Screw the Players! Let’s Just Fix Baseball
Previously I have used this newsletter to suggest that the baseball players are in the right during the current labor fight. But I’m a socialist—I always think unions are in the right. And even if decidedly non-socialist writers like Jeff Passan and Ken Rosenthal seem to agree, I understand why some fans might not be sympathetic to this point. After all, baseball players ARE very well-paid. They’re not all “millionaires,” but even the league minimum would put an earner in the 99th percentile of family incomes in the United States. We don’t have to exaggerate the hardship of the players to agree with them.
More to the point, the thing baseball fans like is baseball. They want the game to come back. Even more, they want the game to IMPROVE. Baseball is facing a lot of problems right now, and “the players are too poor” is not very high on the list. There are probably many fans who would agree that the players should get more money; they’re just more concerned with other problems in the game, or the fact that the 2022 season might not even happen. And I empathize with these fans. I want the game to come back, too. So, for now, let’s just ignore the players. Who cares if their demands are “correct”? Forget their demands. Screw ‘em. Let’s just try to fix the game.
Problem #1: Tanking
This is a real issue for the league. It is hard to win over fans when, in any given season, 8-10 teams are not even trying to win. It’s demoralizing for fanbases, and it makes the on-field product worse. In the midst of the Orioles’ second 14-game losing streak last year, manager Brandon Hyde said, “They're playing to win it and we're trying to just do the best we can and stay positive with it.” It would be better for the sport if every team were “playing to win it.”
The problem is that tanking WORKS. The Royals in 2015, the Cubs in 2016, the Astros in 2017… all these teams won the World Series with cores built by losing badly for years and accruing high draft picks that turned into Eric Hosmer and Kris Bryant and Carlos Correa. The easiest way for a team to build a contender is get high draft picks, horde prospects for a few years and manipulate their service time; then, when they’re all hitting their primes in the last years before they become eligible for arbitration, you use the money you saved to pick up a free agent or two, or trade for a veteran on the last years of a big contract. Then, after your run, you trade those guys for more prospects, or let them walk in free agency to gain a compensatory draft pick, and start the whole process again.
If the league wants to fix this, it needs to make young players less valuable. Given the accelerated development of modern prospects, and the cost controls imposed on players in their first years in the majors, young players can generate incredible amounts of surplus value. According to FanGraphs, Mookie Betts’ MVP season in 2018 was worth about $83.3 million dollars (based on an fWAR of 10.4 and a free market value of ~$8 million per win, which is roughly what free agents go for). But his salary was only $10.5 million, because it was only his first year of arbitration eligibility. The year before that, he was only half as valuable on the field, with an fWAR of 5.3—but he was still on the rookie pay scale, so his salary was 90% lower, making that year an even better deal for his team!
Given these incredible discrepancies between player pay and player value, it’s no wonder that teams eschew veteran talent for young prospects. But since it takes time to develop those prospects, that means being bad for several years before this way of winning can work. To solve this problem, baseball needs to close the gap between what young players are paid and what they are worth.
But wait a second… this sounds awfully close to the players’ demands of raising the league minimums and making more young players eligible for arbitration earlier in their career. The whole point of this exercise was to ignore the players’ demands, but here we are. OK, fine, just this once we’ll accept that what the players want is good for the game:
Solution #1: Pay players more.
Problem #2: Where are baseball’s stars?
This is a complaint you hear a lot from casual baseball fans. Other sports have star power: LeBron, Brady, Giannis, Mahomes, etc. But what baseball player has that kind of national appeal? Perhaps Mookie Betts and now Shohei Ohtani, but after that it’s tough to come up with anyone, which makes it hard to sell the sport to new fans. It’s not for lack of talent: Guys like Juan Soto, Nolan Arenado, and Jacob deGrom are elite players who should be way bigger stars than they are.
It's easy to blame the league’s marketing, or the players’ lack of charisma—insert your favorite joke about how boring Mike Trout is. But, the on the field at least, Trout is not boring. It’s just that he’s still only ever played in three playoff games. As long as the league’s best players are not on its best teams, it will be difficult to build national stars. Of course, MLB can’t help it if the Angels stink, and individual stars will never be as meaningful in baseball as they are in basketball, but there is a pattern here:
In 2015, the Kansas City Royals made a thrilling World Series run. It should have been a star-making performance. But within three years, Lorenzo Cain and Mike Moustakas were in Milwaukee, Eric Hosmer was in San Diego, Wade Davis was in Colorado, and Ben Zobrist was in Chicago—almost the entire core was gone, spread out among middling teams.
In 2016, the Cubs had a historic World Series win. But five years later, they unceremoniously traded all the remaining stars from that team.
In 2017, Giancarlo Stanton had a historic season that should have turned him into a national star… but then the Marlins traded him to the Yankees to save money.
