Week 4 Blog (Blake Snell is overpaid)

Hello, welcome back to my blog! This week  I have consulted my reading list, mainly Jim Bouton and his groundbreaking novel, Ball Four, one of the only pre-free agency descriptions of contract negotiations in professional baseball. Bouton chronicles his career as a pitcher in the 1960s giving anecdotes about his day-to-day life, one that stuck out to me was his contract negotiations with the New York Yankees in 1965. After winning 21 games with a 2.53 ERA the Yankees refused to meet Bouton’s request for 30,000 dollars (Roughly  $200,000 in 2024), instead offering $15,500 (~$153,000). After negotiating for months, Bouton was able to work past this discrepancy of nearly half of his initial contract to get $28,000. This episode is important, as it is an example of a front office attempting to take advantage of a player who only has two grounds to stand on for his demands, through ignorance of contribution to a team. It is important to note that Bouton’s contract was primarily decided by his win-loss record, with his ERA getting secondary consideration. Bouton’s power to negotiate was, like every other baseball player before the overturning of the reserve clause (see last week’s Blog for more info) weak, he was forced to sign one-year contracts with the Yankees for as little as they wanted to pay him. The Yankees front office trying to negotiate with their 4th best player from last year (Based on bWAR) is stark considering they could afford him considering their deal with CBS for 11 Million dollars that year. Ten years before free agency and the overturning of baseball’s trust exemption, and even 5 before the reserve clause was heavily scrutinized, Bouton gives insight into the life of a player

After I’m done learning about the past of Baseball and labor, I will begin to look toward the free agency era before Moneyball next week. I will also be reading Nickel Dimed for next week, looking into the low-wage labor market to connect it to my research from baseball. I have also been working diligently on my On-site, learning more and more commands in Google Sheets, which I am becoming increasingly literate and proficient in. Thank you for reading my blog.