The Money Pitch: Baseball Free Agency and Salary Arbitration PDF
Preview The Money Pitch: Baseball Free Agency and Salary Arbitration
BASEBALL FREE AGENCY AND SALARY ARBITRATION Roger I. Abrams DffiD Temple University Press III PHILADELPHIA Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122 Copyright © 2000 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2000 Printed in the United States of America § The paper used in this publication meets the require ments of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abrams, Roger I., 1945- The money pitch: baseball free agency and salary arbitration / Roger I. Abrams. p.cm. Includes index. ISBN 1-56639-774-X (cloth: alk. paper) Baseball players-Salaries, etc.-United States. 1. Title. GV880.A27 2000 99-087922 ISBN 13: 978-1-56639-774-2 (cloth: alk. paper) 121608P To my mother, Myrna Posner Abrams, and my late father, Ave. Silverman Abrams Contents Preface IX Introduction Xlll 1 A. G. Spalding and the Development of Baseball Professionalism 1 2 Baseball's Salary System 22 3 The Baseball Marketplace: Economics and Game Theory 45 4 The Ballplayers, the Owners, the Agents, and the Union 67 5 Roy Hobbs and the New York Knights: A Salary Negotiation 98 6 Ty Cobb and Negotiation Hardball 129 7 Salary Arbitration in Operation 142 8 The Free Agency Auction 167 9 Player Attitude and Disloyalty 184 10 Conclusion 200 Notes 203 Bibliography 207 Index 210 Preface I have always been fascinated by the game of baseball. Growing up in New Jersey, a few miles from where the national game was first played in Hoboken, I rooted for the Yankees of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Phil Rizzuto. My mother was (and is) an avid Yankees fan. My childhood was a time when most games were played during the day. I would return home after school, and, without asking, would know the Yankees' fate that afternoon, because the ceramic figurine of the Yankee pitcher normally standing upright on the television set would be turned face down on its side if the Yankees had lost. A three-game losing streak-admittedly a rare occurrence for the Yankees in the 1950s-would find the pitcher submerged in our fish tank. (Perhaps that is the origin of the phrase "to go in the tank"?) This book continues the story of the baseball business I began in Legal Bases: Baseball and the Law, published in 1998, where I explored the legal terrain of the game by combining two of my life interests baseball and law. The story was incomplete, of course. I needed to do more work in disciplines related to law, drawing from the fields of eco nomics, strategic analysis, and game theory that lawyers too often ignore, to better understand the business enterprise that has grown up around the game we first played as children. Baseball provides a very suitable playing field for discussing the eco nomic marketplace and the tactics of negotiations. It is a microcosm of the economic and interpersonal bargaining that go on throughout life. Baseball is also fun to think about, write about, and read about. If you want to learn something about economics and game theory, baseball
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