OK please help me out. The owners pay the players a total of $4 billion for the season. Each team on average goes 81 and 81, because every game is both won and lost. So the total number of wins for a season for Major league baseball should be 81×30 = 2430. 4,000,000,000÷2430 equals 1.6 million and change. Why is that not the price per win?
There are 81 wins but that is about 35 wins above reoplacement. A team of all replacement players would average about 45 actual wins. So 35 *30 is a aound 1050 WAR. $4B/1050 is a little less than $3M per WAR and that is the actual value of the players not the inflated Fangraphs number. So Trea Turner's 7WAR is not worth the $54M FG uses which is based on what they would get as free-agents, but he is worth about $21M. FG's methos is a classic statistical trick. If you looked at any job, we would measure the value based on what is paid in an industry not what those getting new jobs only are paid, becuase free agents in any industry a nearly always worth more when moving jobs and that is inflated even more in sports.
I think the flaw — perhaps not a flaw, maybe misunderstanding — in what you're explaining is the fact that total salary in baseball was about half ($4 billion) than the amalgam of every player's collective "value" according to the formula ($8 billion). I understand why the number is $8 billion, because you're assigning every single player their free agent value against the value of other free agents … But that's flawed, isn't it, because in no major North American sport does any athlete enter free agency upon arrival. Every CBA in each major sport includes rookie scale deals of some form and I presume even players associations in those leagues would not be all right with absolute free agency, because it could crush the pay of veterans. FanGraphs maybe could offer two figures. The figure they're already providing, in which all players worths add up to $8 billion, a measure of their free agent value, and one where all players worths add up to the $4 billion figure, because how can all players, collectively, be worth twice what the game, collectively, is actually paying, when what the game is actually paying is mostly a function of total revenue divvied up in accordance with the reigning CBA (unless I'm quite wrong about that where baseball is concerned)?
It would be great if FanGraphs could offer a "value" that explains how big a slice of the game's roughly $4 billion pie each player is worth. Because that's the point at which the numbers become more meaningful to be (because players cannot be worth salary that nobody in the game is actually paying, can they?)
As an aside, I've read, from you, that total MLB pay has actually been dropping, so I'm guessing the total percentage of total revenue paid the players is somewhat fluid. That's a problem. I'm all for minimum payrolls.
You can go to archive and click the magnifying glass and search for Greinke. Or whatever you want. But I think there are some stories that are on other sites like NBC or Sports Illustrated that Joe might not have the rights to.
I really like this column because it starts to get at a some questions that I think are really interesting and poorly understood (at least by me):
- How much more valuable is each additional WAR by an individual player? I assume WAR #1 is worth very little premium over WAR 0, but WAR #5 is worth a lot relative to WAR #4. But how much? And because of the risk of injury/underperformance by an individual, at what point are you better spreading out your WAR premiums among more players?
- In general, given the ways runs are scored, are you better off having two 4 WAR players or one 8 WAR player and one 0 WAR player? Or three 3 WAR players? And how does the increasing cost of each additional WAR affect that?
- Also given the way runs are scored, are you better off piling all your WAR into offense and getting adequate pitching/defense, or is it better to try to balance things?
- Is constructing a lineup as simple as putting as many WAR into it as you can, wherever it lands, or how do you structure a lineup to best spread out your WAR?
I feel like the Rays may be really good at understanding this. If I were a front office, this is definitely the secret sauce I would be trying to develop.
*By "given the way runs are scored", I mostly mean that one single or double does you no good, but three singles or a single + a double can result in a run. You probably get shut out with one hit, and you might get shut out with 10 hits, but you almost certainly don't with 15 hits.
I made this point in your last article, but Pujols has one of the most known really long term very expensive contracts that was really a disappointment. He also played into his 40s. He was negative value the last few years. But he still made more than $110 million less than he was worth over his career. That is not even close. What if he had not had the sudden drop off? How big would it be then?
Seriously, any way you look at it the owners have this set up so that they get the best of all benefits, and that starts with keeping the minimum down, and keeping the years to free agency up.
