Phillies News and Discussion 2025 Season

[andyb]

Clearly you grumbled when the first players crossed the $100K salary barrier decades ago.....

[zambonir]

We can say "inflated" or just "paid more" instead of overpriced. A quantitative rather than judgmental description.

Relative to the revenue MLB generates nobody is overpaid, even if we wish John Middleton's money all went to teachers and libraries instead of baseball and art collections [not that he isn't very charitable too].

[Austinfan]

Except the "Winner's Curse" suggests FAs ARE overpriced.
A smart organization would take that into account.

Anomalies: The Winner's Curse - American Economic Association

and in a similar fashion, the "Bidder's Curse"

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.2.749

[julio]

How does a "smart" organization take these into account, in a limited market for scarce talent, where the other bidders are not "smart"? The result is that the "smart" organization doesn't acquire the needed talent. Yeah, they don't "overpay" - they don't pay at all.

I mean, the bidders could collude. It has been known to happen. But failing that, you either play the game (bid the price up) or you don't make a transaction. And when the scarce talent is gone... it's gone. There isn't more coming on the market next week, or next month.

[phillychuck]

One could take this into account by moving resources to other means of acquiring talent (I expect that’s what AustinFan would prefer)...Take your free-agent pool dollars, and buy the best talent you can on the amateur market, hire the best scouts you can find for the draft, buy Japanese talent, make trades for younger players who are on their first contracts or in arbitration, etc. But don’t buy the Harpers, Wheelers, Schwarbers, Castellanoses, Realmutos, Turners, Nolas, etc. etc. at competitive market value. I think this might work, but organizations don’t try it at the extreme level I think would be needed to prove it. Interesting experiment, but if I owned a big-league team I wouldn’t try it.

BTW: The winner’s curse is very real, and Thaler is a Nobel prize winner, so he has authority to write about it.

[Matt_Winkelman]

The thing about all of these free market thoughts is that MLB has hard capped all other avenues of spending (both the draft and international are functionally hard caps) and has artificially suppressed the salaries of a large portion of the workforce. You can say international professionals, but there really are 1-2 players worthy of spending in that market a year. Yes you then have to overpay for a free agent, but you can't actually spend the money on something else. If you don't want Trea Turner at Trea Turner money, then you just don't get a player of that value. There is no replacement market to get alternate players without then spending resources from the amateur and development group which gets back to the hard cap. You can pour a ton of money into development, but as you see with the Dodgers and Mets, that doesn't mean you can't spend elsewhere too. It all comes down to there being a very very limited supply of players and no other alternatives.

[phillychuck]

Hypothetically, I can see a way to divert your resources. First, as I mentioned, you have the best scouting and analytics available. Then you draft better than everyone else. You trade your mid-to-late 20s players fr equivalent 20-22 year old talent before you have to pay the older guys. Every trade you make you get younger. You trade talent at the deadline for better, younger talent. As I said, this would be an interesting experiment, but no one will try it. And it would be really hard to be consistently right about your signings and trades.

[zambonir]

I feel like this experiment has been tried. By Oakland, a team whose s*** didn't work in the playoffs, per their own architect, and by teams like Tampa, Kansas City, Cleveland and Minnesota, with some occasional and anomalous success. Houston may have been the best at the Tampa model, except they cheated two different ways [the guy who got caught hacking and the sign-stealing) and also still spent at a very high level on veteran pitching, and now have to spend in general.

I think Tampa really has done it this way, because they did have the players. The current Philllies couldn't do it because they only have prospects or slightly above-average young players approaching FA fast, not any stars.

A system that actually let teams pay players for their peak value/age/performance would work better of course.

It really is a lot like Hollywood in a way. An actor has a few hit movies or one hit TV show and gets to a certain salary level, and then there's really nothing to do but bomb or disappoint. A few still excel, or grind along, but it can never be as good as when they were at their youngest and hottest and still semi-affordable.

[andyb]

Economic models from the rest of the world just do not apply as much to free agents. The vast disparity of resources between teams means that some teams can afford more and some teams cannot.

Tampa also chooses their model because they were forced to do so. Oakland at the moment shows how hard the model is to pull off even with smart people. In an ideal world the Phillies would hit on every draft choice and international free agent. We don't of course. We seem to be very average in scouting and player development. When that happens, spending money for free agents can be a good decision.

PC - I think we have an above average amount of resources dedicated to scouting and analytics and development. We may be getting better but we are not really that good overall. We trade prospects of course, but in terms of development per dollar we seem to be very average. When that happens smaller draft and international pools can also hurt long term. No organization can rely on AF's strategy of cheap free agents and late round draft picks. Every organization should try. It is just not a great strategy long term and with limited organizational spots very hard to pull off.

