So much for commissioner Rob Manfred’s stated desire to avoid a “disastrous outcome,” and so much for the urgency of the owners’ “defensive” lockout, which was supposed to jumpstart negotiations towards a new collective bargaining agreement — albeit in a most curious manner, with 43 days of radio silence and just one formal proposal to the players over a 71-day span. On Tuesday evening, the commissioner canceled the first two series of the regular season — a total of 91 games, constituting five to seven for each team — after the players union and the owners failed to meet his artificially-imposed deadline for a new CBA in time to preserve the season’s scheduled opening on March 31.

“I had hoped against hope I wouldn’t have to have this press conference where I am going to cancel some regular season games,” said Manfred on Tuesday. Citing the two sides meeting in Jupiter, Florida for nine straight days, he added, “I want to assure our fans that our failure to reach an agreement was not due to a lack of effort by either party.”

If indeed those games are lost, they would be the first regular season games missed due to a work stoppage since the 1994-95 players’ strike, and the first due to a lockout by the owners. When the owners locked the players out of spring training for 32 days in 1990, the resulting settlement included an Opening Day pushed back by a week, a season end date extended by three days, and all but two of the 26 teams playing 162 games. The 91 games would instantly leapfrog the 86 missed at the start of the 1972 season due to a players’ strike. As in that year, Manfred has said that games won’t be made up, even if that means competitors playing uneven numbers of games — a situation that helped to decide the AL East that year, with the Tigers (86-70) finishing half a game ahead of the Red Sox (85-70). Read the rest of this entry »

On the day that commissioner Rob Manfred set as a deadline for the completion of a new collective bargaining agreement that would end the owners’ self-imposed lockout and keep a March 31 Opening Day on schedule, no deal was reached. For the eighth consecutive day of negotiations, representatives for the owners and the players’ union met at Jupiter, Florida’s Roger Dean Stadium, going back and forth so many times over the course of 16 1/2 hours that the calculations of steps traveled strained FanGraphs’ servers, to say nothing of the brains of the handful of reporters staked out outside the gates. Enough progress towards a deal was made before the two sides broke for the night at 2:30 AM ET that Manfred agreed to extend the artificially-imposed deadline to 5 PM ET on Tuesday.

While nothing has been finalized, the reports of where the key components are heading do not paint a particularly pretty picture for the players’ side. After a decade in which they have largely been shut out of massive revenue growth, with new television deals falling into place, they appear to be improving the lot of their rank and file — no small matter in an industry where 47% of all service time went to players making the minimum salary — but while achieving only modest gains in areas where they initially sought more radical change.

Based upon the drips and drabs that have emerged from various reports, the battle to expand the postseason has loomed large, with MLB presenting alternative proposals based on whether it’s 14 teams (their preference) or 12 (the union’s preference).

Sources: Deal not close, but not impossible. CBT thresholds, prearb pool big issues, among others. MLB has proposed two choices:

A: 14-team expanded postseason, minimum of ~$700k, ~40m into prearb pool

B: 12-team expanded postseason, ~$675k minimum, ~$20m into prearb pool

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) March 1, 2022

The 12-team format appears to be the route this deal will take, though according to the New York Post’s Andrew Marchand, the gap between the two formats amounts to only a $15 million difference in what ESPN is offering ($100 million for a 14-team format, $85 million for a 12-team one). Whether the “ghost win” concept — giving the division-winning team that does not receive a first-round bye a one-game-to-none advantage in a best-of-five series — survives is unclear at this writing. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s February 28, the deadline set by commissioner Rob Manfred to have a new collective bargaining agreement in place that would end the owners’ self-imposed lockout and allow the season to open as scheduled on March 31 following an abbreviated spring training. To the surprise of no one, there’s no deal yet, even after seven straight days of negotiations between representatives for the owners and the players union in Jupiter, Florida, talks that have stretched into Monday. Negotiations have yielded incremental progress regarding some core economic issues and other matters, but the two sides remain far apart nonetheless. While a league official characterized Sunday’s talks as “productive” after both sides voiced considerable acrimony on Saturday, it would take something on the order of a miracle to have a deal in place by the end of the day.