It's not correct to assume the $8M per WAR that currently applies to free agents is what the number would be if all players were free agents from day one. As Posnanski notes for that to happen total MLB payrolls would need to double and I don't think anyone is suggesting the owners collectively are only spending half as much as they could afford to while still getting a reasonable return.
My wild-ass guess is Pujols ended up making about what he was worth.
The tricky bit is real WAR valuation by the market surely isn't linear; i.e. teams will pay more for a player's fifth win than for some other player's first. This is because both the rules of the game and the way marketing works mean that a handful of players with a lot of WAR is more beneficial than many players with a little. You can only field 9 players to start a game; you've only got 25 roster slots; you can only feature so many guys in a coherent marketing campaign.
The fangraphs value is year by year, based on the value for that year. I did not apply this year's estimated value to prior years. They take this into account, even assigning some players (including recent Pujols) negative value in some years. I do believe a year by year accounting, based upon value for each year, and the actual money he made, is quite a bit superior to a "wild ass guess" from someone who has not looked at anything.
That shows Pujols paid more than $110 million short of what he is worth. If you were to factor in the time value of money (as he was worth much more and paid much less as a younger player) this number would be much, much bigger. While no one figures the time value of money when looking at things like this, you can bet your ass that the teams do.
Doing it year by year is good, and your point about time value of money is spot on. But still, the Fangraphs value is what a player would receive in a theoretical world where that player was a free agent but the overall number of FAs and what was paid to them was unchanged. That's not the actual world though. If young players like 2nd year AP were all FAs, the value per WAR that Fangraphs would have come up with, using the exact some process they use now, would have been far lower. Unless you assume the teams overall would have massively increased their player spending.
$ per WAR as a straight multiplier/divisor is idiotic. It's a curve, where the first 1-2 WAR is more "freely available" in the market (crazy to pay $10M for only 1+ WAR) and then WAR 2+ to 5 or so is then more costly, maybe $5-8M per. WAR 6-8 another increase but then returns above that are essentially free - the market has never paid for those and as it doesn't work in hindsight (players aren't directly compensated for the immediately previous season (yes, free agents are paid forward on recent history/forecasts, you know what I mean)), saying someone's season was worth $20M, $50M, $80M in this way adds nothing to any conversation
The first WAR isn't just more freely available in the market, it's less freely available in game action. You can only have 9 people on the field at once (~ 9.5 with the DH.)
The first WAR is also less freely available in team marketing. You don't see teams marketing a team photo of their 25 or 40 man roster. They pick a much smaller set of guys and market them.
WAR,, SMORE(s),,BORE(ing). I have always really enjoyed and respected your writings,,, but,, I want to see and read about real BASEBALL!!! MLB League Leadership is losing me ,,, this lockout is terrible!
I do have a concern about the validity of using the $8M/WAR figure universally. If teams weren't getting younger pre-arbitration players at bargain-level salaries, their dollars would have to be spread more. Assuming teams are still going to spend the same ballpark amount on salaries, the overall salary budget divided by everyone's WAR would decrease the overall cost per WAR. So while it is true that it is 8M free agent dollars per WAR, should that be the basis of overall team value for $/WAR? It certainly wouldn't be if everyone was a free agent like Marvin Miller feared.
Free agents benefit by everyone else making less. I guess the argument was that a rising tide raises all boats, but in this case the tide is strictly for free agents while younger players struggle. I am all in favor of players getting paid, but the current system is heavily weighted towards free agents (just like other entertainment stars).
The median salary of MLB players is about $1.5M. If everyone was a free agent, it would be interesting to see if the $/WAR was linear or more exponential for big stars. I'm not sure what "fix" I would propose or whether a fix is even desired. It seems obvious that the MLBPA likes the slant towards free agents.
"I do have a concern about the validity of using the $8M/WAR figure universally. "
Yes. The math simply doesn't work.
