※Translated with Notion AI. (Plus version)
The opening of professional baseball, which begins tomorrow, can be said to be the arrival of spring in the baseball world.
Many former professional baseball players are tackling the prediction of the professional baseball rankings for 2024 while welcoming the arrival of “spring ball”.
However, from the perspective of a former MLB player, I feel that their predictions lack the analysis based on grounds.
Japanese professional baseball adopts an estimated annual salary system, which is different from MLB.
Professional baseball is a system where this year’s annual salary is determined based on the team and individual achievements of the previous year, which is different from ordinary company employees.
In MLB, many leading players have multi-year contracts, which is a little different from Japanese professional baseball where there are many single-year salary contracts.
From that point, the stronger the team and the more players with good performance, the higher the total annual salary of the team tends to be, and it might be easier to predict the rankings based on the amount of investment by the team.
Numbers are just numbers. Just because you invest doesn’t mean you will win.
However, it is also true that it is rare for an invested team to finish last.
I hope you will enjoy watching professional baseball even more by digging deep into the information that can be read from the numbers and seeking the truth behind it.
In MLB, team management is more of an investment opportunity than a status of success.
Therefore, player salaries are soaring like rockets, but the team is also an industry with a structure where revenues can be obtained accordingly.
MLB fans enjoy predicting performances from the amount of investment in each team’s players and the annual salary by position.
I would like to introduce some of that fun.
