I Got Into An Argument About Rick Porcello

This project investigates how salary and performance of offensive players in Major League Baseball are linked. We believe this is an interesting problem because it is traditionally believed that professional athletes play with hopes of earning a high salary, yet it often seems a batter’s performance is not linked to their salary (Jensen). Therefore, it seems as if the link between a player’s performance and their salary is different than their true performance. Performing a statistical analysis of this conundrum will give us great insight as to if it is accurate to say that performance changes salary drastically. Studies that prior statisticians have done differ from this study because their studies focus on salary and team performance rather than on the performance of individual players (Jane). Our study focuses on salary and individual performance in the current season. While there is extensive data on both game performances in the MLB and salaries, we can contribute to the statistical community by comparing how salaries are affected by different performance indicators for randomly selected individual players. Essentially, our hypothesis is an examination into how a batter 's game performance affects salary. We expect that the better a player’s statistics are, the higher their salary will be.

George Lopez (born April 23, 1961) is a Mexican American comedian and actor. He is one of the most prominent Mexican-Americans from within the Latino community to be recognized in mainstream North American popular culture. He is perhaps best known for starring in his own produced television sitcom show entitled George Lopez.

The book Moneyball by Michael Lewis is about a former major league baseball player who became the manager of the Oakland A’s. It tells the story of how he led the team to success despite their low budget by using computer based analytics to draft players. With the help of Bill James, the Oakland A’s came up with a new plan based on statistics to draft players. He went after players nobody wanted due to their low budget and his new plan. Billy led the Oakland Athletics to a successive win seasons by changing the way he measured players. He abandoned the traditional 5 “tool” the other scouts used and adopted empirical analytics. The abandonment of the traditional assessment of

Teams with large payrolls routinely win at a higher rate than teams who cannot afford to spend the massive amounts of money other teams do. For example, in the last fifteen years the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, two teams which regularly are among the highest spending teams in baseball, won on average 94.7 and 86.8 games respectively. By comparison, the San Diego Padres and the Kansas City Royals, two teams who are not able to compete financially with teams with deeper pockets, won an average of 77.1 and 71.6 games respectively in that same time span (Major League Baseball). This disparity in season wins is a direct cause of Major League Baseball’s lack of a salary cap. Over the course of a 162 game season, teams with higher payrolls, and therefore better talent on their roster, will prevail more often than

He states, "This is not about stupidity, it is about what is fair in baseball, and what is not. It is about the overall appeal of the national pastime. It is about caring, interest, and most of all, competition. Right now, there is very little of any of these components outside of the 212 area code." Most importantly, he explains why baseball needs a salary cap by saying "it is the only way to put constraints on what the Yankees are doing and to return the sport to the interesting and suspenseful form of sporting entertainment it once used to be." The Yankees are at an unfair advantage all across the league, and nobody, not Atlanta, Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, or perhaps even Los Angeles, can acquire talent the way they can. The only way to prevent them from doing so is to put a cap on how much they can pay their entire team.

Baseball statistics are meant to be a representation of a player’s talent. Since baseball’s inception around the mid-19th century, statistics have been used to interpret the talent level of any given player, however, the statistics that have been traditionally used to define talent are often times misleading. At a fundamental level, baseball, like any game, is about winning. To win games, teams have to score runs; to score runs, players have to get on base any way they can. All the while, the pitcher and the defense are supposed to prevent runs from scoring. As simplistic as this view sounds, the statistics being used to evaluate individual players were extremely flawed. In an attempt to develop more

“Eddie Cicotte, our leading pitcher, had won 28 games in 1917 and still was making only $6,000 a year”(The Black Sox: My Side of the Story). The significance is that Eddie was not payed very fairly as far as the amount of games he

