Take Me Out to The Ballgame

With the reporting the last few days about 1) the Godzilla contracts with Harper, Trout, et al and 2) the average (read: mean) contract falling, by a bit, each of the last two years I wondered whether anyone in the analytics branch of sports actually gets it. Turns out, yes. As in real life, so in baseball: earnings are severely skewed.

The reported average salary of an MLB player is $4.38 million. However, the median income of $1.5 million tells a different story about the earnings of all players. The average gets distorted because of the large number of players with multimillion-dollar salaries. At the most recent count, 38 players are making above $20 million a year, and 125 players are pulling in more than $10 million.

One might wonder whether any readers of that site understand what 'median' is, but at least one sports writer does (well, that's not his day job). There is hope.