the modern business side of sports and also don’t understand player value that well. As far as frequency of stars being traded in the major sports, I’m not familiar with any particular data on that. I do suspect that fans wouldn’t actually care about “re-signing players” as long as they were actually spending money and signing good free agents, and the evidence I’ll site for this is NFL / NBA.
Also, I just checked and Braves are spending more on payroll this year than last year. So it’s not like they dumped Freddie, signed a dime store replacement, and pocketed the difference like is being accused. Paying down at Freeman’s spot allowed them to beef up the bullpen and re-sign some other key free agents.
This was from MLB Trade Rumors:
[Freeman] and team are hung up on both length and value, with the Braves reportedly offering a five-year, $135MM pact and Freeman holding out for something closer to six years and $200MM. At the beginning of the offseason, MLBTR projected Freeman would ultimately land a six-year, $180MM deal, a prediction that roughly accords with how the market played out ahead of the lockout.
So the Braves reportedly offered 5/135 which is 27/yr, and he was holding out for 6/200 (33.3/yr)? LOL. Here’s how much he settled for in the end:
So he gets the same 27M/yr but for an extra year. Doesn’t sound like he loves Atlanta very much.
It sucks as a fan losing your homegrown stars.
Sometimes homegrown stars go on to suck.
Both of these can be true!
Except the first rarely happens to Dodgers fans and almost always happens to small market fans, and only in MLB out of the major US sports.
No amount of pointing out exceptions and reciting stats changes that simple fact that any sentient sports fan can easily see. MLB is different.
Before this last CBA round I always heard the owners would never go for a cap/floor because the revenue disparity was too big in MLB compared to those other sports. I accepted that because it seemed to make sense. But now the players seem to be the biggest obstacle to a cap/floor, and the national baseball writers are 100% in the tank for them, and that really grinds my gears.
Olson is also a local kid to the pro team, not every day you get those.
the joe mauer’s where one star stays with the same team forever is rare enough but he was also a local kid, shame they never rang’d with him
Your team was run by a cost-cutting Wal-Mart grifter that was so angered by the 1994 strike that he decided to slash and burn a perennial top payroll in baseball for the next 25 years. If you’re arguing that none of those owners should be in baseball and that a salary floor of, say, $150M should be implemented, then ok I agree.
Now let’s pretend like the Royals are spending the $150M or whatever and they have a guy like Freddie Freeman in this current situation. Are you really gonna complain about not re-signing homegrown players when a smart front office cuts these dudes loose, signs the same caliber player for substantially less money, and then pumps those savings back into team improvements? Because that would be really weird if you did. Free agency in baseball has been a thing for longer than my entire life, and overpaying terrible contracts is bad for any team, not just the bottom feeders (see: Phillies).
The Royals would be very very unlikely to keep George Brett in today’s environment. The Chiefs would be very very likely to lose Mahomes if the NFL was run by MLB.
Teams don’t tank for windows in the NFL.
The NFL is a far superior product for anyone but large market fans. It really doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.
They would be unlikely to keep George Brett because their (dead) owner was a lying piece of shit who claimed to be losing $30M/year while raking in huge profits. So, right, they should probably fix that. That’s what we’ve been saying!
Ewing Kauffman died in 1993, Brett’s last year.
Johnny Damon was the first time Royals fans realized the game had changed. A lot of fans were really upset about Damon. But then by Carlos Beltran and whatever came after, they grew to accept it as the new reality, myself included.
But now that I see the owners at least proposed a cap/floor (although who knows how serious they were about it) and it’s the players (and their Reek writers) who are against a cap/floor - I’m incensed again.
Salvador Perez has been on the royals his whole career and just had 2/3 of the triple crown last year and just extended
it did happen to a pretty good player anyway
Yeah because he had to feed his family back in Venezuela and signed a contract very very early, which has become a case study in a terrible contracts from the player’s POV.
Unless MLB changes its structure, Salvy will very likely be the last lifetime Royal with a shot at the HOF. Although Greinke will probably go in as a Royal, which is nice.
And no I don’t want to hear from the anti-fun police that Perez has no shot at the HOF. It’s literally my biggest rooting interest in the Royals right now.
“Something changed.” Yeah, this crook took control of the team is what changed:
This is a small sample of the donations of David Glass from Bentonville. I’m sure he was totally telling the truth about the team losing $25M to $30M a year a though. Jeffrey Loria another truthteller who was totally losing money 
and not pocketing $500M from revenue sharing.
You seem to be under the presumption I love David Glass. He was horrible. Agreed.
But don’t tell me losing homegrown stars is some result of David Glass that’s unique to the Royals. The Royals are now “doing it right”, and we’re still tanking for windows and losing homegrown stars.
You think the Royals are going to have a chance to keep Bobby Witt Jr. if he turns out to be as good as he looks? I know it’s possible. But it’s not likely.
It’s pretty much entirely due to David Glasses all across MLB who are losing on purpose to pocket the money. But also, who cares? Players team hopping in free agency to get more money has been the predominant mode in sports for my entire lifetime. You should just hope that your team is smart enough to spend the money wisely, and that often includes letting homegrown players walk and finding better value elsewhere. The Braves just won a World Series by underspending the Dodgers by $100M. They made what appears to be a pretty wise baseball decision in telling Freddie to pound sand. Now the Dodgers get to overpay for him, the Braves replaced him and upgraded some arms with the savings, and could certainly win another ring in the process.
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Here’s an idea - why don’t we force the David Glass’s (apparently nearly all small and mid-market owners) to spend more?
Or we can just keep calling them mean names and hope that works out.