What’s more, if the league intends to treat the February 28 deadline as a hard one, living up to its threat to cancel games without making them up, and not paying players for a full 162-game season, a deal may become even harder to reach. That would create another issue to settle via negotiations, because the length of a season is subject to collective bargaining; the league can’t unilaterally reduce it. One need only to dial back to 2020 to recall what a fiasco that can become once service time and contract incentives come into play. What’s more, the cancellation of games would raise the possibility of the players answering with some hardball of their own by not agreeing to expanded playoffs for the 2022 season. The union indicated that was possible earlier this month, when the specter of cancellations arose. The value of those expanded playoffs is estimated at $100 million. Read the rest of this entry »

As the lockout wears on, team financials have repeatedly been called into question. Are teams making money? What about if you ignore franchise value? Commissioner Rob Manfred recently claimed that owning a baseball team has been a worse investment than investing in the stock market, a claim that was quickly challenged by outside observers. Last week, Liberty Media, the principle owner of the Atlanta Braves, announced their 2021 financial results, shedding some light on the financial state of the league.

The Braves enjoyed a banner year in 2021. Per their filing, they turned a profit of $104 million. That’s full-year OIBDA, or operating income before depreciation and amortization. That brings their four-year operating income, including the pandemic-marred 2020 season, to $193 million.

OIBDA sounds like a great big pile of financial jargon, and it is, so let’s talk about what all of that means. Operating income refers to the money that the team has left over after it takes in all its revenue and pays all of its costs. More specifically, it’s revenue minus the cost of goods sold minus other operating expenses. If a team sells 100 hot dogs for a net $800, that’s $800 in revenue. If they paid $20 to buy those hot dogs in bulk, that’s $20 in cost of goods sold. If they pay the vendor who sells those hot dogs $15, that’s $15 in other operating expenses. Voila – $765 in operating income. Read the rest of this entry »

Though the owners could end their self-imposed lockout of the players at any time and allow the baseball season to proceed on schedule, the first week of spring training games has been scrubbed. Odds are that more cancellations are to come, and commissioner Rob Manfred’s February 28 deadline to reach an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement that would preserve Opening Day is fast approaching. With a newfound sense of urgency that stands in marked contrast to Major League Baseball offering one formal proposal in the lockout’s first 10 weeks, representatives for the owners and the players union have been meeting on a daily basis in Jupiter, Florida this week to discuss core economic issues — and those meetings have lasted more than 15 minutes at a time! But even with the more frequent back-and-forth and some minor movement here and there, including a formal proposal from the players on Tuesday, the two sides still appear to be far apart on the most central issues.

If there’s optimism to be had, let us know, because we could sure use some. In the meantime, here’s an attempt to capture where things stand as of Wednesday morning.

Competitive Balance Tax

The lack of optimism regarding an impending resolution to the lockout centers on the players making the tax “the lodestar” of negotiations, to use Jeff Passan’s term, and so far this week, neither side has budged from where things stood as of the owners’ February 12 proposal. I broke down the recent history of the CBT — the threshold for which has not kept pace with the growth of revenue over the past decade — in my previous analysis in the wake of that proposal.

The short version is that the players believe the CBT functions as a salary cap. With teams’ total payrolls down 4.6% from 2017 (from about $4.25 billion to $4.05 billion), and with most of the biggest-spending teams pulling up just short of the threshold in 2021 — the Phillies, Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, and Astros were all within $4 million of the $210 million bar, with only the Dodgers and Padres paying the tax — one can understand their frustration. In Tuesday’s proposal, the players didn’t budge from their previous position from January 24. While generally preserving the previous CBA’s tiered penalties for teams exceeding the thresholds by more than $20 million and more than $40 million, they’ve sought an increase in the base threshold from $210 million to $245 million, growing to $273 million by 2026. That jump in part makes up for the threshold’s meager growth over the life of the last CBA (from $195 million to $210 million over five years, an average of 2.1%), while revenues grew at a quicker rate. The only real difference in that aspect of their proposal is that there’s no draft-related penalty involved, where the previous CBA bumped the draft place for the highest pick of any team with a payroll at least $40 million above the threshold down by 10 spots (unless it was a top-six pick). Read the rest of this entry »

This past Saturday, as part of the ongoing collective bargaining agreement negotiations, Major League Baseball sent its second proposal on core economic issues to the Major League Baseball Players Association. We’ve already covered how the two sides differ on pre-arbitration compensation, and examined how changing the arbitration eligibility rules would alter player salaries based on recent arbitration awards. MLB and the MLBPA have also laid out proposals regarding the competitive balance tax, proposals that would have strikingly different effects on team spending.