But while the specifics of the $8m/WAR breaks down when Fangraphs applies FA pay to pre-FA and especially pre-Arb players, the broader concept is sound: players are contributing a LOT more value to the teams than the teams are paying for prior to them reaching the free market. Between the draft, draft slotting, and the 6 year reserve clause, the league has created a system where management captures most of the financial windfall.
Craig Edwards was a shill for the MLBPA when he was at Fangraphs, took every chance he could get to butter their bread, and then went to work for them. His blog posts at Fangraphs were littered with financial inaccuracies and lazy logic that readers with even a basic business background would dissect at will. But sure, he's an unbiased and credible voice in this conversation...
You ask how much would someone like Corbin Burnes be offered if he was a free agent? But isn't it a function of supply and demand? Back in the 1970's, Marvin Miller's worst fear was that the owner's would listen to Charley Finley, completely end the reserve clause and declare everyone a free agent each year. Of course, the other owners considered Finley an off-the-wall nut and rejected his proposal. Much to Miller's relief. As Miller stated, "I didn't want free agency every year. You flood the market like that, and salaries would be only a fraction of what they have become. You want just a few guys out there to create a situation where the demand is far greater than the supply." So, yes, Corbin Burnes was vastly underpaid last year under baseball's crazy and unfair system. But using the earnings of free agents who are limited in number, to determine what a "Win" and, thus, a player is worth doesn't really work.
The union had the owners against the wall after the Seitz arbitration decision. That decision, as I understand it, found that players could be free agents after two years (the first initial contract and then a one year renewal period).
Instead of using that leverage, Miller opted to artificially restrict the pool of FAs in order to boost the top FA deals. That worked out great for the best players. It was never supposed to fairly compensate the younger ones. Burnes is underpaid by a system of the union's design, and they are just now trying to fix that.
This is where I get frustrated with the union, and I will say (1) I generally favor the players side, and (2) I haven't really thought this all the way through. But it really seems like their consistent approach for going on 50 years has been to favor the interests of a smaller number of the best players rather than the overall interests of the broader pool (including minor leaguers, as I commented on the other day).
It may be that the best players and those with the longest careers are funding the union a lot more (because they make larger salaries and I assume dues are a percentage of what players make) - and therefore command more attention. Or it may just be that their careers are longer so they have more influence because of that. But the union does seem happy with the artificial scarcity of a few, even though that undermines the interest of the many.
Then why is the biggest hang up over the minimum salary? Sure, the owners throw a lot of red herrings into the water with things like number of playoff teams and such, but the sticking point is the minimum salary for first year players and other pre arb players. If the owners agreed to the player's demand for that, this thing would be over in a week. The other biggest sticking point has been a bonus pool for younger players
But that is where the owners make their money, and that is what they don't want going up. Pay minor leaguers poverty wages, keep the costs down before arbitration, limit the amounts after arbitration as much as you can, then you can unilaterally reduce (overall) money spent on free agents. It is why player payroll actually went down while adding an extra roster spot. Why player salaries went down 15% in relation to share of revenue during the last CBA.
You are reading this wrong, this impasse is about the players wanting younger players to make more money before free agency, and the owners wanting anything but that.
Miller's "logic" doesn't really hold up. Artificially restricting salaries of a good fraction of players cannot improve the salaries of all players in general. The transition from no free-agency to limited free agency exploded the players' average wages. Miller somehow posits that more free agency will reverse this trend, based on his "glut" logic. Not everyone would become a free agent every year, only those whose contracts have ended, so the "glut" is not really a problem. It's possible under universal free agency that some of the top salaries would come down, but not a given, and overall, all of the currently restricted players would be much better off.
So why wouldn’t the players simply decertify the Union if the owners continue to dig in their heels? If they did that then there would be no CBA, no restrictions on how much a team could spend, colluding to set rules would be illegal (assuming that out dated anti trust exemption gets overturned) and Corbin Burnes would get his 1 year $40M contract rather than $750K or whatever. Seems pretty clear to me.
