Kris Bryant has been the talk of the baseball world this spring. Following Monday’s news that the Cubs had officially reassigned Bryant to the team’s minor league camp, speculation shifted from focusing on whether Bryant would make the Cubs’ opening day roster to whether Bryant or the Major League Baseball Players Association will challenge the demotion.

For its part, the MLBPA helped fuel this speculation in an official statement released on Monday following Bryant’s demotion:

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The almost certain, impending demotion of Kris Bryant to the minor leagues for the season’s first couple weeks has brought renewed focus on Major League Baseball’s service time rules. As most readers are by now well aware, by sending Bryant to the minors for the first two weeks of the season, the Cubs will ensure that he fails to earn a full year’s worth of major league service time in 2015, preventing Bryant from becoming a free agent until 2021, rather than after the 2020 season. While it thus makes sense from a business standpoint for the Cubs to send Bryant to the minors for a fortnight to preserve an extra year of his services down the road, the thought that baseball’s top prospect – and MLB’s spring training home run leader – could begin the season in Triple-A has nevertheless led to calls for the Major League Baseball Players Association to take a stand on the issue.

Last week, for instance, Ken Rosenthal wrote a column arguing that the MLBPA should file a grievance if Bryant is demoted. Although he recognized that the union would almost certainly lose such a grievance – since arbitrators generally defer to teams on decisions regarding a player’s major-league readiness – Rosenthal nevertheless believed it would show the owners that the MLBPA won’t be pushed around on the issue. Meanwhile, others have taken a somewhat more patient approach, urging the MLBPA to address service time manipulation in the next round of collective bargaining talks following the 2016 season.

However, while service time manipulation certainly needs to be dealt with, the MLBPA has a much more significant and pressing – but often overlooked – issue to address in the next round of CBA negotiations: the players’ plummeting share of overall MLB league revenues.

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Yesterday, I went through team rotations to analyze the most cost-effective pitching staffs in Major League Baseball. Today’s post looks at the hitter side. In a rotation with just five members, one superb pitcher can help create value for the entire staff. On the other hand, one bulging salary without production can drag down the entire rotation. On the hitter side, one player has less of an impact. A 220-inning pitcher counts for around 15% of a team’s innings, while a hitter with 700 plate appearances accounts for around 11% of a team’s plate appearances. The burden to score runs is spread among the entire lineup and bench players.

Like with the pitchers, we begin with the projected WAR generated by the hitting side of each team. Taken from the FanGraphs Depth charts, here are the team totals for projected WAR in 2015. The numbers include both starters as well as bench players.

Bringing in Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval looks to have a positive effect in 2015 for the Boston Red Sox as they beat out the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays for the top projected position player WAR. On the other end of the chart, moving Jason Heyward and Justin Upton without finding quality replacements is a 6-7 win downgrade for the 2015 projections. Half of the teams are bunched together with around 20-25 WAR. The payroll is more spread out.
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Even with almost unlimited resources, assembling a good rotation can be a difficult task. The best rotation in Major League Baseball this season is expected to be the Washington Nationals. The Nationals signed Max Scherzer to a huge free agent contract. The franchise drafted Stephen Strasburg and Jordan Zimmerman and both players have missed seasons due to Tommy John surgery. They traded prospects to get Gio Gonzalez and Doug Fister. The Nationals have put together an incredible rotation, but it took a lot of money and prospects to create and the result will be fleeting. Zimmerman and Fister are pending free agents with Strasburg just a year behind them.

Moving pieces around to create a rotation was not easy for the Nationals, and for those with considerably less resources, a cost-effective rotation that looks good on the field is a difficult proposition. There are a few ways to measure the effectiveness of a rotation. The way that matters most is the play on the field. In that regard, the Nationals are the best in baseball with the Los Angeles Dodgers coming in second. The graph below uses the data taken from the FanGraphs Depth Charts for starting pitching.

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Teams have long devoted a majority of Major League Baseball payrolls to starting position players and the starting rotation. Last week’s post reinforced that notion with first baseman and aces receiving more money than any other position. Shifting back to team analysis, we can take a look at how individual teams spend their resources, separating payroll by rotation, starting position players (including designated hitters), bullpen, and bench. Team spending can vary greatly. The New York Yankees’ position players would rank in the top half of MLB salaries while the Los Angeles Dodgers spend almost as much on their bench and bullpens as the Houston Astros and Miami Marlins spend on their entire teams.

