Monday, November 29, 2004

Conventional wisdom and trading Jason Kendall

Let me preface this entry by saying that few people have been more critical of the Jason Kendall contract than me, right from the moment the ink dried. I’ve always maintained that the Kendall contract was a public relations contract, not a baseball contract. The contract was to designed to prove that a new ballpark enables the Pirates to keep desirable players, competitiveness be damned.

Ok. Glad I got that out of the way. Now to the brass tacks.

“The formula of one player eating up a significant portion of the payroll just doesn’t work. The easiest example and most recent is A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez) in Texas. When one player makes up a significant portion of payroll, it’s not a formula for long-term success.”
- Dave Littlefield, during the press conference to announce the Kendall trade

We’ve all heard this over and over, from Pirate management to radio talk shows to the street corners. But how true is it? A lot of times, things that ‘sound good’ are repeated often enough that we simply begin to accept them as true. It may be that Littlefield is simply parroting a line he knows will fly in order to curry public opinion for the trade, though I have no reason to believe Littlefield doesn’t believe his statement.

It’s a simple exercise to determine the validity of this statement. You simply need to take a look at the contenders and find out if there are any teams who are winning despite giving a significant percentage of the payroll to a single player. To do this, I checked baseball-reference.com, and in a matter of minutes I found the following 2004 payrolls and player salaries* for a few contending teams:

(*- These numbers do not take into effect salaries owed to players not on the roster. But I doubt that anyone would argue that it’s any benefit to pay players no longer on your roster.)

Oakland
Total Payroll ~ $59.1 mill
Highest Paid Player ~ Jermaine Dye, $11.7 mill
Percentage of Payroll ~ 20%

Minnesota
Total Payroll ~ $47.5 mill
Highest Paid Player ~ Brad Radke, $10.8 mill
Percentage of Payroll ~ 23%

San Francisco
Total Payroll ~ $74.2 mill
Highest Paid Player ~ Barry Bonds, $18.0 mill
Percentage of Payroll ~ 24.%

Texas
Total Payroll ~ $43.2 mill
Highest Paid Player ~ Chan Ho Park, $14.0 mill
Percentage of Payroll ~ 32%

Now for the good guys….

Pittsburgh
Total Payroll ~ $32.5 mil
Highest Paid Player ~ Jason Kendall, $8.6 mill
Percentage of Payroll ~ 26%

It’s interesting to note that the evidence (Texas) cited by Littlefield to support the Kendall trade is the very evidence that most disproves his point! We can see from the above that the conventional wisdom just isn’t true. You CAN win by paying a large percentage of your payroll to a single player, even when that player isn’t a contributor.

Most fans would agree that the Pirates should try to model the successes of similar small market teams like Oakland, Minnesota, and Florida, yet there they are doing the exact thing that the conventional wisdom says you can’t do. These teams have won because they have been more efficient at using their limited resources to acquire talent. the Pirates have lost because they have been inefficient. The Kendall contract is simply a single point of inefficiency.

Speaking of Florida….

Florida – 2003
Total Payroll ~ $50.9 mill
Highest Paid Player ~ Ivan Rodriguez, $10.0 mill
Percentage of Payroll ~ 20%

The next time you hear someone spout the conventional wisdom regarding the Kendall trade, let them know that the last small market team to win the World Series did so by paying a large percentage of their total payroll to their all-star catcher.

posted by bkopec @ 2:55 PM   3 comments