Commanders Post at The Warpath - View Single Post - Let Freedom Ring

FRPLG · 01-10-2009, 03:39 PM

The intrinsic nature of baseball can be attributed to a larger sample size. The signing of a quality free agent in baseball has approximately 10x the amounts of chances to actually "improve" a team over all. It's all about the sample size. In football free-agents get 16 games to make a difference. Miss a game because of injury...it's like missing 10 games in baseball. Miss 4 weeks...it's like missing 40 games. The small sample size really skews the effects of talent. Similarly like Schneed has pointed out a superior talent that literally wins you two or three games is like signing a baseball player who single-handedly wins you 20-30 games. That doesn't exist. The best players in the history of baseball at best won games for their teams maybe 15 times a year on average.

I think what the author is missing is that potentially the argument isn't about hard/soft/no cap but more about whether it makes financial/logical sense for the likes of NY to compete with the likes of Buffalo in anything. It seems clear that a completely socialistic system would probably kill everything off since Snyder/Jones/Kraft types would stop trying so damn hard to make money(hurting the product in unpredictable but probably catastrophic ways). The mixture approach seems to work in the short run but it has to be managed and tweaked constantly to account for chaning environments and situations. Faced with also trying to appease a demanding players union I think the mixture approach might be doomed to fail in the long run since unions rarely seem to care or even understand complex market equations. It'd very hard to co stantly be finding the right emixture while also keeping the players happy when the players expect to never ever lose money. So it comes to to accepting a complete free market which undoubtedly kills offf the Buffalo types. I think we should should start preparing ourselves for that.

01-10-2009, 03:39 PM	#4
FRPLG MVP Join Date: May 2004 Age: 46 Posts: 10,164	Re: Let Freedom Ring - Busting the Myth of the Salary Cap The intrinsic nature of baseball can be attributed to a larger sample size. The signing of a quality free agent in baseball has approximately 10x the amounts of chances to actually "improve" a team over all. It's all about the sample size. In football free-agents get 16 games to make a difference. Miss a game because of injury...it's like missing 10 games in baseball. Miss 4 weeks...it's like missing 40 games. The small sample size really skews the effects of talent. Similarly like Schneed has pointed out a superior talent that literally wins you two or three games is like signing a baseball player who single-handedly wins you 20-30 games. That doesn't exist. The best players in the history of baseball at best won games for their teams maybe 15 times a year on average. I think what the author is missing is that potentially the argument isn't about hard/soft/no cap but more about whether it makes financial/logical sense for the likes of NY to compete with the likes of Buffalo in anything. It seems clear that a completely socialistic system would probably kill everything off since Snyder/Jones/Kraft types would stop trying so damn hard to make money(hurting the product in unpredictable but probably catastrophic ways). The mixture approach seems to work in the short run but it has to be managed and tweaked constantly to account for chaning environments and situations. Faced with also trying to appease a demanding players union I think the mixture approach might be doomed to fail in the long run since unions rarely seem to care or even understand complex market equations. It'd very hard to co stantly be finding the right emixture while also keeping the players happy when the players expect to never ever lose money. So it comes to to accepting a complete free market which undoubtedly kills offf the Buffalo types. I think we should should start preparing ourselves for that.