The reason to care how much the Red Sox sign a player for, or how much a player makes whom they could trade for, is because they have a budget. I'm not saying they're the Pirates or the Rays. It's a high budget, but it's limited. The question regarding whether the Red Sox can afford to sign a player is only legitimate if they can afford it within the budget they set for the team payroll. It's the ownership's team and they have a right to set the budget how they want. It's not like they don't set their budget high enough to be competitive.
If the Red Sox sign a player for more money and years than he's worth, that's money that could have gone to a more productive player, or in some cases plurally more productive players at other positions.
Acquiring a position player for too many years at too much money can also sometime later during the too-expensive player's contract prevent the Red Sox from acquiring a better player who plays that position. Chances are they're not going to pay the too-expensive player many millions of dollars to sit on the bench. Yes, it's possible they could trade the too-expensive player and eat some of the salary (ex. Edgar Renteria), but it's tough to get equal value in a trade when the other teams know the Red Sox are trying to get rid of a player because he isn't worth what the Red Sox are paying him. Also, as an example of what was said earlier in this post, that money they're eating in such a trade is money that could have gone towards more productive players if they hadn't originally acquired the too-expensive player.
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3 comments:
Ideally overpaying would be easily avoided, in a perfect market with perfect information. Unfortunately, that doesn't exist, so teams must take risks. Sometimes they don't pan out. Whining about what should happen in theory won't change that. Grow up.
Nobody said teams shouldn't take risks. I understand there are times you have to. The question is which risks are worth taking. It's no secret that years and money are considerations when potentially acquiring a player.
This argument is really about the concept of opportunity cost. The Red Sox only have 25 slots on the roster, so signing one player who's definitely going to be on the roster (e.g. any major-league FA) prevents the signing of one player who might have been signed.
Likewise for dollars: whatever the price paid to a major signing, it doesn't just represent dollars out the door for an organization, it also represents the opportunity cost of those dollars, i.e. what else we might have been able to do with them. That's why so many people opposed to a given signing will frame their arguments as "Instead of this signing of player X for $Z, I would have rather signed player Y for $Z". All perfectly reasonable.
Where the argument breaks down is that, unlike other major sports, the Red Sox' budget is amorphous and flexible. It's not that there's some secret budget figure and we just don't know what it is. It's that - particularly at the high end of the player market - there's not some smooth, continuous curve of available players at various prices and performance probability-distributions. There's a handful of top players available, with particular price tags attached, and as a result each addition represents a tactical decision by the GM and Ownership: do we stretch the budget to include them, or pass and take the savings? We see this dynamic play out in other uncapped leagues such as European football, where some owners with particularly deep pockets may care less about short-term profits than about short-term wins and long-term brand value, and such will jump at even un-economic signings. In MLB, we've seen that recently with Ilitch in Detroit and less-recently with Steinbrenner.
It seems that to the extent that there's a budget for high-payroll teams, it is a moving target. So opportunity cost isn't the only way to think about it: we've got to factor in vague-but-somewhat-quantifiable concepts like improvement in postseason / championship odds, brand/marketing value of that player, likely impact on TV ratings and ticket prices, etc. What I'm saying is, the team's competitive performance, and a potential addition's impact on it, isn't a "closed system" in the thermodynamics sense. So it's probably not as simple as this post makes it out to be.
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