I don’t understand your point. How does the fact that the Giants have a contract with Barry Bonds make Beltre a better acquisition for them than it does for us? Using these two teams, I would argue the contrary. Beltre is a better acquisition for the Mariners, because he would improve the Mariners more than he would improve the Giants. The Mariners currently have a hole at 3rd base with only a slight to moderate chance of filling it to satisfaction from within the system. The Giants, on the other hand, have one pretty good player locked up at third base for a while (Edgardo Alfonso) and have another young third baseman that shows potential in Pedro Feliz.

I’m not saying that the Giants 3B situation is an ideal one… but if the Giants really want to improve their team, acqisitions in other positions have the potential to provide greater improvement for less cost (such as SS, CF, RF, 1B, Starting pitchers 2-5, relief pitcher).

Aw heck… what am I saying? The Giants could stand an improvement at just about every position except left field.

You are right regarding my juggling Manuels, I realized this as well later after I’d posted, too. I’m not much more impressed with Bro’ Charlie than with Jerry, but it would be churlish of me at the least to blame the one for the other’s mistakes.

The problem is that the question as framed entirely ignores the factor that determines its success or failure. It’s like saying “Is it better to buy a new or used car?” and coming up with an answer like “used”. It entirely ignores that every cost/benefit discussion is different depending on the individual and the decision made on a generalization like that may have a slight advantage in being correct in more situations while still entirely wrong in many others.

Take the stars/scrubs thing. If you spend $20m on Bonds and $1m on three other players, and you spend the minimum on draft picks Hudson, Zito, Mulder, that’s a huge difference in results against spending $20m on Chan Ho Park and $1m on three washed-up veterans.

No study on payroll distributions or similar problems can avoid the problem that payrolls are once-removed from the ability that most separates good from bad teams: the ability to assess and acquire talent.

Bringing in a $20M scrub isn’t going to help anyone. The idea is that contracts are correlated with the level of talent of the player involved and are, in this sense, a measure (albeit a noisy one) of player quality. So, if I control for the overall talent level of a team, would a particular team be better off spending their money on two players that are OK, or one player that is great and one that is replacement level, WITH EVERYTHING ELSE BEING THE SAME. I guess I don’t see the flaw in the argument.

Their finding is that the greater the inequality within a team’s salary structure, the lower the performance of the team, all else equal.

This echoes the much bantered-about stats that teams with more than x% of their payroll devoted to y players don’t perform up to z standard.

It’s a flawed argument because payroll distribution does not have anything to do with quality of payroll, or level of payroll. If I take the Devil Rays and spend $20m/year on a scrub, that doesn’t help. Whereas brining in Barry Bonds does (see: the Giants). Similarly, if I have the Yankees, with 10 guys who make $20m/year, that payroll distribution’s going to look pretty even, and perform well, but any of those guys would be 1/4th of the Expos payroll if they were over th ere.

Economic (and other) studies of sports issues often focus so specifically on the application of some tool or theory that they entirely miss the question of the worth of applying that same tool or theory to the problem, and what exactly the end result measures.