Baseball Salaries

Interesting piece over at Foxsports.com on how the average baseball salary has decreased for the first time in nearly a decade. (I found the article via Doug's Business of Baseball Blog - which I should have added to my blogroll by now).

I do think that the article left out some of the causes for the decline in the average salary including:

- It is now much harder for teams to insure contracts and the teams are thus much more hesitant to give out big dollar contracts

- With the rise of "sabermetrics" - the replacement level player idea has taken hold. Why overpay for a older journeyman when a younger cheaper player would provide the same productivity? (I would like to see charts on the median age and experience levels to go along with the pay information.)

- Salary Arbitration is being used by clubs much more often. Now this will result in larger one year contracts but it helps avoid dead money long term deals where a player is getting a big salary for being on the DL while driving up the cost of the average salary at the same time.