Kevin Baker described him as “staggering in his self-absorption” (Baker, xii). This means that he is confident to the point that he believes he can do everything himself, and doesn’t care about the rest of his team. Roy is also a very greedy man, and his greed is accentuated by his baseball skills. For example, Roy’s contract entitled him to make three thousand dollars for the season. Within a few weeks, he decided that this was not enough, so he spoke with the team owner about a raise. In the novel, it says that: “He figured for himself a flat forty-five thousand dollars for the rest of the season” (Malamud, 89). Forty-five thousand dollars is more than most baseball players made in an entire season, and he was asking for this astronomical amount for only half of a season. Each of these traits can be considered one of Roy’s tragic flaws. His greed and his self-confidence both contribute to his downfall at the end of the novel, in which he is humiliated due to his acceptance of a bribe to throw an important game and lose the pennant. In the New York Times, an article written by Harry Sylvester stated: “Roy Hobbs almost achieved greatness, but was distracted or betrayed by people, objects, or events equated with elements in our environment” (Sylvester, www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/06/home/baseball-natural.html). Sylvester is saying that Hobbs has the potential to be a

There were many reasons the scandal that was the 1919 World Series happened, none more important, and maybe less mentioned than the greed of Charles Comiskey, the teams owner. This club may have been the best ever assembled, but it may have also been the most underpaid. No incident explains this any better than the salary of Eddie Cicotte, Eddie had won 28 games in 1917, the war had harmed 1918, but Eddie was back for 1919, but Eddie was only paid $6,000 for the 1919 season, many pitcher in the league with much less talent was paid more than twice that amount. Eddie wasn't the only one, as a whole Comiskey was paying a much smaller salary to his players than any other team would have to pay for the same talent. But for Comiskey it was all about the money.

Kershaw has achieved what many pitchers dream about many times. In 2011, Kershaw produced a appealing record of 21-5 with an Era of 2.28 and 248 strikeouts made it an easy selection to award Kershaw his First Cy Young Award. Kershaw, had achieved a triple crown, leading pitchers in wins, strikeouts and Era in 2011 to go along with a gold glove award. Clayton Kershaw is the youngest, three time CY-Young award winner, and first NL pitcher to win the MVP award since “Bob Gibson” in 68. Kershaw from 2011 to 2014 has had the lowest earned run average in baseball for four straight years. Kershaw is destined for the Hall Of Fame, as a batter, Clayton Kershaw had a higher on-base percentage as a batter [2.35] than opposing hitters against him [.231].Kershaw is a five time all-star from [2011-2015.] Kershaw has thrown two no hitters in his career, but has never made it to the World Series unlike Justin

Every year, it becomes more obvious that many sports in America have problems. For years, Hockey has been criticized for its excessive violence. The National Football League has also been scrutinized for this reason as well as the fact that many of the top players have constantly been in trouble with the law. Major League Baseball is no different. The situation with baseball is more complicated, and is not only ruining the game itself, but also drawing millions of fans away from the sport. The biggest problem is with the high salaries paid to athletes. These salaries are taking the competitiveness out of several sports, especially baseball, where there is no salary cap. Action must be taken

to old to play in the Major Leagues.” This, while insignificant on the surface, implies a startling

A Bachelor’s degree prepares you for many things. We live in a very complicated and competitive world in which an education is essential. Education separates us from the many other intelligent human beings that are exactly like us. The difference between us and them is how we handle ourselves and the decisions we make about our morals, our future and how we make our dreams combine with our future and make it become our reality. Psychology has interested me ever since I was a child. I remember having my own opinions but always wondering how and why my peers thought differently, so what made us have all these different opinions? I soon discovered psychology was exactly that, trying to construct and understand what other people thought and why,

In Major League Baseball the general belief is that the more a team spends on their payroll the more games they will win. With the absence of a salary cap baseball may seam unfair to the smaller market teams who can't bare the salary costs that the larger market teams can. In Michael Lewis' Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Lewis depicts just how the Oakland Athletics have been winning in an unfair game for almost a decade. The A's are a small market team that doesn't have nearly the amount of money at their disposal that their competitors in the American League do. However this past season the A's won their fourth American League West championship in the last seven years while having the lowest payroll in their division. In

The 10 year contract which Tom Hicks and his team proposed for Alex Rodriguez was one of the biggest ever in the history of Baseball. It was a major Investment decision for the group. The Group had taken over the Dallas Stars few years earlier and spent on buying quality players. This worked wonders for the team and Dallas Stars went on to lead the group. Tom Hicks had a policy of spending 50-55% of team revenue on team payrolls. If that is maintained he always gains an operating profit of 10-15%.