To compare the two approaches, I started with the actual tax regime from the previous CBA, which was in effect from 2017 through ’21. I made one modification: the abbreviated 2020 season led the league and the union to bilaterally amend the CBA to drop the competitive balance tax for that season. Payrolls also ended up being quite different than their original projections due to the 60-game slate. For the purposes of this analysis, I’ve turned each payroll into a full-season number and calculated the tax as if 2020 were a regular year (hopefully, how the new CBT handles a pandemic will not be relevant for future seasons). Read the rest of this entry »

You didn’t have to be a cynical curmudgeon to know that Saturday’s meeting between Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association would not magically produce a deal for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, thus allowing spring training to begin on time. With its “defensive” lockout and subsequent failure to officially offer more than one proposal to the players on core economic issues over the previous 71 days — a counterintuitive definition of “jumpstart,” never before observed in the wild — the league had already made abundantly clear the fantastical nature of any dates attached to pitchers and catchers reporting. By prematurely calling for the entry of a federal mediator into the proceedings after the barest attempt to negotiate, by telling the media that “phones work two ways” when it comes to bargaining, by downplaying the financial benefits of owning a team relative to investing in the stock market, and by mischaracterizing the owners’ latest proposal for the Competitive Balance Tax rates, commissioner Rob Manfred and the owners have made it clear in recent weeks that they aren’t ready to play ball. And so, for the foreseeable future, there will be no major league baseball played.

Manfred has yet to make a formal announcement to that effect because no spring training games have been scrubbed thus far, but via USA Today’s Bob Nightengale, that could happen by the end of this week, as the exhibition season is scheduled to begin on February 26. During his press conference last week, Manfred didn’t offer a deadline for an agreement that would keep the March 31 date for Opening Day intact, though he did express a desire for a minimum of four weeks of spring training, suggesting that the league has absorbed at least one lesson from the frenzied and contentious run-up to the 2020 season and the soaring injury rates that followed. Nightengale reported February 28 as the deadline for an agreement that would preserve Opening Day, though with 197 unsigned arbitration-eligible players and nearly 300 free agents (his figures), such a compressed timeframe would create a level of chaos and logistical difficulty that would make Team Entropy cringe.

If you’re expecting this column to both-sides the failure to hash out a new CBA, to assign equal blame to the MLBPA as to the owners, you’ll have to look elsewhere. This is a lockout, not a strike. It is entirely of the owners’ doing — you could say they own it — and entirely unnecessary, because the 2022 season could be played under the terms of the previous CBA until a new one is in place. The two sides would need to agree to restore the old agreement’s Competitive Balance Tax, Joint Drug Agreement, and domestic violence policy — all of which have technically expired as of December 1, 2021 — until such a point, and that may not be trivial, but it would be a rare glimpse of good faith. Based on the minimal concessions the owners have been offering, not to mention the widening gap between revenues and salaries over the past decade, they must like that old CBA pretty well, because they seem reluctant to change things too radically.

Yes, the two sides have agreed that the new CBA will include a draft lottery of some kind as well as a universal designated hitter and the elimination of draft pick compensation, as Manfred announced on Thursday. But the owners have refused to budge from the status quo on the years to free agency and arbitration, as well as revenue sharing, and the two sides remain miles apart on the core economic issues addressed in Saturday’s proposal. The players are not amused. Via The Athletic’s Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal:

There are some [players] who would have preferred that the union had not made its last counter offer at all. Some of the same sentiment cropped up Saturday, based on a feeling that MLB is moving too little to consistently warrant counter-offers.

Because Saturday, when MLB made its first economics proposal of February, was predictably just like everything else that preceded it. MLB made moves it thought the players should consider significant, and the players felt, again, lowballed and frustrated. Some players fear that with their counter-offers they essentially are bidding against themselves. The league says it has the same fear with its own offers to players.

