Hot Stove Economics: Understanding Baseball's Second Season
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Hot Stove Economics Hot Stove Economics Understanding Baseball’s Second Season J.C. Bradbury © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published in the United States by Copernicus Books, an imprint of Springer Science+Business Media. Copernicus Books Springer Science+Business Media 233 Spring Street New York, NY 10013 www.springer.com Library of Congress Control Number: 2010922994 Manufactured in the United States of America. Printed on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-1-4419-6268-3 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-6269-0 To my mother, who gives more than necessary. Additional Praise for Hot Stove Economics In Hot Stove Economics, J.C. Bradbury delves into important questions of how professional baseball franchises value the talent of players. The questions are of interest to baseball fans who can and do argue the merits of specific trades, established player for established player or established player for prospects. The questions and their answers may also be interesting to people who bemoan the large salaries paid to grown men playing a game, people who want to know on what basis a ball player can be worth millions of dollars a year. J.C. addresses all these questions and all these readers in an engaging and easy style that manages to inform barroom sports debates and teach some basic economics all at the same time. –Dennis Coates, University of Maryland, Baltimore County and past President of the North American Association of Sports Economists Reviews of The Baseball Economist Bradbury would be the first guy to tell you that baseball fans are the most sta- tistically minded sports fans out there. And he should know: he is an economics professor and a baseball addict (and a popular blogger, too). Here, he tackles some of the game’s most cherished truisms and controversies. Is being left-handed really a disadvantage for a catcher? What role, really, do steroids play in being a home-run king? (You may be surprised at the answer.) How can we effectively evaluate a player’s value to his team? Ball fans may be shocked at how rele- vant economics is to their favorite game, and economists may find an exciting vi ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR HOT STOVE ECONOMICS vii new application for their specialty. Like John Allen Paulos, author of such “pop- ular math” books as A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995), Bradbury writes with a smooth, accessible style and makes the tricky game of numbers seem both straightforward and exciting. Like Bill James’ Abstracts (2003), this volume could become essential reading for baseball fans. –Booklist,DavidPitt Subjecting recent baseball debates to plentiful regression analyses, Kennesaw State economist, Bradbury, gamely fuses our national pastime and the “dismal science” somewhat in the spirit of Steven Levitt (Freakonomics), Michael Lewis (Moneyball), and Bill James (Baseball Between the Numbers). Like the latter, Bradbury offers a front-office perspective on labor (that’s the players), salaries, managerial influence, steroids, market size, and the like. Like a scrappy role player, Bradbury’s enthusiasm is evident (he’s a Braves supporter); he offers a chapter on managers’ ability to work the umps (“it appears that most managers don’t seem to have any real impact in arguing balls and strikes”) and investigates top pitching coach Leo Mazzone’s contributions. A blogger at his website saber- nomics.com (a play on the acronym SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research), Bradbury, while not forging new ground, shines in the closing chap- ters, in which he convincingly bucks the conventional wisdom that Major League Baseball behaves like a monopoly. While the numbers crunched are more of the Financial Times than the box score kind, the issues the book deals with are those discussed in many a barroom. –Publisher’s Weekly Acknowledgments I would like to thank several people for their help with this project. First, I offer a special thanks to Sean Forman for providing access to much of the data I used in this project. His website Baseball-Reference.com is an amazing resource for baseball data, and he was kind enough to put forth extra effort to help me with this project. My former Sewanee colleague Doug Drinen discussed ideas with me and provided some data assistance, but most of all I owe him a debt of gratitude for putting me on my current research path. I would also like to thank Matt Zarin for his valuable research assistance and feedback on early drafts of this manuscript. Thanks to many individuals for useful comments on issues relating to ideas in this book, which were presented in parts over several years: Dave Berri, Mary Jo Bryan, Dennis Coates, Brad Humphreys, John McLester, Phil Porter, Skip Sauer, Frank Stephenson, Bob Tollison, and several anonymous referees. I know that I received comments from many other individuals whose exact contributions I cannot directly recall; please know that I appreciate your help. Also, thanks to the many volunteers and employees who collected and published baseball data with Baseball Info Solutions, Baseball-Databank.org, Cot’s Baseball Contracts, Retrosheet, and the Society for American Baseball Research. Thanks to my editor Jon Gurstelle for having confidence in my project, and his comments greatly improved the book. Also, thanks to Gillian Greenough and the other folks at Copernicus/Springer for their help in producing the book. Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank my family for their time and support. My parents, in-laws, and extended family provided practical support ix x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and advice that allowed me to write this book. My wife Rachael, who wrote her own book as I wrote this one, and my daughters Rebekah and Sarah saw less of their husband and father as I worked on the manuscript. You are my inspiration, and I love you all. List of Abbreviations Abbreviation Name AL American League AVG Batting average BABIP Batting average on balls in play BB Walks BB9 Walks per nine innings pitched BFP Batters faced by pitcher BRA Batter’s run average DIPS Defense-independent pitching statistics DPT Doubles-plus-triples ERA Earned run average ERA+ ERA plus GCL Gulf Coast League GM General Manager HR Home runs HR9 Home runs per nine innings pitched K Strikeouts xi xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS K9 Strikeouts per nine innings pitched LSLR Least squares linear regression (regression-estimated runs) LWTS Linear weights MLB Major League Baseball MRP Marginal revenue product MVP Most-valuable player NL National League OBP On-base percentage OPS On-base-plus-slugging PA Plate appearance PV Present value RA Runs allowed average RBI Runs batted in RC Runs created RISP Runners in scoring position SABR Society for American Baseball Research SLG Slugging average VAM Value approximation method VORP Value over replacement player W “Win” as earned by a pitcher WAR Wins above replacement WPA Win probability average Preface I am in a business called professional baseball where no quarter is asked and no quarter is given,—highly competitive, where we put a dollar mark on the muscle... —Branch Rickey1 As much as I like watching the action on the baseball diamond, I have to admit that I enjoy the space between the World Series and spring training nearly as much. And I am not alone. Popular websites like MLBTradeRumors.com expe- rience their highest traffic of the year when teams aren’t even on the field. Newspapers, websites, and friendly gatherings erupt with exchanges that have nothing to do with tape-measure homers or web-gems that normally spur base- ball chatter. The MLB Network replaces its signature television program MLB Tonight with Hot Stove. The off-season marks the beginning of the “hot stove league,” when fans follow a different type of game. In this league, it’s not the athletic feats of baseball play- ers that attract fans; instead, players are individual parts, which when properly assembled, produce a championship contender. Journalists and fans aren’t just spectators; they’re participants who discuss the moves that teams make, don’t make, or should make. Each team has different needs: an ace starter, shoring up the bullpen, acquiring a back-up catcher, etc.; and, every fan thinks he/she has identified the missing puzzle pieces to complete the team. The main event of the hot stove league is the opening of free agency, where teams purchase player services on the open market. While most people I know don’t normally enjoy watching other people shop, baseball’s free-agent market xiii xiv PREFACE draws significant attention. It is easy for fans to ponder the contents of the free-agent pool and imagine what each player might do for their team. Players compete against players to sell their services to the highest bidder, and owners compete against owners to purchase the best players for the lowest possible price. The players flirt with many teams as player agents plant rumors in the media about their clients’ desires and expectations, often playing general managers off each other in the hope of bidding up salaries. At some point, all a player’s suit- ors but one are gone. The general manager with the highest bid calls a press conference where he drapes a new jersey on the back of his smiling prize. The off-season is also a time when teams tinker with their rosters by swapping players between clubs, a tradition from the old days of baseball when bartering was the main way that players switched major-league teams.