Baseball Statistics for Player Salaries

If you love baseball, you might also love statistics. I suppose analyzing players’ performance numbers gives spectators something to do during long at-bats. Very few other sports engage fans by providing scorecards, and learning how to score a game is like learning a language or a code.

I enjoy baseball, as much as a Mets fan can be said to “enjoy” the sport, but I’m not fanatic when it comes to sports statistics. Possibly more appropriate for Consumerism Commentary readers are the baseball statistics that pertain to salary rather than performance. Major League Baseball players, particularly the better ones, are able negotiate what seem like stratospheric salaries, with the assistance of agents. It’s easy to look at multi-million dollar salaries for what seems like an easy job and think that the players don’t deserve it. That’s even more the case when players don’t perform as expected. (Oliver Perez, are you reading this?)

A new website takes a look at the available salary data for Major League Baseball players and presents an analysis. On Thanks, Curt, you can review, based on the latest information publicly available, several different views of the data. The name of the website refers to Curt Flood, the player who in 1969 was on the forefront of free agency in baseball.

You can see the top salaries among all players, but more interestingly, the site calculates the players who are the best values. Each player receives a cost vs. performance score, which is the MLB player average salary divided by the player’s salary, multiplied by the player’s WAR (wins above replacement), a measure of overall performance.

Oliver Perez, mentioned above, is currently fourth on the list of worst value players.

Other statistics included are cheapest home runs and most expensive home runs, a simpler calculation that takes the player’s salary and total HR into account.

If you like baseball, personal finance, and statistics, you should find the data on Thanks, Curt interesting. Permutations of baseball statistics are limitless, and I expect that as the site matures, even more financial information and analysis will be available.