Hell yes, this is true. If you ride the shuttle for three years, manage to stay on a roster for a few more, getting a couple arbitration awards, and then have your arm blow up and are out of baseball.... You're still set for life if you managed your money well.
In 2022, Chris Sale through 102 pitches in 15.2 innings. That's 17 outs for which he was paid $30,000,000 or almost $1.765 million per out (ten million of that year's salary is deferred for 15 years ---baseball prospectus).
Most Americans don't make more than 750k in their lives? Nevermind that there are plenty of guys who make MLB rosters and are up and down and don't last a full season.
In a word, No. MLB minimum in 2024 is $740k. US average income in 1985 was $23.6k. In 2024 its $59.6k. If we just do a straight line average, with no accounting for time value of money either, that's $41.6k per year x 40 years = $1.66M. So in *three* years, today's MLB rookies make more than the average palooka makes in his/her life, but not more in *one* year.
After writing my rebuttal, I double- and triple-checked your post and thought maybe you meant "accumulate" as "savings" not "earnings", so sorry if I was too harsh with my comments.
The mean is the average. Are you asking about the median? That's 1.5 million.
Dammit, yes I meant the median. Which I think is more useful for this discussion.
But how much can a guy who lasts only one year in the bigs put away from $750K of pre-tax income?
That's not the question, though. The OP said "potentially". It's about the risks of trying to get there with no guarantee of anything from the time the approach is started. Which unfortunately these days, is more often than not Little League.
If my kid were really good at baseball, I'd probably steer them toward playing a position rather than focusing on pitching. Attrition is much lower on that side of the ball. But if the kid could throw but not hit, I'd let them pitch and hope for the best. It's not like football where a concussion can ruin their lives. I could easily do my job running IT with a damaged UCL.
I will calculate it for you... But the bottom line point is:
This.
You are remembering this wrong, the survey was done in the eighties among (some?) top runners (not all sports) and was around 50 percent, but when an attempt to replicate it was made more recently, the number was around 6 percent.
Are you saying that a 26 year old (to pick a figure, you might prefer 24 or 28) who saves half that salary, let's even call it $300K as they don't have to pay for food and lodging during the season, and puts aside $900K is easily set for life?
Right...I also F'ed around in my 20s and didn't really make any progress on the career I have now nor saved any money, so it's not like spending 5 years playing ball (if I had any talent) would have made a difference there. Probably would have ended up better off if I had a college scholarship from baseball.
I have dozens of clients who were middle aged when I met them and they have literally nothing saved for retirement.
Mean and median are both types of average, though (arithmetic) mean is the most common.
You have a point but I think you're overplaying it a tad. To make an MLB roster means you're one of a tiny percentage of people who are that good, and it's taken you a lot of work to get there. And if it's only one year, $300K is not going to get a 25 year old through the rest of his life.
Building off of this, I think a college junior who throws 90ish mph with a decent slider would be smart to do everything possible to increase velocity/spin in hopes of getting drafted. But the kid in AA who can throw 94 to location and has a great change up, and who is getting good results against AA batters... I'm not sure if it is a good idea for the team to push that player to go max effort in order to throw 97 or 98.
And I think you have perhaps not gone far enough. We're not talking about what a bunch of guys in their 40s and 50s might retrospectively choose. We're talking about what a 12-22 year old is actively choosing to do to compete with their peers.
Oh I get all that, no argument at all. The only thing I'm quarreling with is the other poster's flat assertions that anyone who makes a major league roster is set for life.
This is the crux of the issue: teams have figured out what is a benefit, increased player performance, and what will win ballgames. Their incentive is to use that knowledge to win, and if it gives them an advantage because no one else is doing it so much the better. I think we’ll be waiting a long time for teams or the league to fix this. To a certain extent the genie is out of the bottle and this is a result of something almost intrinsic to the game (like concussions in the NFL).
I agree generally. Sometimes you have to regulate, including the baseball examples of the spitball, the sticky-ban, gambling, PEDs, and chewing tobacco. You're never going to get wide compliance on those issues without legislation (rules) and enforcement (applied penalties and disincentives). And the last example (chew) I think really goes to the problem of expecting science, empirical evidence, and "adults in the room" giving rational long-view stances that run counter to whatever young men currently think is cool and seems to have no immediate harm.
This sort of begs the question of whether the max velocity flavor of "increased player performance" that (we're assuming for these purposes) causes more injuries and thus forces teams to replace them with inferior pitchers really does win ballgames. Or to what extent it does. I still think there' a place for pitchers who can throw strikes with any pitch on any count to various points within the strike zone. While the presumption is that these pitchers will get hurt less, I doubt there are many "pitching academies" teaching that.
The simple answer is they'll take the shorter stints because the metrics show those are more effective.
Didn't Japan ban gunpowder after adopting it and seeing how insanely destructive it was? Obviously that's quite different than a world wide ban as it puts any groups that DON'T apply that ban at a disadvantage.
Baseball wants offense, right? They want home runs. They ban the shift because it reduces offense. They lowered the mound to give hitters more of a chance. Juiced baseballs. Etc. I don't think MLB wants to suppress scoring. Even though your suggestion makes sense.
Incredibly? You're describing 2023 JP Sears (90 ERA+), Kyle Gibson (87), and stretching slightly, Patrick Corbin (83), Giolito (91), Miles Mikolas (91), Cristian Javier (92).
And let's not forget they actually experimented with moving the mound back a foot.
Right now.... I'm actually seeing that MLB fans want more action, not necessarily HR's. Not that they'd vanish either but they'd just become more rare. I know I'd like to see it and gauging what I've read here that also applies. I don't know how many surveys would accurately reflect that but the "Three True Outcome" play has really lost some fan enthusiasm. Softer ball would mean slower throws from the C, more steals, more runners maybe pushing for a 3B?
I think he meant people universally and voluntarily forgoing something. And that's a tricky category to find examples for. The tuna jello-mold, maybe?
And if they had made 20 starts each that's 11 starts by some guy that's probably considerably worse. That's the suce of high value, IMO. We can talk about Chris Sale's relatively high WAR last year in his 20 starts. But what about the other 12? (I understand that this idea is more "logic" than numbers. If there's an ability to calculate those "other" starts that shows I'm out of my mind, so be it.)
So the WAR calculation assumes the difference in playing time is taken by a replacement level pitcher.
The WAR calculations assume the other innings will be taken by replacement level performance. That's just the math of how it works. In reality, most teams don't give many innings to replacement level pitchers, so I think it actually tilts the math too far in Gibson's favor.
I wonder how much the sticky stuff ban might be contributing to this - would pitchers needing the grip the ball harder to spin it lead to these issues? Anyway, MLB can implement rules, but I think the concern in your examples is which ones were addressing issues fundamentally related to how the game is played and the last part is why I don’t think this is going to be easy to fix. The fundamental problem is that pitching is not good for your arm, and i font think MLB can legislate its way to pitcher safety (at least without fundamentally changing the game).
And you can see the results you get when Admiral Perry or the Tampa Bay Rays show up.
This made me wonder about the strategy of accumulating LOTS of low round draft pitchers, and very young international pitchers— and basically win the war of attrition
