after an exceptional season and Hart wins after a crappy season. About 5 million for each. WTH…

is more than many people earn in a lifetime.
 

It blows my mind that we can debate whether a pitcher is worth $5 million or $7 million; and whether his feelings are hurt for only getting $5 milllion. But we do and do so without any sense of fantasy. Amazing.

Let’s see: My average hourly raise the past two years was 60 cents, which was offset by higher costs in healthcare plan absorbed by employees. Maybe I should have gone to arbitration for 80 cents an hour raise; or maybe for an additional $1000 an hour raise like Wandy did .

comparing professional athletes’ salaries to your own is not really possible. It’d be like comparing your salary to the salary of a day laborer in a Mongolian rice field.
If the laborer asked for a 5 cent a month raise, he’d be asking for too much.

The supply/demand economics of a quality starting pitcher are a bit different than whatever you do… and I don’t mean that as an attack on you in particular. I can be replaced and although I’d like to think that my company would lose a good deal of productivity, it wouldn’t impact their bottom line as if one-fifth of the Astros’ starting rotation was not there anymore.

After reading the Biz of Baseball article in the the fanshots earlier (before the arbitration decision), I was persuaded that Wandy’s agent probably aimed too high, meaning that he might win if he had asked for $500,000 less ($6.5 million). Wandy’s proposed number was on the high side compared to what comparable pitchers proposed in arbitration (e.g., Edwin Jackson asked for $6.25 million). Even if the player deserves more than the Company proposes, the agent can hurt his case if he proposes a number which the arbitrators think is too high.

I really doubt that this decision creates any problems between Wandy and the Astros. I think the prospect of those kinds of reactions is usually overblown. Both the team and the player know this is a business, and the arbitration is just part of the business. My guess is that the liklihood of a long term deal right now is lessened because the Astros won. If Wandy had won, the Astros would have had more incentive to seek a long term deal. But, given that Wandy thinks he is getting less than he deserves, why would he agree to a long term deal, knowing that he can aim for a lot more in free agency after 2011?

In more traditional statistics, Wandy doesn’t look nearly as impressive: 51-52 W-L with a 4.33 ERA and only one 200+ inning season. Unfortunately, things like his impressive FIP, tERA and xFIP marks don’t get nearly the same attention, obviously.

A guy like Wandy would get some pretty big money on the open market, but he was looking for a huge raise for a guy who just had his first season with more than 10 wins, and he was still only two games above .500 for the year. Not that W-L record and ERA mean much of anything at all, but the arbitrators do look at that stuff.

Guys with similar ERA and W-L marks to Wandy just didn’t get $7M in their second arb year.

But I hope that we can work out some kind of long term deal with him for at least a few years.