In 2018, the Red Sox won… then they traded Mookie Betts and David Price to save money.
In 2019, the Nationals won, then let Anthony Rendon leave in free agency and traded Max Scherzer.
Even right now, the defending World Series champions seem ready to let fan-favorite Freddie Freeman leave instead of signing him to a new contract.
Player movement does not preclude stars—just look at the NBA. But none of these moves were initiated by the players trying to find better spots to win. They were all done by teams trying to save money. As a result, the potential stars ended up toiling in obscurity on teams that haven’t gone anywhere (like Rendon and Hosmer), or they were ancillary additions to teams that were already good (like Betts and Stanton), which limits their star power.
If you look at other leagues, you see that it’s dynasties that make stars. The closest thing the league currently has to existing stars (Betts, Jose Altuve, Aaron Judge) are guys who have made repeated playoff runs. In order to get more of these, Major League Baseball needs to make it easier for teams to retain their cores for longer, and not make it so tempting to trade their top players as soon as they are eligible for free agency.
Uh oh, we’re doing it again… we’re dangerously close to yet another union demand. After all, a major reason teams are so inclined to cut payroll is that the luxury tax threshold has barely budged in years. As such, there’s simply no way for teams to retain their best players while staying under the tax. Only the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have been willing to go over the tax, have kept their core together. But it would seem that, in order to fix this problem, we need to raise the luxury tax threshold.
Ugh, I swear I was trying to avoid this, but one more time:
Solution #2: Pay players more.
Problem #3: Games are too slow
OK, this is the big one, and I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with player salaries. After all, this all about what happens on the field, and not how rosters are put together. In recent seasons, a number of trends have conspired to dramatically slow down baseball’s pace of play. There are more strikeouts, more home runs, more pitching changes, more shifts, and fewer stolen bases. All this boils down to less time when the ball is actually in play.
There are already some proposals to fix these trends, like adding a pitch clock or banning shifts, and these are probably worth trying. But I’m not sure that this gets to the heart of the matter, which is that relief pitching is much better than it used to be. Just a few years ago, the conventional wisdom was that a lineup wanted to chase the opposing starting pitcher so it could instead face more middle relievers, which were typically the soft underbelly of a team’s bullpen. But between 2010 and 2015, the percentage of fastballs thrown over 95 mph surged from ~14% to over 22%, largely due to an influx of hard-throwing middle relievers.
There is now a crop of largely anonymous, hard-throwing arms—guys like Pete Fairbanks and Chad Green and Michael Kopech—who don’t close games or make All-Star teams or even make much of an impression to anyone who doesn’t follow their team regularly. But they throw so hard and strikeout opposing hitters with such frequency that managers are eager to use them. This means more pitching changes, and more strikeouts. And since it’s so hard to string together rallies against pitchers like this, teams are more reliant on home runs for offense.
Teams used to be reluctant to use guys this way, for a couple of reasons. First, there was the idea that if a pitcher were that talented, you should use him as a starter, to get more value out of him. And there was also a concern that letting a guy so throw hard would hurt his arm.
But developing a starter usually takes time: Guys like Johan Santana and Adam Wainwright, who transitioned from relievers to elite starters, took a couple of years to emerge in full form. If you are trying to obtain as much value from a prospect as early as you can, then this is no good. On the flip side, if throwing hard for short appearances damages the arm, then that damage is likely to show up later, after the player is no longer under team control.
Take, for example, Dellin Betances. Drafted in 2006 by the New York Yankees, Betances was used almost exclusively as a starting pitcher in the minor leagues until 2013, when he was converted to a relief pitcher. Then, between 2014-18, he emerged as an elite reliever, averaging roughly 15 strikeouts per 9 innings; in 2015, his bWAR was the highest on the team. But because he was never used as a closer, and arbitration tends to reward relivers with saves, Betances never earned more than $5.1 million in those years. Then, in 2019, the year he was set to finally reach free agency, he hurt his shoulder. Since then he’s thrown fewer than 14 total innings, and lost about 4 MPH on his fastball velocity.
In other words, Betances’ career was molded to perfectly fit the contours of value extraction in the pre-free agency period. If we want teams to shift their focus back to developing more starters who can go longer, and fewer hard-throwing middle relievers who burn out after a few years, then we need to change baseball’s salary structure. Players need to hit free agency earlier, or teams need to be incentivized to spend money on older free agents—the so-called “middle class” free agents who used to get nice deals to be a team’s #3 or #4 starter.
Well, fuck, we did it again, didn’t we? We’re back to echoing the exact demands of the MLB Players Association, even though that’s what we specifically set out to avoid!
Ugh, fine:
Solution #3: Pay players more.
I’m starting to think we should pay workers more not just because it’s the fair and right thing to do, but because we could solve most of our other problems that way. I wonder if there are any broader public policy lessons to be learned from this exercise? Nah, probably not…