I don't think you understand how this works. Corbin Burnes is owned by his team. They don't have to bid against other teams. He can't play professional baseball anywhere else. They don't have to give him a $40 million contract. With no agreement, they don't have to give him $750K The anti trust exemption is not getting overturned in my lifetime.
The owners would all have simultaneous orgasms if the union was decertified. It is their dream. I still believe that the owners will eventually (once games are sure to be missed) end the lockout and invite the players to play without a deal "for the good of the game." This will, of course, cause the players to strike, (Making them the bad guys in the public eye) but even if there was an infinitesimal chance of the players playing without a union deal, that is what the owners have always wanted. They believe this is a win-win for them. Either they achieve their dream, or the put the onus entirely on the players in the public's eye.
The "assuming that out dated anti trust exemption gets overturned" assumption is a huge assumption. Might take years before it happens, anti-trust violations may never be enforced, etc.
Corbin Burnes might be better off but a lot of players likely would be worse off.
Keep in mind too that the players are engaged in a physically dangerous profession. (My colleagues in software engineering are missing chunks of each year with coding injuries or limping around on bad legs in their 50s.) I expect you'd see a quite a bit higher rate of long terms injuries if there was no union.
I was about to decide I was bored of this topic. I think the Fan Graph number is too high because it excludes players for much of their careers, which is sort of the point of it. And I don't want to argue about it because I have better things to do in life than millionaires vs billionaires.
But you hooked me back in. There is nothing boring about Zach Greinke. So now I am looking forward to another installment.
Thanks for kicking off my weekend with what was indeed a fun read! I imagine someone has already done this (although difficult given the secretive nature of MLB teams' financial records), but it would be cool to see what a player is paid as compared to the incremental revenue he generates for the team.
Look at contract Carlos Correa signed with Twins. That is a great model
OK please help me out. The owners pay the players a total of $4 billion for the season. Each team on average goes 81 and 81, because every game is both won and lost. So the total number of wins for a season for Major league baseball should be 81×30 = 2430. 4,000,000,000÷2430 equals 1.6 million and change. Why is that not the price per win?
There are 81 wins but that is about 35 wins above reoplacement. A team of all replacement players would average about 45 actual wins. So 35 *30 is a aound 1050 WAR. $4B/1050 is a little less than $3M per WAR and that is the actual value of the players not the inflated Fangraphs number. So Trea Turner's 7WAR is not worth the $54M FG uses which is based on what they would get as free-agents, but he is worth about $21M. FG's methos is a classic statistical trick. If you looked at any job, we would measure the value based on what is paid in an industry not what those getting new jobs only are paid, becuase free agents in any industry a nearly always worth more when moving jobs and that is inflated even more in sports.
I think the flaw — perhaps not a flaw, maybe misunderstanding — in what you're explaining is the fact that total salary in baseball was about half ($4 billion) than the amalgam of every player's collective "value" according to the formula ($8 billion). I understand why the number is $8 billion, because you're assigning every single player their free agent value against the value of other free agents … But that's flawed, isn't it, because in no major North American sport does any athlete enter free agency upon arrival. Every CBA in each major sport includes rookie scale deals of some form and I presume even players associations in those leagues would not be all right with absolute free agency, because it could crush the pay of veterans. FanGraphs maybe could offer two figures. The figure they're already providing, in which all players worths add up to $8 billion, a measure of their free agent value, and one where all players worths add up to the $4 billion figure, because how can all players, collectively, be worth twice what the game, collectively, is actually paying, when what the game is actually paying is mostly a function of total revenue divvied up in accordance with the reigning CBA (unless I'm quite wrong about that where baseball is concerned)?
It would be great if FanGraphs could offer a "value" that explains how big a slice of the game's roughly $4 billion pie each player is worth. Because that's the point at which the numbers become more meaningful to be (because players cannot be worth salary that nobody in the game is actually paying, can they?)
As an aside, I've read, from you, that total MLB pay has actually been dropping, so I'm guessing the total percentage of total revenue paid the players is somewhat fluid. That's a problem. I'm all for minimum payrolls.
