Breakable Young Pitchers - A New Trend or an Old Story?

I think they’re urban (or rural, if you will) legends. Pitching mechanics in that period were not anywhere near sufficiently developed to enable pitchers to throw 100 MPH.

…which is one of the reasons the Mets dumped him. The moment he hit Los Angeles he got his act together. But for those first few years, he was at best, wildly inconsistent. During the years of the pitcher, ERAs above 3.30 were considered average to poor. The Ryan or Fregosi trade is no considered one of the worst in baseball history, but at the time there was little way of knowing if he’d actually harness his skills or not. I mean, it was a terrible trade because the Mets had nurtured him and there was no reason to get rid of him, but it’s also true that he was considered a wild man at the time.

He turned it around with the Angels, and was 25 at the time.

There were fewer major league teams, and thus fewer players in the majors. Also, while it’s true there were also fewer international players, baseball was the dominant sport in the United States. I have no idea if that’s a wash or not.

I did not, in fact, call you a psychopath. At worst, I’m guilty of a hyperbolic characterization of your argument.

The same reason they always did. God forbid a guy plays ball because he likes it. Dennis Eckersley didn’t get a billion-dollar signing bonus, and he was a fine pitcher. Besides, what are they gonna do, go be dentists? They can’t make money like this in the NFL as, whatever, quarterbacks. And they don’t have the athleticism for the NBA. They’ll play baseball or they’ll work in a cubicle. Anyone who picks the cubicle just doesn’t like baseball or money, and was never going to play baseball anyway.

Plenty of extremely impressive athletes play baseball. Notwithstanding the stereotypical pitcher with a beer gut, those guys are the exception and not the rule. And even if you could make a go of MLB without any elite athletes, which you probably could, the quality of play would be dramatically worse.

And the fact that there are good baseball players who did not get big signing bonuses is irrelevant. There are STILL good baseball players who do not get big signing bonuses. Albert Pujols got peanuts as an 11th round pick. And yet— overall, the higher someone is drafted, the more they are paid and the better, on average, they end up being as a player. Random outliers do not alter the trend, and anecdotal references to them are very poor evidence.

Their personal freedom? Are their Constitutional rights waived because they play baseball for money? (Interested to see your response to that particular hyperbole, because you’re the guy who thinks baseball players are basically slaves, if I remember correctly.) Pretty sure they’re not sacrificing anything more than any other guy who gets a job. Where’s my signing bonus?

My response to that hyperbole is that you really have no idea what you’re talking about. People waive rights of all sorts (Constitutional and otherwise) all the time, frequently for money. (Most employers will tacitly if not explicitly require you to waive your right to call their product crap, for instance. Certainly it’s not a form of free speech I’d care to exercise when working for a company.) If you do not pay people to waive those rights, they will often not do so.

The reference to personal freedom is simply making the point that teams get something in return for that signing bonus— the services of a baseball player, who could be doing something else instead. (And thanks to the reserve clause, they also get to guarantee that he can’t play baseball for anyone else, even if he wants to. Swell!)

What’s even worse is when a guy has actually had to PAY thousands and thousands of dollars, out of his own pocket or by taking ill-advised loans from amoral corporations, to unpaid "work" to even get to the point at which he could be paid for his talents. It happens to people all the time. We call it "college." Where’s my signing bonus?

That last line is really revealing, I think. Your jealousy shows through.

In any case, though, I’m hardly a fan of encumbering 18-30 year olds with massive debt loads as a prerequisite for joining the economy. But, again, general discussions about American political economy are beyond the scope of this blog.

You just don’t have a "conversational" mode, do you? It’s all rhetorical war, every time.

Ironic that you whine about personal attacks, yet you are the one obscuring points with irrelevant ad hominem remarks.

400 grand to sit on the bench. When do I get hosed?

Who’s paying players 400 grand to sit on the bench? You advocated paying them nothing and then releasing them when they got injured.

BTW, players who suffer career-ending injuries in the majors don’t get paid 400 grand either, at least not after the season when it happens. They get outrighted off the roster and released.

Of course it’s not a benevolent gesture. I’m not a capitalist, but I do acknowledge the way it works. The laws of supply and demand are more complex than one increases and the other goes down. There are quite a few instances in which a company will lower the price on a product to a certain level, on the assumption that purchases of that product will skyrocket so much that they’ll actually make more money than they were making before. A company won’t do that if they don’t believe it will work, and they won’t do that if they think it will cut into what they have arbitrarily defined as their bottom line. But if their bottom line is lowered by fewer ridiculous outsized expenditures, they have more flexibility to take a risk or two and see what happens.

A team will set ticket prices at the point at which they estimate that they can maximize profit given their fanbase. That point does not undergo a short-run change based on who is playing for the team. Players are a fixed cost of operating a baseball team— you have to pay them the same amount no matter how many people show up.

If the team thought that cutting ticket prices would make it more money, it would do so. If it thought that raising prices would make it more money, it would do so. And no team is so hard-up for cash that it cannot leverage itself to some degree to experiment with lowered or raised ticket prices. MLB does not allow owners who do not have some degree of fiscal liquidity, for precisely that reason.

As for “ridiculous outsized expenditures,” that’s positively Orwellian in its denial of reality. The average draft pick between #16-30 ends up providing $6.51M worth of surplus value (which is a polite way of saying “value he doesn’t get paid for”) to his team. It’s actually much higher for picks 1-15. The profit for teams declines as you get further into the draft, but so do the signing bonuses. By the time you get to the last 25 rounds, players are getting paid so little that literally if one guy in the entire history of your franchise has ever come up and been better than terrible at the major league level, the team has turned a profit on that draft slot.

There is no better investment in baseball than signing bonuses for draftees. They are dramatically discounted relative to their actual worth. There’s a reason why a majority of teams are now using “over-slot” bonuses to sign more top-quality amateur players— they’ve realized it’s far more efficient and cost-effective than signing “proven” free agents who are getting paid for past performance.

Your feelings on workers’ rights are blinding you to the reality that nobody needs less saving than professional athletes. I’m a union supporter through and through, but I despise the players’ union, because they’ve ruined the game as much as the owners have. This isn’t Harlan. This isn’t a bunch of downtrodden factory workers. These are guys making, at minimum, $400,000 a year. Sorry. Got no tears for them.

Minor leaguers are not making “at minimum $400,000 a year.” The vast majority of all baseball players never get a damn thing out of it (other than stories for the grandkids) in their lives. Many who do, only do because they were smart enough to invest some of their signing bonus wisely— either because they got hurt, or because the team mis-estimated how good they were.

The bottom line here is that screwups in evaluating players’ health or talent ought to be on the teams, and not on the players, because the teams are far better capitalized and hence far better positioned to withstand the financial risk (and they will certainly reap the rewards when that risk pays off, so let’s not start weeping for the poor owners here). That is in fact how the current system works, although the monopoly power of the draft cartel means that the players give up too much and get too little in the bargain relative to an efficient marketplace. Your proposal would make that marketplace much less efficient (reducing the quality of the product, which is the labor of MLB players) and also shift the risk in an inefficient way. It’s both morally and economically unjustifiable.

is a personal attack.

I obviously disagree.

Plenty of guys do longer time for dogfighting.

…there will be less stress on the ligaments and joints in the throwing arm. At least, I think that’s what Seaver used to point out.

Is there data to support the thesis that it’s all in the arm angles? You’d think that if this was as easy as it sounds, then there’s no way Tyson Ross would’ve made it the major leagues without changing his motion.

Unless, of course, they’re all idiots.

vaccines.