Pages

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

It's not worth it for the Pirates to buy free agents

Over at Slate, I have a new article about why the Pirates can't sign any free agents without losing money.

Some of my previous posts on wins vs. payroll are here, here, and here. I'll probably post more in future.


9 comments:

  1. http://www.slate.com/id/2265068/

    ReplyDelete
  2. I didn't realize you wrote for Slate. I am curious how bigger sites like them and the Huffington Post (for example) work. Did you contact them or did they contact you? I blog about sports myself and, while I'm no leading expert, no one has contacted me to bring my work to a larger audience.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jon,

    They contacted me. They had read one of my blog posts that seemed relevant to what they were looking for.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Cool. A Lana Turner moment. COngrats!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Phil

    Good job. One of my students is a Pirate fan. I sent him the link.

    cy

    ReplyDelete
  6. Interesting article. I remember thinking when I read that the Pirates had made a profit of $30 million that it wouldn't go very far in the free agent market.

    You point out that things are even worse than I realized. If the Pirates were to make changes to increase their revenue, they'd start losing the revenue-sharing which is pretty much the margin of their profit.

    The Pirates are the proverbial welfare queen. They are making more money by being terrible than they could by "working".

    Rather than the revenue-sharing plan MLB has now, they should force all teams to kick in half of their local media revenue to be divided among the league teams. This would help equalize the disparity between the large and small market teams without going to the extreme that the NFL has. Putting a couple of more teams in the New York metropolitan area wouldn't hurt either.

    ReplyDelete