Earlier this week, Dubner wondered what kinds of changes might make Major League Baseball more interesting to the modern T.V. viewer.
A number of you suggested instituting salary caps. This chart comparing team performance with total player salaries over the 2008 season, by data visualization guru Ben Fry, does seem to suggest a link between higher pay and sluggish performance.
But does it?
Check out Fry’s charts for the 2005, 2006, and 2007 seasons as well.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
How do I become a “data visualization guru?”
Seems like a pretty sweet gig. But you probably need a degree in Useless Plots from Superficial Analysis School.
All sports should be nationalized with a salary cap of 2 times median family income + travel expenses, all other profits are donated to libraries, schools, and other forms of education.
To make millions playing a game when people are starving is sick and disgusting.
But essentially all a salary cap does is transfer wealth from one party–the party whose salary gets capped–to another party–the party paying the salary–the owner of the team. Not to fans. Why should teams reduce ticket and concessions prices from levels you’re willing to pay? Why should we expect anything except that salary caps will put money in the pockets of the Steinbrenners, serial-franchise-destroyer Jeff Loria, Jerry Reinsdorf, and other multi-millionaires?
Perhaps a better research opportunity was right in public view last weekend; many newspapers ran articles describing how the rapid rise in guaranteed money paid to top NFL picks has changed the value of the draft chart. The Boston Globe, for example, ran a version of a new chart that shows the highest value for trades being somewhere around pick 12 or 15 – don’t remember exactly.
The questions are right there: will the huge guaranteed amounts paid to unproven players be a better catalyst for bad teams to improve? Will the new draft chart values affect the type and value of trades, meaning that teams might want to avoid trading for first round picks, especially from potentially bad teams, because they don’t want to invest $20M in an unproven player? It would be interesting to go through the failure / success rates of players before and after the guaranteed money increases became so large. Are teams more careful? Are the drafts more or less predictable?
I would create two or three divisions comparable to what they have in the English soccer leagues.
At the end of the season the worst 3 (?) teams in the higher division get “relegated” to the lower division and the best 3 in the lower get put into the higher division.
The higher divisions get more of the TV revenue and play many fewer games against the lower divisions.
That way we don’t have to watch mis-match games during the season.
There could be a championship for each division as well.
But does it? Yes. If you look at the teams that have the highest pay roll year after year, namely the yankees and the red sox, they always compete. Other teams may get lucky for a few years, but not over the long term. The problem is, that baseball doesn’t believe that it can afford to level the playing field. So much of baseball’s popularity is in the northeast, that if other teams had a fair shot, baseball risks losing its fan base. True, over time, implementing a salary cap may improve attendance and ratings in other cities over the long term, but it would take a while, and if the red sox or yankees string two bad seasons together, baseball is in trouble.
A salary cap + revenue sharing only works if there is also a salary floor. As Jason (#8) already pointed out, there are several owners out there who receive revenue-sharing checks but are not using the money to improve their teams.
As to the correlation between payroll size and winning, I think having a large payroll gives you a better shot at doing well in the regular season just because you have a greater margin of error when a high-priced player gets hurt or plays lousy. A team that can afford five $15 million a year players can survive an injury to one of them much easier than a team whose only $15 million a year player gets hurt.
The postseason in baseball is such a crapshoot because of short series length that it would be very difficult to establish any correlation between payroll size and winning the World Series, however.
I don’t like the idea of salary caps. The business of baseball is taking in the money regardless – capping it for players just means the businessmen get more. I think the bigger issue is that most tickets are now prohibitively expensive. Most of the season ticket holders with the best seats wind up being corporations, not fans. I don’t believe for an instant that if they lowered the salaries of the best players that the business would charge less money for tickets.
Also, have you been to a ballgame? BORING. Unless it’s a big rivalry or playoff. I love listening to baseball on radio though – they use the downtimes to give out stats, talk up the players and in general say what is going on with interesting stuff to fill up the dead air. On TV there’s some of this, but not enough running patter. In the actual stadium, it’s just dead air. It’s hard sometimes to tell what’s going on. And this from someone who can keep book on the plays.
My solution? Fewer games during the year by about 20%, Announcers at the games who provide infotainment during dead air time or broadcast wireless radio simulcast to people who bring headphones. Would make it a lot more interesting. And before discussing salary caps for players, find out how much the stadium and team owners are raking in and how much they actually pay to support the local infrastructure that funnels the fans to their venue.