Outside the Box

ESPN.com - Major League Baseball - Part III: Player movement a fact of life

Jayson Stark takes a turn looking at player movement in free agency and surprise, surprise player movement isn't up all that much. Admittedly this isn't that scientific of a study, but it does show that these arguments are easy to discredit.

The more that I think about the system in place, the more obvious it becomes how thoroughly the players have duped the owners. The owners have made mistakes any beginning MBA would have avoided.

First, free agency naturally pays players more than they are actually worth. When you have 30 teams bidding, the team that most highly values the player will get them. This means that the salary is well over the player's actual value (as determined by the market). This isn't as true in "real life" because the labor supply is much, much, much larger.

Second, arbitration then takes these inflated values and makes them standards for every other player. The ability of this system to raise every player's salary is staggering and brilliant. The owners would have been far better off swallowing a bitter pill and allowing free agency after three or four years and then incorporating some sort of advanced compensation like more draft picks or a major league rule V draft where each team can protect 18 players or some such thing. Instead, we have almost the perfect system for driving up player salaries.

Of course, in a time when college football coaches are making $1.4million per year, I'm sure that current salaries are not out of whack at all.