Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

There is a show on MLB the network called Clubhouse Confidential, hosted by former ESPN host Brian Kenney. He had a very interesting dialog in yesterday’s show that I wanted to push out as a discussion piece because I have not seen anything that has quantified the argument. On the show he had a baseball writer for SI.com, Tom Verducci and Rob Neyer, a long term sabermetric guy that started out with Bill James and is every where now. Sharp guy.

When the Mariners had some young super stars in Ken Griffey, Jr. and ARod they gave them contracts that were beyond the minimum. Players, all players are under control until their sixth year, after which they get to go to the free agent markets.

The show talked about how the great young players, in their second or third year get big deals to make them feel good about how much the organization feels about them. It also protects them against an injury before that control is over. The amounts though do not approach what they would get as a free agent. What further came to focus is that the organizations will let them walk away later, say at age of 31 or so. Not the end of their career, but closer to it now that steroids are gone.

I’m going to get some more material on it and some analysis to see how it shows. Some of it is intuitive as the career peak is thought to be 27 or 28 and the deceleration past that can be rapid.

That’s all for now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2012 at 8:07 pm by terrybenish and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.