While there’s certainly interplay between the various economic facets under discussion, no single issue illustrates the distance between the two sides, and MLB’s unwillingness to yield, more than the Competitive Balance Tax structure. Over the past decade, the tax threshold has not kept pace with revenue (or, for that matter, inflation), and it has functioned as a soft salary cap that even the wealthiest teams have been willing to approach but very rarely go over; per The Athletic, the Phillies, Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, and Astros all finished with payrolls less than $4 million below the first CBT threshold in 2021. From that roundtable, using figures from Forbes and the Associated Press, here’s The Athletic’s oft-circulated graph showing the separation between the revenue and the lowest threshold:

In Thursday’s press conference, Manfred mischaracterized the owners’ previous proposal as being similar to last year’s structure with regards to the tax. Via ESPN’s Jeff Passan:

Manfred said the league had proposed taxation rates that were “status quo.” This was incorrect. In recent years, the tax rate was 20% for teams over the $210 million threshold, 32% at $230 million and 62.5% at $250 million. MLB’s proposal calls for a 50% rate at a $214 million threshold, 75% at $234 million and 100% at $254 million. Additionally, teams would lose a third-round draft pick at the first threshold, a second-round pick at the second and a first-round pick at the largest.

Admittedly, things get a bit confusing when trying to distinguish between the penalties for moving up a tier ($20 million or $40 million above the first tax threshold) and those for repeated annual violations. Using MLB Trade Rumors, The Athletic and the expired CBA, I’ve attempted to summarize the CBT’s recent history and the basics of the three economic proposals that have been officially exchanged since the beginning of the lockout (two offered by the league, one by the players). First, here’s a look at the thresholds:

As you can see, the first threshold has barely budged in recent years, falling short of even a typical 2% or 3% cost-of-living adjustment, let alone the rate of inflation. As MLB Trade Rumors’ Tim Dierkes explained, “A simple 5% increase per year beginning in 2012 would have put the 2021 base tax threshold around $290MM, yet it sat only at $210MM.”

Note that rather than ordering the official proposals chronologically in the table above, I’ve kept the owners’ two proposals adjacent to illustrate how little they differ. The second one increased the thresholds for each of the last three years of the upcoming CBA by a whole $2 million a year. It took the owners a month to come up with that, though to be fair, they did also do away with teams exceeding the first tier losing a third-round draft pick (worth $3.8 million by Craig Edwards’ 2019 estimates, and probably not much more now).

Here’s what those penalties look like:

While the players’ first post-lockout proposal attempts to make up a bit of the lost ground with a substantial jump in the CBT threshold, it maintains the same tiered and annual penalties that were in the last CBA. Meanwhile, the tiered penalties in the league’s two offers have become more severe even while the thresholds have barely moved. Even with the removal of escalating repeater penalties and the draft pick penalties for teams exceeding the first threshold, the owners’ proposal appears designed to continue the effects of the last CBA, during which the average salary fell by 6.4% relative to 2017, with the brunt borne by baseball’s middle class; via the Associated Press’ Ronald Blum, the median salary dropped 30%, from $1.65 million in 2015 to $1.15 million in ’21.

Regardless of the other bells and whistles in the deal, the players simply don’t believe that the structure of the owners’ proposals will allow them to grow their salaries. As pitcher Alex Wood put it via Twitter on Saturday:

If penalties increase under the CBT/Luxury tax IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT THE THRESHOLD IS MY GOD. Make the threshold a billion dollars it doesn’t matter. Teams already don’t spend bc they use the current penalties as an excuse not to. Imagine if the penalties got worse. SMH.

— Alex Wood (@Awood45) February 12, 2022

Beyond the tax structure, the two sides are far apart on the minimum salary, which in 2021 stood at $570,500, the lowest of the “big four” North American team sports according to The Score’s Travis Sawchick (the NBA’s $925,258 is the highest, and even the NHL comes in at $750,000), and only about 12% higher than in 2016, with annual growth of less than 2% in each of the past four years. What’s more, none of those other sports rely on that minimum-salary labor more than baseball. Via Sawchik, 63.2% of all players in 2019 had less than three years of service time, meaning that they were generally making some function of the league minimum. Those players accounted for 53.6% of all service time accumulated, but only 9.8% of player pay. Via Ben Clemens, in 2021, players making the minimum accounted for 47% of service time accrued, but only 7.5% of player pay. Via Nightengale, 1,145 of the 1,670 players on rosters last year (68.6%) made less than $1 million — a reminder that calling this a fight between millionaires and billionaires is off base.

