It read like an extra credit question on an algebra quiz: You have $40 million to spend on twenty-five baseball players. Your opponent has already spent $126 million on its own twenty-five players, and holds perhaps another $100 million in reserve. What do you do with your forty million to avoid humiliating defeat? “What you don’t do,” said Billy, “is what the Yankees do. If we do what the Yankees do, we lose every time, because they’re doing it with three times more money than we are.” A poor team couldn’t afford to go out shopping for big league stars in the prime of their careers. It couldn’t even afford to go out and buy averagely priced players. The average big league salary was $2.3 million. The average A’s opening day salary was a bit less than $1.5 million. The poor team was forced to find bargains: young players and whatever older guys the market had undervalued. It would seem highly unlikely, given the wage inflation in pro baseball over the past twenty-five years, that any established big league player was underpriced.
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