Payroll and Performance

The arbitrary nature of the statistics and governing rules surrounding free agency need to be abolished. There has been a major push for progressive, intelligent research on players' values over the past forty years. It is unacceptable any longer to formulate business strategy on archaic rules especially when those rules are unpredictable, as we have seen in the aforementioned Yankees case.

The examples of favoritism in MLB are polarizing the teams and beginning to eliminate the lower-class from playoff contention. In the second-half of the 2000s, there was a 7% increase in the number of lower middle-class and upper middle-class teams to make the playoffs than during the previous five years. Also, there has been 10% less lower class teams to have made the playoffs in the most recent five years than in the first half of the decade. A more important ratio is that the upper and upper middle-class teams have accounted for over 83% of the total playoff teams in the 2000s. These numbers continue to build on the Weisman and Chatterjee (2002) paper that displayed the correlation of payroll and performance to the increase of likelihood of postseason entry.

From this blog’s data analysis, it has been shown that as teams spend more money, they will increase their chance for berths in the playoffs. The policies instituted by the new CBA do not need to give added benefit to upper payroll tiered teams.