Regression of Baseball Player Salaries Essay

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.

Professional baseball players work tirelessly to perfect their craft and deserve to be paid adequately. Another reason the MLBPA chooses to keep a free labor market is that with a more open labor market, team revenues can steadily increase and lead to increased player salaries. A negative side effect of this, however, is that teams can receive and use supplementary party revenues, which can help outbid competitors for top-tier free agents, and raise the cost of a player beyond the means of teams with fewer or no supplementary revenues (Zimbalist 24). Under this circumstance, which is currently the present state of MLB, a salary cap may become a sensible solution. On the other hand, if a salary cap system was in place, teams might be tempted to cheat by underreporting total revenues.

Baseball has always been a game of numbers. Fans of the game have grown up being able to recite them by heart; Ted Williams’.406 batting average, Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak, Babe Ruth’s 714 home runs. These numbers hold a special place in the history of the game. Statistics such as batting average, wins, home runs, and runs batted in have always been there to tell us who the best players are. Your favorite player has a .300 batting average? He’s an all-star. He hit 40 home runs and batted in 120 runs? That’s a Most Valuable Player Award candidate. Your favorite team’s best pitcher won 20 games? He’s a Cy Young Award contender. These statistics have been used to evaluate player performance

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

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

Twenty-five million dollars made per year. Over one hundred fifty-four thousand dollars made per game. Over forty-seven thousand dollars earned per at bat. Sounds a little ridiculous, does it not? That is what current Texas Ranger shortstop Alex Rodriguez earns to play the game of baseball (azcentral.com). Baseball is a game that children have been playing in schoolyards and fields for the past one hundred years. It may not be a game anymore. On the Major League level it has become a business. This is where the problem starts.

There’s always some people hating on the fact that MLB players are paid millions of dollars, but never have anything to back up how they are overpaid besides saying that it is ridiculous how much their paycheck is. Little do they know, that some of the money comes from fans, ticket sales, endorsements, and how well they perform. There is a lot more that goes into how they EARN that money.

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

Any sports one looks at can be classified as a money-making pit. Scouts looking at young talent ready to sign them for a quick buck and then once they stop producing, move on to the next potential talent. Baseball is the sport that is an industry dominated by trying to gain a profit from a region’s juvenile talent (Ruck). Since 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, there has been an increase in Latin American countries represented in MLB. More than a quarter of major league players are from Latin American, with about half of the minor league players being Latino (Ruck). On the opening day of the 2011 season, eighty-six players represented the Dominican Republic alone. That is more than a tenth of major leaguers (Ruck). One would

Batting average was the norm adopted by other baseball teams. But training for Oakland was focused on the player’s ability to obtain on-base scoring. The team relied more on selecting players by their on-base percentages. According to Sabermetrics model, teams always win with players having attained high on-base percentages.

Most people think that more money means more success, but that is not always the case in major league sports. In the MLB, some of the teams with higher payrolls don’t do nearly as well as some of the teams who have small payrolls. Some think that the game is all about money now, but others think that it is still fair despite the differences in payroll. Major-League Baseball teams differ greatly in payroll, and its effects on their record vary.

In today’s society many will argue whether or not professional athletes are overpaid. In the present time athletes are being paid phenomenally large amounts of money for their entertainment. It is my claim that all professional athletes are overpaid because they do not offer society an essential function that improves or enhances our world in comparison to other professionals such as medical doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Society does not value entertainment enough to warrant such high salaries such as those of many professional athletes. There is no reason that these athletes should demand these tremendous amounts of money. This is why you have to put into question their reasoning for demanding

number 23 out of 30 top salaries in the league, they also had 96 wins

Major League Baseball is known as America’s favorite pastime, and MLB teams spend an extensive amount of money in the excess of a billion dollars with the ultimate goal to win the World Series. This learning team’s focus throughout this descriptive statistics paper is the MLB players’ performances, salaries, salary caps, and winning percentages. Though salaries will by no means be a trade for wins, the goal is to use the less experienced players and pay them a lower salary. Research has been done on whether or not player’s salaries and wins are connected.

and analyzing vast amounts of baseball data. Then came the boom in baseball players’ salaries: this dramatically