Baseball salaries are officially nuts

[RalphWiggum]

John Lester at 25.8 million a year until he's 38? He's getting more money than Stanton per who is 6 years younger and plays a position where he is more likely to not suffer a serious injury.

It's their money and I'm not going to be one of those guys that personally begrudges a guy getting paid what someone is willing to give them but that salary for that guy just boggles my mind.

A pitcher who is historically speaking probably just past his prime getting more cash than 99.5% of professional athletes when he's best case the 9-10th best pitcher in the game and more than likely going to decline drastically by year 3-4?

It's not like he's a Brady, Manning, Rodgers, James, Durant where he really brings that much more to your franchise that you can justify over paying for what he does in the game for what he brings in ancillary value. Nobody gets that excited to go see an individual baseball player other than maybe Barry Bonds when you couldn't throw him a strike that he wasn't going to hit 450 feet?

Good for Lester but at the end of the day it's salaries like this that make going to games out of reach of most people and make it almost impossible for 80% of teams to have a realistic chance to improve their teams without risking more money than most owners are willing to spend.

I'm sorta against putting a cap on a persons value and salary caps in sports in general but then a guy like lester gets money like this and I realize why caps exist.

Am I wrong about this, am I right or is it a giant grey area?

[Raps in 4]

And that's why the Cubs continue to be the worst team in professional sports history.

[Sifu]

And that's why the Cubs continue to be the worst team in professional sports history.

I disagree. The Cubs have a lot of pieces and their window is coming up
Lester is going to be good for the first three years of that contract and that will overlap with the cubs emerging window.

I think its an overpay, but a calculated one.

Its a gamble but I can see why it was done.

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[Lateral Quicks]

Unfortunately in this day and age you're not going to find a proven #1 or #2 for less than $20M in free agency. It's all the more reason to develop them internally.

[torontoaces04]

...and this is why AA cannot trade any of the young pitchers (Norris, Sanchez, Osuna, Castro).

[Graham's Cracker]

The Cubs should have many cost controlled bats in their lineup. They can afford to pay it and they surely need pitching in the rotation.

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[satyr9]

Lester's short-term value is likely worth the AAV now. Don't use Stanton as a comparable. One it's buying out restricted years, that are cheaper, and far more important, it's 900 years long. You're supposed to get saving when you guarantee 13 years of salary. Compared to Kershaw or Felix or Verlander or Hamels or Cain or whoever else got big deals the last couple years, it's about in line factoring performance and age. Before the offseason I actually thought there was a possibity the new TV money would blow this up even further and pull him towards 30 AAV. Thankfully for Jays fans the market didn't got that far. Still, getting Lester for the price of two Robertsons a year and 50% more years seems alright to me.

As to the general point about player salaries in sports, Yes, it's completely insane.

[HangTime]

What if teams had a 4 man pitching rotation again?

An Ace would go from about 33 starts, to about 40 start.

Do you think if Teams can prove that pitchers can't do it, it'll lower their value in the long run?

[Geddy]

Salaries are going crazy and I'm hoping it doesn't lead to some kind of labour dispute somewhere down the road. A lot of these guys are getting paid more than world famous soccer players are.

[Squintz21]

[Wo1verine]

Good thing we got the richest owner in the game, right?

[Fairview4Life]

Salaries are going crazy and I'm hoping it doesn't lead to some kind of labour dispute somewhere down the road. A lot of these guys are getting paid more than world famous soccer players are.

The owners are making a lot of money too. The way to reduce player salaries is to stop going to games and watching on TV.

I, for one, will not be doing that.

[Skin Blues]

John Lester at 25.8 million a year until he's 38? He's getting more money than Stanton per who is 6 years younger and plays a position where he is more likely to not suffer a serious injury.

Stanton's deal is complicated and involves a buyout, making it more like two separate deals. The first part of the deal includes two arbitration eligible years which suppresses the amount he could have earned and has an AAV of $18M. No doubt this part of the deal is team-friendly, but the Marlins don't get that team friendliness without a cost. The second (guaranteed from Stanton's side) part of the deal is for 7 years and $218M which is an AAV of $31M, or slightly more than Kershaw is making in his own 7 year deal. Don't forget that they're agreeing to this monster 7 year contract six years in advance, so if Stanton goes all Josh Hamilton on them and essentially becomes a role player by the time he's 30 years old, they will still owe him a Kershaw-in-his-prime contract. So... Lester comes much, much cheaper to the Cubs than Stanton did for the Marlins.

