Historical Mod Salaries Calculation

[Phil Parent]

Just wondering, how will you guys deal with the salaries for historical mods?

Baseball Reference has all the info, and the site can even adjust the salaries from years' past for inflation, but this doesn't really put it in today's economics.

So, I'm thinking about using the rule of three for this:


(Historical Player Salary * 2015 MLB Average Salary) / Season's MLB Average Salary = 2015 Player Salary

So say, we punch in Barry Bonds' numbers from 1994.... averaging the value of the 6 years contract he signed in 1992 over 6 seasons...

(7,300,000 * 4,000,000) / 1,200,000 =...

Which would give him 24.32M per year for the next 5 seasons.

FWIW: Inflation-adjusted, without adjusting for market, his 1992 contract would give him around 12M per in 2015 dollars. It's faster to do it this way, but not as precise.

[jemyers1975]

That seems like a great way to do it. I may have to try this on the 1987 set. I was thinking about using OOTP 15 salaries with inflation set to 2014 but that is just random salaries. If we can actually use their real salaries and use a formula that would make it even more real.

With your formula I did a test run in Excel with 1987 and 1984 salaries and just put random years for contracts for now to see what it would be like here is a file if you want to view it of course I love your idea. The only problem is getting the contract years without going through every single player on baseball reference. http://wikisend.com/download/935372/Salaries.xlsx

[Phil Parent]

Wow, that's a great exemple of the results we'd get using the formula! Great work.

About getting the contract years right, unless there's a better ressource for it, I think using BR and Google is pretty much the way to go. But yeah, it will be pretty long and tedious. Looking at BR, you can tell when a player's salary went up, when he was granted free agency... with enough common sense, you can get something realistic.

For exemple, I just picked a player at random out of the team I was porting over, the 1994 Pirates. Al Martin.

I look at his salary history, he played 92 and 93 for league minimum (109k) and then got a raise for 94-95-96, (Average: 355k) before getting PAID (Average: 2,65M over 3 year).

I'll consider that 94 to 96 average to be one contract. So I pass 355k through the formula and it comes out to (Rounded) 1,2M per. So, in the game I'll have him at 1,2M per for 3 seasons. Makes sense. Then, the contract will end and he'll get paid like in real life, and PIT gets to keep him because he won't have enough service to be FA.

[Ghost Of The Year]

Pre 1985, say 1981-1984, there are small amount of salaries baseball reference doesn't have that baseball almanac does have.