Anyway, I hope you see where I'm coming from.
I can't imagine how much fun it would be to read Joe going full rabbit hole with Zach Greinke stories.
A Zach Greinke book would be a fascinating read … that book written by Joe would be next level.
Please provide ALL the Zach Greinke stories. Or are you saving them for a book?
You can go to archive and click the magnifying glass and search for Greinke. Or whatever you want. But I think there are some stories that are on other sites like NBC or Sports Illustrated that Joe might not have the rights to.
Looking forward to any Joe Poz stories about Greinke...
I really like this column because it starts to get at a some questions that I think are really interesting and poorly understood (at least by me):
- How much more valuable is each additional WAR by an individual player? I assume WAR #1 is worth very little premium over WAR 0, but WAR #5 is worth a lot relative to WAR #4. But how much? And because of the risk of injury/underperformance by an individual, at what point are you better spreading out your WAR premiums among more players?
- In general, given the ways runs are scored, are you better off having two 4 WAR players or one 8 WAR player and one 0 WAR player? Or three 3 WAR players? And how does the increasing cost of each additional WAR affect that?
- Also given the way runs are scored, are you better off piling all your WAR into offense and getting adequate pitching/defense, or is it better to try to balance things?
- Is constructing a lineup as simple as putting as many WAR into it as you can, wherever it lands, or how do you structure a lineup to best spread out your WAR?
I feel like the Rays may be really good at understanding this. If I were a front office, this is definitely the secret sauce I would be trying to develop.
*By "given the way runs are scored", I mostly mean that one single or double does you no good, but three singles or a single + a double can result in a run. You probably get shut out with one hit, and you might get shut out with 10 hits, but you almost certainly don't with 15 hits.
I made this point in your last article, but Pujols has one of the most known really long term very expensive contracts that was really a disappointment. He also played into his 40s. He was negative value the last few years. But he still made more than $110 million less than he was worth over his career. That is not even close. What if he had not had the sudden drop off? How big would it be then?
Seriously, any way you look at it the owners have this set up so that they get the best of all benefits, and that starts with keeping the minimum down, and keeping the years to free agency up.
It's not correct to assume the $8M per WAR that currently applies to free agents is what the number would be if all players were free agents from day one. As Posnanski notes for that to happen total MLB payrolls would need to double and I don't think anyone is suggesting the owners collectively are only spending half as much as they could afford to while still getting a reasonable return.
My wild-ass guess is Pujols ended up making about what he was worth.
The tricky bit is real WAR valuation by the market surely isn't linear; i.e. teams will pay more for a player's fifth win than for some other player's first. This is because both the rules of the game and the way marketing works mean that a handful of players with a lot of WAR is more beneficial than many players with a little. You can only field 9 players to start a game; you've only got 25 roster slots; you can only feature so many guys in a coherent marketing campaign.
The fangraphs value is year by year, based on the value for that year. I did not apply this year's estimated value to prior years. They take this into account, even assigning some players (including recent Pujols) negative value in some years. I do believe a year by year accounting, based upon value for each year, and the actual money he made, is quite a bit superior to a "wild ass guess" from someone who has not looked at anything.
That shows Pujols paid more than $110 million short of what he is worth. If you were to factor in the time value of money (as he was worth much more and paid much less as a younger player) this number would be much, much bigger. While no one figures the time value of money when looking at things like this, you can bet your ass that the teams do.
Doing it year by year is good, and your point about time value of money is spot on. But still, the Fangraphs value is what a player would receive in a theoretical world where that player was a free agent but the overall number of FAs and what was paid to them was unchanged. That's not the actual world though. If young players like 2nd year AP were all FAs, the value per WAR that Fangraphs would have come up with, using the exact some process they use now, would have been far lower. Unless you assume the teams overall would have massively increased their player spending.
