"Honestly? What's to like about it?"
-Anonymous MLB executive, on the subject of salary arbitration

Bud Selig and the executives at MLB headquarters must have breathed a sigh of relief. At the end of the 2008 season, baseball could boast that it had reached the second highest paid attendance in its history, that on top of another record year for revenues, all while just missing what would be the onset of one of the largest economic declines in US history.

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In baseball parlance, MLB Advanced Media is in the bottom of the ninth with two outs in their legal case with CBC Distribution and Marketing Inc., the fantasy sports company that has been fighting for the rights to use player names in conjunction with their statistics without paying a fee to MLBAM for licensing. On Tuesday, October 16^th, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis ruled 2-1 upheld a lower court decision in favor of CBC, based on First Amendment rights, delivering yet another blow to MLBAM's legal case. "The decision is a big win for us. It is a big win for the fantasy sports industry, as well as entrepreneurs of the World," said CDM Fantasy Sports' Vice President Charlie Wiegert. "It's a win for all the underdogs. All the Davids who have a war with a Goliaths."

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The bubbly had to be popping at MLB's New York offices, and at the headquarters of Turner Sports. The gamble to place the Division Series exclusively on cable through Turner's TBS channel had initially paid off handsomely. In the next few days, however, the television execs, Bud Selig and the rest at 245 Park could be faced with a bit of a champagne hangover. With the Yankees being knocked out of the playoffs in a Game Four ALDS loss to the Indians, only the Boston Red Sox remain as a perennial ratings powerhouse. No Yankees/Red Sox drama. No Chicago Cubs, no Wrigley Field, no goat, no curse. Not even a Rally Monkey.

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When Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball, a larger audience became aware of Doug Pappas and his groundbreaking metric, Marginal Payroll/Marginal Wins, published here at Baseball Prospectus. The metric placed an economic value on how much a club was spending to earn wins, and how much a club was spending in the overall in terms of marginal payroll. It placed the value of a win into perspective, and was seen as a way for clubs to better valuate how they spent, not how much they spent.

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See, it's Opening Day, and I found me a little black book full of numbers. No, not phone numbers, these numbers: the player payroll figures for all of them thar 30 MLB clubs. Yep, there's a bunch of money being thrown at players, and since you seem like the reasonable type, I thought I'd show you all the zeros in the book's ledger. Seems I have here the Opening Day payrolls for 2007. What? Well now, they seemed to add in 2006 and 2005 as well...

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"In response to those concerns of our fans, baseball has negotiated with DirecTV to offer the package to the incumbents," Major League Baseball President Bob DuPuy said at the announcement last Thursday. "I hope that those fans who have been directing their concerns to us over the last several weeks will now encourage their cable carriers to in fact enlist for this package."

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It was the foresight of Marvin Miller, just after Curt Flood lost his challenge of MLB's antitrust exemption in the Supreme Court, that set the stage for the creation of salary arbitration. Miller understood that trying to achieve free agency for players immediately after the Flood ruling was not going to be fruitful, so salary arbitration was offered as an alternative. With the exception of Gussie Busch and Charlie Finley, the owners accepted the process as part of the new deal. Miller saw this as one of the greatest achievements of his early career as executive director of the MLBPA. He correctly anticipated that even though some players would lose their arbitration cases, they would still see a boost to their salaries as compared to not having the process.

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Ignorance is learned; innocence is forgotten.
-José Bergamín, The Rocket and the Star

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