The union has proposed increasing the minimum salary to $775,000. After making a preliminary offer of $600,000 during negotiations in mid-December, the league offered straight salaries of $615,000, $650,000 and $700,000 for players with 0-1, 1-2, and 2-3 years of service time in their mid-January proposal. On Saturday, they proposed raising the salary for the third year to $725,000, and offered an alternative as well, a flat minimum of $630,000 in the first year of the deal; that’s 10.4% above the current minimum, a jump that would be the largest since the 2012 CBA increased the minimum from $414,00 to $480,000 (15.9%), but it’s less than $6,400 ahead of what the minimum would be if the last CBA’s 2017 minimum ($535,000) had grown with inflation. Under that structure, teams would be able to give raises for subsequent years, but would also be able to unilaterally renew contracts with smaller or no raises as well, just as they have for ages.

Along with the proposals for the minimum salary come proposals for a pre-arbitration bonus pool, where the gap between the two sides might best be described as a chasm. Via ESPN’s Jesse Rogers:

The league increased its offer from $10 million to $15 million while offering a six-person panel — three from each side — to develop a mutually agreeable WAR statistic to allocate the funds. The top 30 players in WAR and award winners would be eligible for the bonus pool.

The union has asked for a $100 million bonus pool, down from a previous offer of $105 million.

The latter reduction came as part of negotiations since the MLBPA’s first formal post-lockout offer. That the two sides have reduced the gap from $95 to $85 million doesn’t exactly count as progress, though to call back to the aforementioned Clemens analysis of the players’ first proposal, the amount in question is now less than 1% of the league’s annual revenues. The structure of how the money would be divided up isn’t clear, but the league’s figure would mean an average of an additional $500,000 for those top 30 players, while the union’s figure would mean an average of $3.33 million — a substantial difference.

Here it’s worth mentioning that nobody who’s in the business of presenting WAR values, not FanGraphs or Baseball Reference or Baseball Prospectus, is comfortable with the idea of its estimates of performance values being deployed in the direct service of determining player salaries. As our own managing editor Meg Rowley said on a recent Effectively Wild podcast:

“This assumes a precision to WAR that, I think people who think WAR is a really useful framework through which to understand baseball would be very quick to tell you, is not present. So what happens if you are the 31st-most valuable pre-arb player and the difference in value between you and the 30th-most valuable is less than half a win? You’re probably not the same, but you’re within our margin for error on this.”

Other elements of MLB’s proposal that ESPN highlighted pertained to service time manipulation, roster continuity, pre-draft physicals and a restoration of the draft-and-follow system. Via Rogers, “The league increased the incentive for teams to keep their best prospects in the majors, offering them two draft picks within the player’s first three years if he finishes in the top three in Cy Young, Rookie of the Year or MVP voting. Previously, the league had offered one extra draft pick per player within his first three years.”

The example Rogers offered was Kris Bryant; had the Cubs kept him up for all of 2015 instead of farming him out for the first 12 days of the season to [check notes] work on his defense — thus leaving him one day short of collecting a full year of service time — they’d have netted one pick for him winning that year’s Rookie of the Year award, and a second one for his MVP award in 2016.

On the subject of roster continuity, the CBA would limit the total number of times a player could be optioned to the minors in a season to five, which could make a significant difference in the quality of life for pitchers at the bottom of the bullpen food chain, the ones vulnerable to getting sent down if they’ve thrown so many pitches that they won’t be available for a day or two. To cite just a few extreme examples, the past year alone saw the Rays option Louis Head 12 times, with the Dodgers optioning Mitch White 11 times, and likewise for the Yankees with regards to Albert Abreu.

On the subject of pre-draft physicals, in what could be called the Kumar Rocker rule (though, as is often the case for players expected to be drafted highly, the Vanderbilt pitcher did not submit to one), the league has proposed that a player who submits to one and is subsequently drafted will be guaranteed at least 75% of slot value and can’t be failed by the team in a post-draft physical. As for the draft-and-follow, the league has proposed reinstating the ability of team to draft a player who’s not yet ready for professional baseball and then sign him the next year. In this case, the team can draft such a player, send him to junior college for one year, and sign him for as much as $225,000 the next year.

For as helpful as those elements may or may not be, they’re of much smaller scale compared to the CBT, the minimum salary, and the structure of arbitration, regarding which “the league has said it won’t move off the status quo,” according to Rogers.

