BASEBALL CONTRACTS ARE OUT OF CONTROL!!!!

First overall pick in the 2009 mlb draft, Stephen Strasburg, signed a $15 million contract. And, of course, people are pissed. Scott Boras is greedy. Baseball sold out. Lost it's innocence. All that shit.

Look, idiots. How much baseball players make doesn't affect you. You don't own a professional baseball team nor do you play baseball for one. If Strasburg signed a $150 million contract your life wouldn't be any different.

And Strasburg's contract is not going to ruin baseball. The salaries these young men are making are the price of their labor, and prices are communicators. They communicate value. Value is determined by millions and billions of economic decisions. So when someone says that a draftee who has never played a major league game doesn't deserve X amount of dollars, that person is inadvertently claiming to have knowledge of the millions of decisions that communicate the value of the draftee's labor. Which is ridiculous.

I know it seems like MLB operates in a vacuum outside of the price system. MLB essentially has a monopsony on baseball players wishing to sell their services at a high professional level. However, there are market forces involved. It may seem like Boras and the Nationals brass just sat down and invented a price to their liking, but baseball salaries - just like all other prices - are subjected to the laws of supply and demand.

So, let's say that Strasburg's contract jacks up the price for future draft picks. Furthermore, let's say that many of these draft picks bust. As a result clubs will conclude that paying a bunch of money for unproven draft picks is not a worthy investment and thus, the demand for draft picks will go down. So will the price. The bubble will pop. People that don't like high baseball salaries can go back to being grouchy about something else.

It is more likely, however, that clubs will realize that investing in draft picks is a good idea and the salaries of these picks will grow.

And for those that are worried that MLB contracts are out of control, let's look at how much the MLB average salary has increased in recent years.


For comparison, the average accountant's salary increased about seven percent last year. Now lets look at a much darker time, a much greedier time in baseball history. A time when children were forced to play with rodent carcases in alleys blackened by the soot and ash from the bonfires of money baseball agents used to light their cigars.


Somehow Scott Boras polluted baseball with greed before he was even a sports agent. Damn that guy's good.