One aspect of spending critical to payroll is the number of cost-controlled players a team employs. Last week, looking solely at starters, the overall breakdown was as follows.
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When it comes to making demands about improving a team’s roster, a fan’s simplest complaint is that the team is not spending enough. Ownership is the easiest target for criticism because they sign the checks. There is a lot of information hidden from the public and even the players when it comes to a team’s finances. Many assumptions are made, but still questions persist: Are the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves cheap? Are the Detroit Tigers outspending their market for a shot at a championship?

Without delving deeply into the finances of individual teams, the answers are not easy to come by. Even if everyone got a look inside the books, there would be reasonable differences regarding subjective definitions of the word cheap. What we can do is take a look at recent spending patterns within baseball. Looking at the known financial aspects of a franchise and attendance, a comparison can be made within the ranks of ownership. The owners might very well all be cheap, and that we cannot know for sure, but we can find out which franchises are cheaper.
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The New York Yankees’ and Los Angeles Dodgers’ payrolls continue to dominate when it comes to paying players. Not coincidentally, those two teams have the best local television deals in Major League Baseball. On average, the two will receive more than $300 million annually over the course of their deals, per Forbes. As more teams cash in with big local television deals — the Arizona Diamondbacks are the latest — it’s becoming clear no team will receive anywhere near the haul the Dodgers and Yankees have enjoyed. How much those local deals impact payroll is less clear.

The revenue from local television contracts is subject to revenue sharing, with one-third of the annual rights money going into the overall pool. The money produced from an ownership stake in a television network does not go into the revenue sharing pool. Local television deals are not the only source of revenue for teams. Teams are getting more and more money from national television deals. Smaller market teams are getting revenue sharing money from the bigger teams. Attendance at 81 home games brings in a great deal of revenue. Then, for that money to translate to payroll, there needs to be an ownership group willing to spend the money they receive.

Payroll does not directly translate to wins, and there is evidence that overall, the correlation between payroll and wins is decreasing. However, the correlation between wins and Opening Day payroll last season (.28) is in line with the the four year average (.29). Looking at a number of different factors and comparing them to payroll can provide a better idea of the factors affecting spending.

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Yesterday, we broke down the payrolls in the American League. This post repeats that exercise for the National League. The average Major League Baseball payroll in 2015 is roughly $122 million. With top-heavy payrolls, the median comes in lower at around $112 million. In 2014, the average payroll in the AL East on Opening Day was $135.1 million, narrowly edging the NL West’s $135 million. With sizable increases for both the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants, the NL West is now the highest-salaried division in the majors.

Figures from Cots with minimum salaries added to create a 25-man roster.

The NL West has a healthy monetary advantage over the NL East and the NL Central due principally to the Dodgers and Giants. Eleven of 15 NL teams have payrolls below the MLB average. Only the Dodgers, Giants, Washington Nationals, and Philadelphia Phillies have payrolls above $120 million.
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We recently took a look at payroll by team as well as changes since the start of 2014. Interleague play, the advent of the Wild Card, and the addition of the second wild card has broadened the scope of competition in baseball. Multiple playoff spots in each league are fought for outside of the divisional format causing competition between teams in different divisions. However, the second wild card also increased the emphasis of winning the division and trying to avoid a 50/50 play-in game before making the divisional round. The current schedule format also increases the importance of the division with an unbalanced schedule. Teams play games within the division in close to 50% of their games.

The divisions are not on the same footing financially with the American League East outspending the rest of the divisions. The average payroll by division are below. The black line represents the Major League Baseball average of roughly $122 million.

Figures from Cots with minimum salaries added to create a 25-man roster.

The average payroll in the AL East is much greater than the rest of the league with more than a $20 million advantage over the other two divisions. Surprisingly, the AL West comes in lower than the AL Central despite big payrolls from the Texas Rangers and Los Angeles Angels. There is a great deal of disparity within the divisions.
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Wednesday’s news that Josh Hamilton could be facing an imminent suspension from Major League Baseball has set off a wave of speculation regarding not only the possible cause of the suspension, but also its potential length. Given Hamilton’s history, some have assumed he may have had a relapse of his earlier substance-abuse problems, triggering a possible suspension under MLB’s Joint Drug Agreement (JDA).

Although we presently have very little concrete information regarding Hamilton’s situation, here is what we do know: Mike DiGiovanna broke the news on Wednesday afternoon that Hamilton was in New York City meeting with MLB officials regarding a potential suspension. Ken Rosenthal reported later that, according to an unnamed baseball executive, Hamilton’s transgression was “worse” than a performance enhancing drug (PED) violation.

More alleged details emerged Wednesday evening, with Jon Heyman reporting Hamilton had confessed to a drug relapse involving “at least cocaine.” Heyman went on to report that Hamilton would be placed in MLB’s drug-treatment program as a first-time violator.

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