The Monkey Cage

I think you may not be including all the information necessary to get to the heart of the matter here.

Baseball — non-pitching baseball players get paid on their ability to hit. First, it is far easier to quantify who the best hitters are and second the cost of a substandard fielder is generally not that great (as compared to a substandard hitter) as the vast majority of plays are relatively routine.

Also, most organizations start their young players at the most challenging defensive positions (well except catcher)and then move down the defensive spectrum until they get to a position they can handle. then they move up to the top levels if they hit well enough to contribute at that position. catchers are a little different, in that injuries and the fact that even most pros can’t handle the rigors of catching every game. Also, even though the fact that most players can not catch at an acceptable defensive level limits the player pool and should therefore increase salaries, the limitations often mean that offensively most catchers are poor (and good hitting cathcers often get moved away from catching so that they don’t spend most of their career hurt). The hitting effect accompanied by the need to have 2 decent players for one position are more important for MLB salaries than the relative scarcity.

Basketball seems likely to mostly be a scarcity argument. there are far more people 6’1” to 6’3” who can play hoops at a close to Pro level than 6’9” people and pay reflects this

Bill: Thanks for the thoughtful response, with which I concur in part and from which I dissent in part.

The dissent: (1) People who can play point guard at a really high level are in extremely short supply, and they’re the (a?) key to winning championships. (And you don’t see a whole lot of them who are 6’1”, either.) (2) To say that non-pitching baseball players get paid on their ability to hit is (a) an overgeneralization and (b) simply a restatement of the idea underlying my post, which is that players don’t get paid at all in proportion to the contribution they can make during half the game. Many catchers are lousy hitters; so are many shortstops, and good-hitting shortstops, like good-hitting catchers, eventually get moved away from their position as they age (the Cal Ripken effect).

A larger question is why baseball players get paid in proportion to their ability to hit — or, more accurately, their ability to hit home runs. I confess to having lost interest in sabremetrics long ago, but is home run production really that much of a key to team success? More broadly, too, there’s something counterintuitive about the idea that those who have high-level skills that are in extremely short supply occupy the bottom end of the salary ladder.

Don’t complicate this. It’s just business. They get paid by the value (potential or realized) they add to the team. Do they help win? Do they sell T-Shirts? Does their name sell tickets? It’s just all business.

Brian is right: it’s just business. Fans pay to see home runs and slam dunks. After all, we have home run derbys and slam dunk contests as part of MLB and NBA all-star week.

I don’t know about basketball, but there are good reasons catchers are not paid as much as the average player. While you might be correct that catching is the most difficult position, that doesn’t mean that the catcher is the most valuable player on most teams. If we measure value by the amount of runs above the average player produced, we see that a top hitter is usually more valuable than a top fielder. This is not a reflection of the difficulty of hitting over fielding, or even the scarcity of good hitters over good fielders, but just that the nature of the game is that a fielder has less opportunity to prevent runs through his ability over the average player than the hitter. Thus, even if catching is more difficult, a good catcher is less valuable than a good hitter.

But that doesn’t explain why catchers would be so poorly paid. My guess here is that in the modern game catching are on average the worst hitters and have the shortest careers. Both of these result from increased rate of injuries and the additional wear on the body that comes from the higher difficulty of catching.

Also, because hitting is more valuable than fielding, a team will get more long-term value from a good-hitting catcher if they move him to a different position (and even before they reach the majors, the best hitters will be encouraged to not catch because it will be too risky).

Finally, many of the best-hitting catchers move to DH or 1B in their later, more well-paid years, which would also drive down their average salaries.

As for DH’s, I assume the main reason for their high salaries is that there are no young DH’s.

Sabrina’s:
Interesting. But please clarify for me what you mean by “If we measure value by the amount of runs above the average player produced, we see that a top hitter is usually more valuable than a top fielder.” I don’t follow either the “if” part or how you got from it to the implication.

And: I still don’t understand why catchers’ salaries are so extremely low, not just in comparison to DHs and other positions where sluggers play, but even in comparison to other “good-field, no hit” types of position (generally the middle infielders).

Also: Perhaps simply because people are more interested in baseball than basketball, nobody’s talking about the salary deficit for point guards. All the “experts” seem to say that having a really good point guard is the key to winning championships, and there surely aren’t a lot of really good point guards around.

