Effectively Wild Episode 1324: The Salary Trap

by
January 19, 2019

EWFI
Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willians Astudillo’s final winter league stats, the retirement of Ricky Romero, the upside of a slow market, and the anticlimax of a big free-agent signing, then (11:25) bring on Baseball Prospectus director of editorial content Patrick Dubuque to talk about why we know how much players make, how knowing players’ financial information but not owners’ affects the way we talk about baseball, whether opportunity cost still matters, whether casual fans will ever sympathize with players over owners, how to analyze transactions without fixating on salary, talking about money vs. talking about games, finishing Baseball Prospectus 2019, how the Annual has evolved over time, why we still want the paperbound Annual in the digital age, and more.

Audio intro: Prince, "Money Don’t Matter 2 Night"
Audio interstitial: Built to Spill, "Pat"
Audio outro: Sonic Youth, "That’s All I Know (Right Now)"

Link to Patrick’s article
Link to preorder Baseball Prospectus 2019
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Subscribe: RSS





 

2 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Fredchuckdave
6 years ago

I love the movie Sicario, and the sequel as well (which is much less political); they are very well made interesting storylines about a somewhat hot topic. However the way they are constructed is sort a loose propaganda framework (and not intentionally made so); essentially the way that we are taught to approach the border drug issue is completely scripted by prior constructions and discussion; the same is true here. The Upper Class has such an easy stranglehold on all information dispensation on the internet that any discourse that runs counter the dominant train of thought is not even considered as being used in a mainstream product. Similarly Baseball writing since the age of Moneyball has always been on a “this team can afford to spend X” whereas its really “this team will make (hypothetically) 10 times X but is only willing to spend X hereafter,” obviously this will eventually lead to a strike/lockout (where the public will favor the owners as they were scripted to do); but at the end of the day the billionaires will still be billionaires and the talented athletes will still be millionaires that are both in some theoretical realm of useless Fiat wealth accumulation that benefits almost no one; one can only hope they’re all willing to be as adventurous as Roy Halladay with their wealth.

0