$ per WAR as a straight multiplier/divisor is idiotic. It's a curve, where the first 1-2 WAR is more "freely available" in the market (crazy to pay $10M for only 1+ WAR) and then WAR 2+ to 5 or so is then more costly, maybe $5-8M per. WAR 6-8 another increase but then returns above that are essentially free - the market has never paid for those and as it doesn't work in hindsight (players aren't directly compensated for the immediately previous season (yes, free agents are paid forward on recent history/forecasts, you know what I mean)), saying someone's season was worth $20M, $50M, $80M in this way adds nothing to any conversation
The first WAR isn't just more freely available in the market, it's less freely available in game action. You can only have 9 people on the field at once (~ 9.5 with the DH.)
The first WAR is also less freely available in team marketing. You don't see teams marketing a team photo of their 25 or 40 man roster. They pick a much smaller set of guys and market them.
WAR,, SMORE(s),,BORE(ing). I have always really enjoyed and respected your writings,,, but,, I want to see and read about real BASEBALL!!! MLB League Leadership is losing me ,,, this lockout is terrible!
I'd just like to say that I really love these Friday posts and look forward to them every week.
I do have a concern about the validity of using the $8M/WAR figure universally. If teams weren't getting younger pre-arbitration players at bargain-level salaries, their dollars would have to be spread more. Assuming teams are still going to spend the same ballpark amount on salaries, the overall salary budget divided by everyone's WAR would decrease the overall cost per WAR. So while it is true that it is 8M free agent dollars per WAR, should that be the basis of overall team value for $/WAR? It certainly wouldn't be if everyone was a free agent like Marvin Miller feared.
Free agents benefit by everyone else making less. I guess the argument was that a rising tide raises all boats, but in this case the tide is strictly for free agents while younger players struggle. I am all in favor of players getting paid, but the current system is heavily weighted towards free agents (just like other entertainment stars).
The median salary of MLB players is about $1.5M. If everyone was a free agent, it would be interesting to see if the $/WAR was linear or more exponential for big stars. I'm not sure what "fix" I would propose or whether a fix is even desired. It seems obvious that the MLBPA likes the slant towards free agents.
"I do have a concern about the validity of using the $8M/WAR figure universally. "
Yes. The math simply doesn't work.
But while the specifics of the $8m/WAR breaks down when Fangraphs applies FA pay to pre-FA and especially pre-Arb players, the broader concept is sound: players are contributing a LOT more value to the teams than the teams are paying for prior to them reaching the free market. Between the draft, draft slotting, and the 6 year reserve clause, the league has created a system where management captures most of the financial windfall.
I agree. The owners have a few losses that haven’t planned out but many more wins on contracts for underpaid players
Craig Edwards was a shill for the MLBPA when he was at Fangraphs, took every chance he could get to butter their bread, and then went to work for them. His blog posts at Fangraphs were littered with financial inaccuracies and lazy logic that readers with even a basic business background would dissect at will. But sure, he's an unbiased and credible voice in this conversation...
You ask how much would someone like Corbin Burnes be offered if he was a free agent? But isn't it a function of supply and demand? Back in the 1970's, Marvin Miller's worst fear was that the owner's would listen to Charley Finley, completely end the reserve clause and declare everyone a free agent each year. Of course, the other owners considered Finley an off-the-wall nut and rejected his proposal. Much to Miller's relief. As Miller stated, "I didn't want free agency every year. You flood the market like that, and salaries would be only a fraction of what they have become. You want just a few guys out there to create a situation where the demand is far greater than the supply." So, yes, Corbin Burnes was vastly underpaid last year under baseball's crazy and unfair system. But using the earnings of free agents who are limited in number, to determine what a "Win" and, thus, a player is worth doesn't really work.
The union had the owners against the wall after the Seitz arbitration decision. That decision, as I understand it, found that players could be free agents after two years (the first initial contract and then a one year renewal period).
Instead of using that leverage, Miller opted to artificially restrict the pool of FAs in order to boost the top FA deals. That worked out great for the best players. It was never supposed to fairly compensate the younger ones. Burnes is underpaid by a system of the union's design, and they are just now trying to fix that.
