It’s the final installment NET WORTH WEEK! To recap: Part One, on the net worth of owners, is here. Part Two, on the teams themselves, is here. Today we’re talking about the players. How do we assign values to all they create?
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I used to wonder why more baseball teams didn’t strive for consistent mediocrity, if only to satisfy greedy owners. The cliché examples of teams run by greedy owners are typically teams like this year’s Baltimore Orioles, who just finished a 19-game losing streak and don’t even seem to be trying to compete, or the Cleveland teams in the Major League movies, made up of castoffs and has-beens.
But surely an owner trying to maximize profits would find this counterproductive (Remember: in Major League, Rachel Phelps is not trying to make money—she’s trying to break her team’s lease in Cleveland so she can relocate to Miami). After all, nobody wants to watch such dreadful teams, and so attendance, TV ratings, and merchandise sales would drop off, cutting into an owner’s income. Not to mention the risk of alienating even your most loyal fans.
It always seemed more logical, from a purely capitalist perspective, to aim to be pretty good, if never quite great, every year. A team that won between 85 and 93 games per season would be in or near the playoff chase almost every year, meaning you’d maintain fan interest into September, which would boost ticket sales and TV ratings. You’d occasionally make the playoffs, so your fans would never grow embittered or complacent. And you could probably do that without signing the kind of mega contracts that teams come to regret. You could keep your payroll consistently modest, while ALSO never leaving potential revenue on the table.
Yet basically no baseball team is run this way. Mediocrity is strenuously avoided—you want to be capable of winning 100 games or losing 100 games. Of the 30 MLB teams, 25 have finished in last place at least once since 2013. In that same period, there were 12 different 100+ win teams, including ten just between 2017 and 2019.
The explanation can be found in baseball’s compensation structure. The problem with aiming for 85-93 wins is that it’s a pretty narrow target to hit in a world of guaranteed long-term contracts. If one such commitment does not work out, then you can slip from “mediocre” to “bad” without much to show for it. Take Joe Mauer and the Twins. In 2010, after an MVP season, Mauer signed an 8-year, $184 million extension. At the time, this was seen as a great, relatively team-friendly contract; indeed, for most of its duration, the Twins’ payroll was in the bottom half of the league.
But Mauer struggled with injuries, and eventually had to be moved from catcher to first base, losing almost all his defensive value. Not coincidentally, the Twins never won more than 85 games during that contract, never won a playoff game, and finished in last place four times. Of course, this wasn’t Mauer’s fault: The Twins could have easily made up for his declining production by adding talent around him. But that would have boosted their payroll, which owners obviously don’t want to do. Alternatively, you could run out young, unproven players in the hopes than some are future stars, but then you run the risk of being truly dreadful, as the Twins were in 2016, when they lost 103 games.
This dynamic has many implications. It has fueled the rise of “The Process”-style team management in baseball; it has exacerbated the labor tensions in the sport; it has led to some embarrassing endings for all-time great players. But my point, for now, is simply that a player’s “value”—both on the field and in the open market—is a function of the rules governing that sport’s compensation structure. In the NBA, contracts are guaranteed but not long-term, which fuels the rise of superteams and star autonomy. In the NFL, contracts are not even guaranteed, and the salary cap is hard, so players have little power and the league actually does maintain strict parity. In each case, these rules affect a player’s pay as much or more than their actual talent.
Perhaps this is an obvious point. Fans are keenly aware of the nuances of their leagues contract structures. But it is nevertheless underappreciated. People who follow sports are obsessed with determining how much a particular player is “worth” and figuring out if they are overpaid or underpaid. But an athlete’s value, like the net worths of owners and teams discussed earlier in the week, is a construct of the power relations between labor and capital. There is no “pure” way of assessing that value.
Still, fans never stop trying. Nothing gets fans more riled up than a player who is supposedly overpaid. In baseball, where statistics have gotten quite good at quantifying the precise, on-field value of specific players, you will even see attempts to assign specific, supposedly rational numbers to free agents. If you look at what other guys got, and what their WAR or wRC+ is, then you can see what the value of a player’s skillset really is. But of course those numbers are themselves subject to rules governing contracts. What would free agent contracts look like in a world where rookies were paid their fair value, or amateurs were allowed to sign wherever they wanted?
Indeed, if the central point of Net Worth Week has not been clear, let me say it one more time: Attempts to assign precise economic values to people and teams are attempts to obscure the power that capital has over labor. If you don’t like a player because you think he’s overpaid, then you are merely expressing misplaced anger at capitalism. Don’t boo, organize.