Even with the lack of progress and the players voicing their frustrations, it’s worth noting that the immediate asymmetry of the situation favors the union. Players don’t get paid for spring training, so they won’t feel the bite of missed games as suddenly as the owners will when their exhibition dates begin to dwindle. The owners obviously have much more ability to absorb the loss of games long-term than the players do, but given the empty ballparks of 2020 and the reduced attendance last year, their resolve may be tested more quickly than that of the union. The players appear galvanized and geared up for a stand via which they can regain some of the ground they’ve lost, and guarantee their rank and file significantly more security, financial and otherwise, than they currently enjoy.

I can’t tell you with any kind of certainty when the 2022 season will start or how many games will be played. I can’t even definitively say if there will be a season at all. But one thing seems nearly inevitable: When we have baseball, it’s not going to be identical to the product we saw last year. For one, the designated hitter, used for the shortened 2020 season in the National League, appears likely to become a permanent part of both leagues, ending the doctrinal schism between the junior and senior circuits. Another likely difference? The playoff structure.

It’s no secret that the owners are highly interested in expanding the playoffs again. Over at The Athletic, Kaitlyn McGrath, David O’Brien, and Katie Woo teamed up to discuss the various goings-on here. The owners have proposed expanding the playoffs to 14 teams, with only the team with the best record in each league getting a bye and everyone else thrown into a best-of-three Wild Card series. The players, meanwhile, have proposed conceding an expanded playoff structure of 12 teams, with multiple byes for top teams.

From the standpoint of the owners’ interests, the best teams winning often isn’t necessarily the ideal outcome. The World Series championship is basically a MacGuffin. MLB doesn’t need it to actually be important, it just needs the public to believe it is. And since the public appears to believe that the best team will win a short series far more often than it actually does, the more teams you can stuff into a postseason without making it seem like chance (rather than talent) is driving the outcome, the better. Who cares if a 107-win team loses two of three games to an 83-win team? They were probably chokers anyway! Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I released a study of the average compensation that players who qualify for Super Two arbitration receive in their pre-free-agency years. Today, I’m replicating the same study for players who reached standard arbitration. This should help add numerical context to the negotiations between the league and the MLBPA around pre-free-agency compensation – though those negotiations aren’t going well at the moment.

As a reminder, I’m looking at the production and subsequent-year salaries of every player since 2013 to establish a rule of thumb for what players can expect to receive in arbitration given their production in the preceding year. The methodology will follow, but first, here’s the high-level summary of what players have received based on their service time, position, and production:

This table displays the amount of money a given player should make above the minimum salary based on who they are and what they did. Just as with the Super Two numbers, this broadly makes sense – players receive less per unit of production than they would in free agency, but their compensation gets close and closer to free agency levels (roughly $6.5 million above minimum salary per WAR) as they go further into arbitration. Read the rest of this entry »

One major point of contention in this offseason’s collective bargaining impasse is compensation for young players. In the two sides’ competing proposals, the existing Super Two system, which each year awards an additional year of arbitration to some pre-arb players with two-plus years of service time, has come up repeatedly. Whether it’s being replaced with an algorithmic solution, increased pay for some players based on performance, or an expansion of arbitration within the two-plus group, compensating these pre-arb but multi-year players is a key point of debate as the lockout wears on.

If we want to understand this debate, we need to understand how Super Two players have been compensated in the existing system. Without that context, the dispute can feel more theoretical than consequential, and it is obviously very consequential to the players involved. To that end, I decided to look at the last eight years of Super Two awards and come up with a rough heuristic for how their compensation relates to their production in those years. From there, I’ve created some rules of thumb, which I’ll share with you here before we get into the nitty-gritty details of how I did the calculations. Here it is, separated out by player type:

This table displays the amount of money a given player should make above the major league minimum based on how many times they’ve been through the arbitration process, their position, and their previous year’s production. Broadly speaking, the numbers make sense — players receive less per unit of production than they would in free agency, but their compensation gets closer and closer to free agency levels (roughly $6.5 million above minimum salary per WAR) as they go further into arbitration. Now let’s talk about how I got to these numbers, and the merits (and limits) of using this style of calculation to model arbitration awards. Read the rest of this entry »