Player salaries have always been a major area of controversy in professional sports. The largest issue is that many feel the players are incredibly overpaid. Without a salary cap in Major League Baseball, earnings have gone through the roof.
How do you decide how much a player is worth? Although teams have never fully disclosed this information, it is generally accepted that they are paid predominantly based on their abilities.
However, Mark Shapiro, general manager of the Cleveland Indians, has decided to consider Vince Gennaro’s new, quantitative equation for what a player is worth to a team monetarily.
After working with Shapiro, Gennaro was able to prove his theory that there is a direct, and quantifiable, link between winning and revenue. Gennaro went further to create an equation factoring in a number of player abilities, along with aspects such as personal popularity, to decide what a player is worth monetarily to a team.
If, for example, Gennaro decides that a player will bring in five extra wins for a team, he can then factor in what those five wins will mean in terms of fan retention and growth, advertising revenue, etc., and find an exact number. A certain fraction of this number relates to what the player is then worth to the team.
There is a problem with this theory. What a player is worth now is not necessarily what he will be worth three years into the contract. Injuries can reduce the value of a player. At the same time, an injured player may recover faster than expected and make a larger impact on the team.
More importantly, a team would hope that individuals would improve throughout the contract and make a larger impact than they may currently be. Take Alex Rodriguez, for example: an article titled “The Real Most Valuable Players” ran in the April 14-15 edition of The Wall Street Journal and said Rodriquez is overpaid by $7.7 million.
However, with April nearing its end, he is even further into beating the home run record for a season, already tying the record for home runs in the month of April. A good team should be able to read a player’s potential, and factor that into the salary, which many teams do now.
What Shapiro and the Indians are doing takes away from the integrity of the sport. There is not a mathematical equation that can define a player’s worth, or how many wins they will bring to a team. For as much analyzing as Gennuso does, there will always be surprises. It is part of the excitement of sports. Although the Indians may decide to use this equation for a while, I do not see it lasting as the number of factors that are not included in this equation continue to play into revenue and player value. At the end of the day, there is a certain chance in investing in a player, and that is just a chance the team has to make.
Contact Campus Press staff writer Margot Schneider at margot.schneider@thecampuspress.com.
