Last week we took a look at how simple economic principles drove the pitching prices in the recent League of Alternative Baseball Reality (LABR) AL and NL auctions. The results showed that the AL participants spent nearly $50 more on saves or speculative saves than their NL counterparts.
Now let's consider more economics and the fact that these auctions are a zero-sum economy. The AL owners spent about $50 more on relievers than the NL. The NL now has $50 more to spend. Where do you think they'll spend it? Was that extra budget funneled to hitting or starting pitching?
Perhaps surprisingly, the AL also paid more for starting pitching than the NL. It wasn't much, but twenty bucks is twenty bucks. This falls in line with the supply and demand analysis from last week. With the arms falling left and right in the American League, the supply of solid pitching well exceeds the demand so the cost went skyward.
Below is a chart of the starting pitching purchased across the leagues. The columns are purposely skewed to show how closely the leagues matched up by taking Kershaw out of the picture.
Overall. more budget was put to starters in the AL, but player for player, they line up pretty closely until you get to the single digit area. Here, in an effort to avoid the $1 end-gamers, AL owners were willing to go the extra buck. It's telling that the NL found 17 $1 starters while the AL only had 11.
As suggested previously, the dirty little secret in all this is everything is relative. The end game arms in the NL may have slightly better stats than their AL brethren but there's still barely useful. In other words, it really isn't worth trying to avoid the last few AL pitchers while accepting the last handful of NL options. Relatively speaking, they're worth the same.
Circling back to the zero-sum nature of things, the NL spent more on hitting than the AL which again can be explained by supply and demand. The supply of hitting in the AL is superior so the cost should be depressed. And it was.
Next time we'll put the recent Tout Wars auctions under the same scrutiny and see if Economics 101 holds true or if there was some other force directing things.