[Matt_Winkelman]

Isn't this just what the Dodgers do while also spending more on FA than anyone else. They turned Michael Busch into Zyhir Hope (a top 25 prospect in baseball) and Jackson Ferris. It is the Rays model, but you aren't going to do it better than the Dodgers doing it too. All teams should do it generating tons of extra talent, but then you also have to spend on FA to keep up.

[zambonir]

And the Dodgers use the Rays model for a reason don't they?

[Austinfan]

If you did what the Rays did, then paid your top young talent before they became prohibitively expensive, you could optimize your resources.

Paying 30+ player paid based on their peak years is the worst possible strategy, it only make sense on the margin when you have a gapping hole that has synergies that make it rational to overpay - but if you do this as your primary mode of team building, you'd better have a very rich owner!

The one area that isn't capped is scouting and development resources, the Phillies have paid for facilities, but it seems like a lot of organizations that they still have a "good ole boys" approach to scouts and coaches. Though this may have changed recently, so far either they haven't hired the "best and brightest" or totally screwed up attempting to do so.

[allentown]

I feel like this experiment has been tried. By Oakland, a team whose s*** didn't work in the playoffs

The team that used to be Oakland never had a budget approaching what the Phillies have to spend.

"A system that actually let teams pay players for their peak value/age/performance would work better of course."
The system does allow teams to do that with their own players, as we did with Kingery. Nola was a big underpay in his early career, but the system didn't stop the Phillies from paying him as a star and getting a long deal with team options in return. Because all baseball contracts are guaranteed, there would be a big risk for a team to do that, but nothing stopping them. We could have paid Schwarber what we thought 3.5 WAR was worth after the 2023 season -- say $28 million a year for 2024, 2025, and 2026 with a team option for same price in 2027, if we valued WAR at $8 million per, for players at or above 3 WAR. That would have been more of a gamble for the Phillies than for Schwarber.

[zambonir]

Well, if Kingery had actually turned into Utley he still would have been underpaid.. But they certainly didn't pay Howard or even Utley, Ruiz and Rollins fair value at their peaks. Those guys were basically collecting money in their 30s to make up for money they didn't get in their 20s, and the team at the time couldn't afford to pay other players while doing so. Howard was cooked, the other guys just weren't quite as good by then. The current team with this owner and budget theoretically would have still paid their way past that. We'll see if they do it as the Nola, Harper and Turner deals become negative.

Meanwhile we paid/are paying four guys the money that they didn't get to make with their previous teams, but especially Nick and Trea. They're still pretty good, not just good like they were on those other teams.

[allentown]

But they certainly didn't pay Howard or even Utley, Ruiz and Rollins fair value at their peaks.

I don't think you've contradicted anything I wrote. I didn't say the Phillies paid the group of stars on the 2008 championship team the value they were worth early in their careers. I said that they COULD have chosen to do this. Nothing in the baseball rules would have prevented it. They certainly couldn't have done this with nothing in return and be a competitive team. The something in return would be team-only options for future years at a non-escalating rate. There is still an injury and nonperformance risk that is borne by the team.

I think without Covid, Kingery could have had a much more successful career but there was aero chance that he would have become Utley.

[zambonir]

Haha touche. Stark on Ranger.

With Suárez, the often-brilliant but often-injured 29-year-old left-hander for the Phillies, the rest of the sport looked at his incredible first half in 2024 and said: Let’s see him do that again. OK then. He’s sitting on a 1.99 ERA with one start left before the All-Star break. So they’ve seen it!The question is how attractive is a 30-year-old left-hander with a history of streaks of brilliance but iffy volume.

“It’s perfect,” said one rival exec, with a laugh. “He’ll sign with the Dodgers.”

What we’ve learned in the first half of the MLB season: 10 midsummer takeaways

[Philsmania]

But they certainly didn't pay Howard or even Utley, Ruiz and Rollins fair value at their peaks.

At least with regard to Howard, I've often thought that if you flipped his earnings history around and he made $25 million a year his first five years and then gradually descending to ML minimum his last five years, his earnings would have been appropriate for his performance. With him, it all came out in the wash in the end.

[Philsmania]

Rojas is at the center of a MLBPA investigation of possible financial misconduct on the part of his agent.

MLBPA investigating agent following allegations of financial misconduct

[zambonir]

And it also involves Big League Advance, that's where Rojas got the money that he then invested with the agent.

[BostonRoss]

I think that most players who have long enough careers make up for the money they were worth but didn't get when they were young. I remember there was a stink about how the Cubs kept Kris Bryant in the minors for a few extra weeks at the beginning of his career to save a year of service time. Bryant more than made up for it with the free agent contract he had not been worth, even before his illness.