Anyway, $$/WAR calculations are nice but if the best way you have to improve your team is in the rotation, that will cost you some cash. The market doesn't really work in a linear fashion. Roster spots are precious, and getting 3 WAR out of one roster spot is a hell of a lot more valuable than getting 1.5 WAR each form two different roster spots. That said, pitchers are always a huge gamble and I really don't blame any team for avoiding long contracts with them.

[r_gill]

You can't compare a free agent to a guy who still had years of control left before free agency.

Salaries really aren't out of wack. These teams are getting ridiculously big TV contracts which is one of the disadvantages of being a Canadian team and owned by Rogers. Rogers basically gets 162 Blue Jays games for free and Canadian commercial money is not even closely comparable to American commercial money so even if the Blue Jays weren't owned by Rogers we wouldn't be able to get the same ridiculous contracts from SN or TSN that the American teams get.

[Yosemite Dan]

What if teams had a 4 man pitching rotation again?

An Ace would go from about 33 starts, to about 40 start.

Do you think if Teams can prove that pitchers can't do it, it'll lower their value in the long run?

Huh????

[rarefind]

What if teams had a 4 man pitching rotation again?

An Ace would go from about 33 starts, to about 40 start.

Do you think if Teams can prove that pitchers can't do it, it'll lower their value in the long run?

Huh????

What you're proposing would be like people purchasing cars, refusing to change their oil as frequently and thinking the valuation of cars will drop when their engines start blowing up 150,000 km earlier.

[Santoki]

What if teams had a 4 man pitching rotation again?

An Ace would go from about 33 starts, to about 40 start.

Do you think if Teams can prove that pitchers can't do it, it'll lower their value in the long run?

Pitching would become even more of a premium because fewer guys would be able to do that which would then in turn drive up their value. The only thing this accomplishes is probably widening the gap in terms of wages for the very best guys.

[JN]

Salaries are going crazy and I'm hoping it doesn't lead to some kind of labour dispute somewhere down the road. A lot of these guys are getting paid more than world famous soccer players are.

Baseball has 162 games a year. Does Soccer have that?

[Larry Dallas]

I agree it's an insane price to pay. But don't baseball players take longer to get paid than in other sports like basketball and hockey? For instance, how much has Jonas Valanciunas been paid compared to say Brett Lawrie? I don't have the numbers and I'm no expert but is it possible the salaries in either sport even out?


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[flatjacket1]

They make up for it, giving the median professional baseball player (including minors) less than $10,000 annually with no overtime or paid travel time.

A lot of minor league players are forced to take up a job in the offseason and pay their own training.

When you start with 2 million participants at a young age and then cut it down to half a million by high school, you got a huge talent pool.

High school: 455,000 (Realistically should add all other countries, as this just represents if the MLB had 750 American born athletes. Japanese, Korean and Dominican participation would easily raise this number)

MLB players: (30*25) = 750

= Every MLB player had to beat out over 600 of his peers who played at the high school level.

I'm not trying to justify salaries, I'm just trying to help understand why they are so high. The cream of the crop had to go down a long road, facing competition at every level.

It's not like anyone on this forum can just wake up tomorrow be like "Hey I am going to be a MLB player!". Doesn't work that way. If you wanted to become a doctor and make 300K, you could do that (Assuming you study and go to school), but there is not really a pain-free way to make it to the Majors.

And the vast majority of baseball players end up getting drafted, borrowing money from their parents to finance their career, and then leave empty handed a few years later with either no post-secondary education or three years worth. We don't hear about those cases.

The top .5% of business men likely make a heck of a lot more than what MLB players make. If you want to hate the industry because of salaries then don't forget to look in your own backyard. I'm sure a few season ticket holders likely make Bautista look broke, but they aren't under a media microscope like he is.

Again, not lobbying for outrageous salaries, but it is the world we live in.