I agree with BillC on the scarcity argument. In fact, I once looked for a relationship between height and salary among NBA players for an intro research methods class. Sure enough, once you control for points per game there’s a significant positive relationship between height and salary. Now, I haven’t looked at height by position, but I’d bet you’d find that PG is the shortest position on average.

I think you may have missed Bill’s scarcity argument. Assume that basketball talent is uniformly distributed, independent of height. Surely you’d agree that there simply exist more of the smaller, “point guard sized” people, so it follows that there are simply fewer “tall” people who can also play at an elite level in the NBA.

Dave Berri makes a similar point well, which he refers to as “the Short Supply of Tall People.”

http://dberri.wordpress.com/2006/11/20/the-short-supply-of-tall-people/

In any case, if you’re really interested in a more developed answer to the point guard salary deficit, he’d probably be the one to turn to. I’d actually be surprised if he hadn’t looked at the issue already.

Patrick:

I think your point ultimately reduces to the idea that being tall is itself considered a talent worth paying for. (Certainly being a tall point guard is, as NBA teams shy away from the really short ones and dream of having a Magic Johnson of their own.) Okay, fine. But I’m still not sure why a mediocre forward is worth more than a very good point guard — and no, I don’t assume that talent is equally distributed across positions, because to make it in the NBA as a “small” guy you’ve got to be really good, whereas a lot of the big guys are real stiffs.

A couple points:

1) My hypothetical is assuming the acceptance of linear weights for run estimation. Essentially, by looking at a lot of box scores, we find 33% of the time a run results from a walk, 47% from a single, 140% from a HR, etc. Thus, by looking at how many BB’s, 1B’s, 2B’s a player gets, we can see how many runs that person creates. To measure that person’s value, we then compare this against league averages (there are arguments about what the proper baselines are, but that’s not relevant). The amount above or below league averages roughly shows how many runs that person contributed offensively.

Measuring fielding is much more difficult as the basic counting stats are less reflective of actual ability. However, we can do similiar things to measure the value of assists, putouts, etc. in preventing runs from scoring. Then when we compare the amount of runs created by the best hitters, we see that it is much more than that of the greatest fielders.

This shouldn’t be surprising. A team’s offense is created solely by its hitters. But its defense is a combination of both pitching and fielding. Thus, fielding is inherently less useful in preventing runs.

2) I don’t know how SI is figuring average salaries, but if they are just doing it by taking the total amount paid and dividing by number of catchers, this is quite inaccurate. Since catchers are injured much more commonly and can’t play as many games, most teams will have more reserve catchers than for any other position. Thus, there are a lot more catchers that aren’t starting than for other positions. So I’m not sure that teams are actually spending less on catchers, or if it is just being spread out among more players.

For instance, last year 3 catchers earned over 10 million, while no 2B did. But, at least in this USToday comparison of salaries there were also 17 more catchers than second basemen.

I would think that the crucial factor is not how difficult the position is but how much difference it makes to the team’s success. How much does it improve our team’s chances of winning if we have a really good catcher as opposed to an average catcher? Then ask the same question for the dh.

because to make it in the NBA as a “small” guy you’ve got to be really good, whereas a lot of the big guys are real stiffs.

Don’t you think you’ve answered your own question?

Put another way, there are so few big guys who can play that if you find one who can, the bidding gets astronomical. OTOH, there’s a virtually endless supply of 6’3 guys who can dribble, penetrate, and play defense. So the median 6’3 guy is almost valueless.

There’s a limited supply of superstar pointguards, but the Chris Pauls of the world all get max contracts. Once you get past the handful of difference makers at point guard, you’re wasting money.

Finally, age matters. Many point guards have relatively short careers. Any 7 footer can play as long as they want.

Remember that it’s not about absolute value but value over replacement player (VORP). If good hitting catchers get moved to prolong their hitting careers, then you are removing the top end salaries. For so so hitter catchers, the VORP is not great unless they are truly stellar defensively.

In basketball, I don’t think top point guards do make less than mediocre forwards. A really good point guard is highly valued, see Derek Rose as the top draft pick. But there is a real scarcity of top quality big men and top quality point guards. The so so point guard has a relatively low VORP, because he is readily replaced by someone of nearly equal quality. The so so big has a smaller pool of replacement players and can command a higher price.

