A Large Regular

Baseball Salaries

Interesting information on baseball salaries. This seems to be the most quoted item from the article:

While there is a decline in overall spending, the average salary is $3,240,206, up 2.7 percent from last year. This is due to less players being on the DL going into the season, where replacement players are often paid the league minimum. According to Ronald Blum of The AP, just 69 players started the season on disabled lists, down from 106 last year.

So average player salaries are actually up over last year? Interesting. The tidbit that really caught my eye was this:

Here is the average player salary, by League:

* American League: $3,371,417
* National League: $3,121,812

The general impression is that the American League is superior to the National League. I guess here's some proof that on average the American League players are at least $250,000 better than their National League counterparts.

HT Baseball Musings

Opening Day Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous baseball thoughts and observations.

The Braves were 4-14 last season against Philadelphia but the strange thing is that they were 0-9 at home at Turner Field and 4-5 up at Citizens Bank Park... Jermaine Dye needs just 2 HR for 300 career and just 9 RBI for 1000 career. I forget that Dye started his career with the Braves. Cliff Claven would say the answer is six guys who have never been in my kitchen but the thing these six players have in common - Keith Lockhart and Michael Tucker, Neifi Perez, Todd Belitz, Mario Encarnacion and Jose Ortiz - is that they were all traded for Dye in three separate trades... Tim Wakefield and Pedro Martinez both have exactly 400 career starts... I read an interesting point over at Baseball Musings over whether the Mets signing of Gary Sheffield might cause a rift “between Wright and those players who might be replaced by Sheffield or sent down to the minors to make way for him.” Fernando Tatis is up there in age (34) and is just making $1.7 million this year. Sheffield could take at bats and by extension money off his family's table. Ryan Church and Daniel Murphy are both lefties. It is Tatis who is the right handed bat Sheffield will be replacing for the most part. The devil in me hopes that Tatis cold-clocks Sheffield in a locker room brawl ... I'm glad Kris Benson made the Rangers. I've sorta missed seeing pictures of Anna Benson every once and a while...

The New SI Cover



This is pretty cool. I'm a fan of comic books but I have to wonder if the Red Sox keep screwing up people's story lines. How can it really be bizarro baseball with the Red Sox still in first place?

HT Baseball Musings