Category: Money
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When the Money Reached the Diamond: MLB’s Biggest Gambling Scandals
By Bill Coleman For more than a century, Major League Baseball has treated gambling as its greatest threat to competitive integrity. While players have battled performance-enhancing drugs, sign-stealing controversies, and labor disputes, nothing has frightened baseball executives more than the possibility that the outcome of games could be influenced by betting interests. From the infamous…
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Less is More
We are all excited that a new baseball season has just begun. With that said, it will not be too long before some of us will be asking how much is enough? For comparison purposes let’s look at the current and recent seasons, as well as seasons from the past in terms of length. The…
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Money is Everything
Back in late November, New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner stated his preference for lowering his team’s overall payroll for the upcoming 2026 season. There was a lot to take from this interview but for the purposes of this post we will ignore what Steinbrenner talked about in terms of the Yankees and will focus…
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Baseball’s Problem
Major league baseball’s biggest problem can be seen most prominently and surprisingly in one of their more successful franchises, the Milwaukee Brewers. The good news is that the Brewers have made the postseason for past three years and qualified for the playoffs seven times in the last eight years. Unfortunately, they are also a small…
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It’s Mostly About the Money
Money doesn’t buy happiness as the saying goes. On the other hand, we here at BP would rather take our chances with having money (and lots of it) and finding happiness than the other way around. The same goes for MLB team payrolls and success. As of August 27th, here is a look at the…
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Baseball’s Luxury Tax
In a recent headline that clearly highlighted the difference between the haves and the have nots was the news of the nine teams that paid a whopping $311 million in luxury tax. That tax also known as the Competitive Balance Tax assesses teams a “tax” when they go over the set thresholds set by the…
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The Easy Starting Pitching Solution
MLB is now considering more rules changes to “reemphasize” the stature to their starting pitchers and to prevent teams from going through a myriad of pitchers throughout a game. In many instances, MLB teams now employ an “opener” which is a strategy where a relief pitcher starts the game to face the toughest hitters in…
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The Poor Get Poorer
As we noted previously, MLB’s greatest greatest problem is the fact that there is a distinct gap between the rich and poor teams. If you are a fan of teams like the Mets, Yankees or Dodgers, you do not have to live with the fear that your club will have to jettison their most talented…
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MLB Salaries and the Other Leagues: Yes There is a Difference!
As we noted in our last post (Rich vs Poor), there is a large chasm between the wealthiest and the poorest clubs in the MLB landscape. We wondered whether this difference between the haves and the have nots was also true in the other sports. In the table below we compare MLB with the other…
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Rich vs Poor
The Los Angeles Dodgers have made the biggest splash this off-season of all the major league clubs by signing Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Combined, the Dodgers shelled out over $1 billion to obtain Ohtani ($700 million over 10 years) and Yamamoto ($325 million over 12 years). Ohtani’s contract is the largest in sport’s history…
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Trevor May: Passion vs Greed
Previously, we pointed out here and here that John Fisher of the Oakland Athletics is one of the worst baseball owners in all of baseball. If you thought that opinion was strictly our own here at BP, then think again. Trevor May, an A’s relief pitcher had a few choice words for Mr. Fisher upon…
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Follow the Money, or Maybe Not?
Based on our last post (MLB Competitive Balance Not So Much), we examined the success and failure rates of all major league clubs by creating what we term the Baseball Purist (BP) Success Rate. We wondered though if there is a correlation between our rudimentary metric and the amount spent by each club over time. …