Everybody:

I’m extremely impressed by the quality of your comments, all of which seem at least plausible and most of which seem pretty persuasive.

I’ll make two other points. (1) I wouldn’t pay a DH a nickel, because I’m from the National League. (2) I wish our “Monkey Cage” posts about politics and political science got nearly as much attention, nearly as quickly, as the ones about sports, dogs, and so on. :-)

some people have sort of touched on this, but there’s a few other things as well:

1. due to the physically demanding nature of the position, catchers traditionally play significantly fewer games per season than other players (esp. DHs). often, catchers will play 120-130 games while other position players will play 140+. so to more accurately compare salaries by position, we would add rather than average the salaries of each team’s two catchers, or at least adjust for playing time.

2. teams in the AL can play highly-productive catchers in the DH position occasionally to give them a rest but still keep their bat in the line-up. hence, AL catchers should be higher-paid, and they are: all of the top 5 and 8 of the top 9 highest paid catchers (in 2007) were in the AL.

3. catchers have shorter periods of peak performance. since MLB players make more money in free agency, and free agency does not begin for players until after their 6th year in the majors, and catchers have shorter periods of peak performance in the free agency period, then we should expect catchers to make less money on average than DHs who are in the FA market longer due to their longer careers.

4. selection bias: many of the best MLB catchers have not yet reached free agency (e.g. McCann, Mauer, Martin, Soto). this is not generally true of DHs. when these guys reach FA in a few years, we may see the average pull up. to match other positions. not OFs or DHs probably, but maybe get closer to MIs.

to me it’s hard to find an explanation, why more demanding positions are paid less? It’s against economical laws

1. baseball is not a competitive market

2. the rewards in baseball go to marginal productivity in two areas: run creation (on offense) and run prevention (on defense). generally, catchers rank lower than many other players in these categories, so they are played less.

You are right about the demands of the catching position in baseball. So let’s all praise Joe Mauer of the Minnesota Twins, a league leader in hitting an an outstanding defensive catcher. He’ll start for the AL in the all-star game this month. Win Twins!

When’s the last time a political science post got this many comments?

Kathleen:

On “The Monkey Cage,” never. I think the only posts that have come close to this one have focused on dogs and the Dakotas. Why bother with political science on a political science blog? :-)

Interesting that football has not come up. I don’t know for sure, but would be willing to bet a large sum (for me, not for a professional athlete) that quarterbacks are on average the highest paid position. By analogy to point guards, you can certainly make the case that they have the hardest job (certainly in mental preparation). Clearly, size scarcity can’t explain their high salaries, though ability scarcity might. Perhaps a quarterback’s supreme value to his team is just more obvious than for a point guard, pitcher, etc.

Spero:

You’re exactly right. Quarterbacks are the highest-paid, and they would seem to be directly analogous to point guards. So if the explanations given above work for point guards, why don’t they work for quarterbacks?

L2P’s comment about point guards is, i believe, analogous to quarterbacks, but in reverse: in basketball, talented big men are in short supply, so the ones that exist reap big rewards. but 6’3” guards with dribbling skills are common, so unless you are exceptionally skilled you won’t get as much money.

in football, slow-moving 300 lb. linemen are dime-a-dozen whereas quarterbacks with the mental acuity and physical requirements to play the position well are rare. hence, the high salaries.

however, marginal returns to ability are very high at the top of the distribution for both point guards and football linemen. it’s just that only the top 10% (say) reap these benefits, so average returns are lower.

again, it’s all about value over replacement (VORP), which is a baseball term but which applies conceptually to all sports. it’s not how much an individual player is worth in some vacuum; it’s how much more he is worth over the next-best alternative. in basketball, the next-best replacement to a skilled 7’ center is likely not even 7’, so the skilled center makes a lot of money; the opposite is true for point guards where average levels of ability are fairly close. it’s the same in football.

think of it in terms of distributions: the distribution of talented centers in basketball and quarterbacks in football has a narrow middle and long tails. for point guards and linemen the distribution has a fat middle and short tails.

Sherwin Rosen’s “The Economics of Superstars” essentially explains all of this in theoretical terms. he doesn’t cover positional breakdowns but does talk about differences in marginal ability. which is, of course, the proper way to look at it.

(this line of logic applies to pretty much any sort of entertainer, from actors to musicians to athletes. some maintain that it even applies to CEOs and other big business leaders.)