Pirates Continue To Spend Inefficiently

`

So you think the Pirates are just plain cheap?  Ugh, not quite.  Just very inefficient as the roster had performances by some Pirates that were the worst of their playing career.  Check out this article  by Maury Brown and The Biz of Baseball who points out that the Pittsburgh Pirates had just eight marginal wins. 

The cost of each of those eight wins was a staggering $2,826,548.   Eight marginal wins was the lowest in MLB, that isn’t a surprise, but what’s surprising is the closet team  was the Mariners who spent (gulp) $6,073,387 for each of their 12 marginal wins.

If your into production, efficiency, and the like, be sure to check it out.  Here are a few tidbits from the article to enjoy….

What is Marginal Payroll/Marginal Wins?

As a baseline, we’ll create a fictitious marginal team. Even the worst teams made up of near minor league players would not lose every game. So, we’ll say that a truly mediocre team would win only 30 percent of their games. For salary, we’ll set every players at the league minimum, which for 2010 was $400,000 . And finally, we’ll make the roster 25, plus 3 replacement players to allow for the DL.

Using each team’s winning percentage, along with the Opening Day payroll we can determine a team’s “marginal payroll”. Using Opening Day payroll gives you the “intent” of a club at the beginning of the season. When adding in how many games a team won over the course of the regular season, we can then determine how much it cost for each marginal win.

The formula works as such:

(club payroll – (28 x major league minimum) / ((winning percentage – .300) x 162)

~~~~

Each division is broken down in the article, click over and check it out….

"How good is Walt Jocketty? How bad to the Pirates continue to be? How badly did the Cubs spend without having anything to show for it? Consider… The Pirates spent nearly twice as much as the Reds per marginal win. But, it could have been worse (at least if this year were the only year the Pirates stunk up the standings). The Cubs finished 5th in the Division, just ahead of the lowly Pirates, spending 3.6 times as much per marginal win as the Reds did. Ouch.–Maury Brown"