In light of the MLBs imminent decision to expand the playoffs by adding a wild card team, I wanted to take a look at whether or not they'd accomplish their goal of making the playoff races more exciting, thereby making more money.

Someone with a lot more time on their hands could study clinch dates, and schedules, but I don't have the time or the interest to do that. I'm going to look at record disparity, something I did in about 15 minutes.

This doesn't account for any sort of "incentive" and doesn't account for effort exerted by teams in a given situation.

All I did was look at the 32 wild card seasons (16 in each league), and the difference between the top three non-division winners wins. Call the best non-division winner WC1, the next WC2, and the third WC3.

I assumed that, if the difference in wins between WC1 and WC2 was LESS than the difference between WC2 and WC3, that adding an additional wild-card team that year would DETRACT from the "drama". Take 2011 in the NL. The difference between the Cardinals and the Braves was 1 game. The difference between the Braves and the Giants was 3 games. In this case, adding a playoff team would DETRACT from the Drama.

On the other hand, look at 2009, also in the NL. The difference between the Rockies and the Giants was 4 games. The difference between the Giants and the Marlins was 1. That'd ADD drama.

So, looking at all 32 season, we get some interesting results:

In the AL, Drama was added 12 times, and detracted 4. In the NL, Drama was added 8 times, and detracted 8. Overall, that's 20 seasons with more drama, and 14 seasons with less. About equal to my 50% a priori estimate. (Exactly equal, if you only count the real league)

So, what does this mean? Not much. There'll be an about equal amount of seasons with more drama and seasons with less drama. I'm sure there's some inherent bias in this quick study that I didn't consider, and maybe I'll expand on it later. Probably not.

Full season data available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkGYe7flOFKPdE02b01UcndFWGIzdklITFBsYWZkcEE

Given that the details of Fielders contract haven't been released, we can't really do a proper comparison of the two. What we can do, however, is make a few assumptions. (And yes, they're going to be very broad assumptions, but they're generally supportable).

Let's assume that Fielder's contract is level for all 9 years, earning him about 23.8M per. Let's further assume that the long term inflation rate is 3%, as is generally forecasted for a short term period.

Discounting the nominal values:

Pujols' contract in 2012 dollars = 201.05M

Fielder's contract in 2012 dollars = 185.15M

This gives us a difference of 15.91M. But, that's not a fair comparison. We know that as of 2011, living in Detroit is 45% cheaper than living in Los Angeles. (Note: Home prices in Detroit are approximately 83% lower than those in LA, but I'll use the 45% Cost of Living Adjustment, for the sake of conservatism).

Let's further assume that the divide between Detroit and LA Decreases by 5% per year, as the automotive economy picks up, and as the housing market in the "Sand States" of the union continues to decline. So, from a 45% adjustment in 2012, we decline exponentially to a 29.9% adjustment in 2020.

So, if we adjust Fielders contract by dividing by one minus this adjustment (essentially adjusting it to get the same "purchase power" as Pujols' contract in LA gets --> Detroit Dollars * LA Purchase Power/Detroit Purchase Power = LA Dollars):

Fielder's annual purchase power adjusted salaries:

Discounting THIS cash flow stream at the same 3% gives him 297.3M in 2011 dollars, at the same purchase power level as Pujols is getting in LA.

So, you could argue that Fielder's contract is about 96M BETTER than Pujols', simply because of location.

Then again, you could argue (and I'd agree with you), that when you're talking about this much money, the general economy doesn't really impact you that significantly, and that you're less likely to actually live in the area where you're working, and thus Fielder won't draw on the massively cheaper cost of living in Detroit (because he doesn't have to).

But, assuming they live and spend most of their time where they work, Fielder can buy more toys with his contract than Pujols can buy with his. Still has to spend a lot of time in Detroit though. Which negates pretty much all the benefits.

So you can argue (and again, I'd agree), that this analysis isn't really relevant because of the raw dollars involved. It's kind of interesting, though...

Given that I love charting random things, I've decided to start sharing some of them with the community at large.  Not the actual community, I'm not allowed out there anymore, but here, with you people.   I won't provide context, because that's less fun, and context-less charts will hopefully lead to better dialouge, rather than me telling you what the charts mean (or what I think they mean)

Today, we start with 3 charts about our "third baseman"

Click to enlarge, but if you'd rather not:  each chart shows a different statistic.  Black line is career numbers through a given game (I only looked at stats as a Brewer).  Red line is the 25 game moving average, and the red line is the 50 game moving average.

1) Casey McGehee OPS (with Brewers only)

via i918.photobucket.com

Decomposition following le jump.

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