This is where I get frustrated with the union, and I will say (1) I generally favor the players side, and (2) I haven't really thought this all the way through. But it really seems like their consistent approach for going on 50 years has been to favor the interests of a smaller number of the best players rather than the overall interests of the broader pool (including minor leaguers, as I commented on the other day).
It may be that the best players and those with the longest careers are funding the union a lot more (because they make larger salaries and I assume dues are a percentage of what players make) - and therefore command more attention. Or it may just be that their careers are longer so they have more influence because of that. But the union does seem happy with the artificial scarcity of a few, even though that undermines the interest of the many.
Then why is the biggest hang up over the minimum salary? Sure, the owners throw a lot of red herrings into the water with things like number of playoff teams and such, but the sticking point is the minimum salary for first year players and other pre arb players. If the owners agreed to the player's demand for that, this thing would be over in a week. The other biggest sticking point has been a bonus pool for younger players
But that is where the owners make their money, and that is what they don't want going up. Pay minor leaguers poverty wages, keep the costs down before arbitration, limit the amounts after arbitration as much as you can, then you can unilaterally reduce (overall) money spent on free agents. It is why player payroll actually went down while adding an extra roster spot. Why player salaries went down 15% in relation to share of revenue during the last CBA.
You are reading this wrong, this impasse is about the players wanting younger players to make more money before free agency, and the owners wanting anything but that.
Miller's "logic" doesn't really hold up. Artificially restricting salaries of a good fraction of players cannot improve the salaries of all players in general. The transition from no free-agency to limited free agency exploded the players' average wages. Miller somehow posits that more free agency will reverse this trend, based on his "glut" logic. Not everyone would become a free agent every year, only those whose contracts have ended, so the "glut" is not really a problem. It's possible under universal free agency that some of the top salaries would come down, but not a given, and overall, all of the currently restricted players would be much better off.
So why wouldn’t the players simply decertify the Union if the owners continue to dig in their heels? If they did that then there would be no CBA, no restrictions on how much a team could spend, colluding to set rules would be illegal (assuming that out dated anti trust exemption gets overturned) and Corbin Burnes would get his 1 year $40M contract rather than $750K or whatever. Seems pretty clear to me.
I don't think you understand how this works. Corbin Burnes is owned by his team. They don't have to bid against other teams. He can't play professional baseball anywhere else. They don't have to give him a $40 million contract. With no agreement, they don't have to give him $750K The anti trust exemption is not getting overturned in my lifetime.
The owners would all have simultaneous orgasms if the union was decertified. It is their dream. I still believe that the owners will eventually (once games are sure to be missed) end the lockout and invite the players to play without a deal "for the good of the game." This will, of course, cause the players to strike, (Making them the bad guys in the public eye) but even if there was an infinitesimal chance of the players playing without a union deal, that is what the owners have always wanted. They believe this is a win-win for them. Either they achieve their dream, or the put the onus entirely on the players in the public's eye.
The "assuming that out dated anti trust exemption gets overturned" assumption is a huge assumption. Might take years before it happens, anti-trust violations may never be enforced, etc.
Corbin Burnes might be better off but a lot of players likely would be worse off.
Keep in mind too that the players are engaged in a physically dangerous profession. (My colleagues in software engineering are missing chunks of each year with coding injuries or limping around on bad legs in their 50s.) I expect you'd see a quite a bit higher rate of long terms injuries if there was no union.
I was about to decide I was bored of this topic. I think the Fan Graph number is too high because it excludes players for much of their careers, which is sort of the point of it. And I don't want to argue about it because I have better things to do in life than millionaires vs billionaires.
But you hooked me back in. There is nothing boring about Zach Greinke. So now I am looking forward to another installment.
Thanks for kicking off my weekend with what was indeed a fun read! I imagine someone has already done this (although difficult given the secretive nature of MLB teams' financial records), but it would be cool to see what a player is paid as compared to the incremental revenue he generates for the team.