Sports Salaries

Activity 1

Essential Questions:

  1. Are high performing athletes paid appropriately?
  2. Is owning a sports team profitable?

Create a document. Call it “Sports Salaries” Pick a sport to research – football, basketball, hockey, baseball, or soccer. Copy and paste the following questions into the doc and answer them.

  1. List the 3 highest paid players in your sport and how much they make.
  2. In general, do these players stats justify their pay when compared to other players? Explain with data and include a citation.
  3. List the top 3 teams with the highest payroll in your sport.
  4. Do the teams stats justify the amount they pay in salaries? (i.e. does the highest paid team come in first place?) Explain with data and include a citation.
  5. List the top 3 ranked teams in your sport and who owns them.
  6. Do the top 3 ranked teams generate a profit for their owners?

Activity 2

Essential Questions:

  1. Do teams with a higher payroll always perform better?
  2. Do owners always get what they pay for?

Create an Excel document. Use the MLB win/loss records and MLB team salary data too see if higher salaries buy a better record. Copy and paste the win/loss and salary data for the last 3 completed seasons. Use the “sort” function to compare records and salaries.

Answer the following questions in a new Google Doc called “Baseball Salary/Win Comparison”

  1. Describe the trend you see when comparing salaries and records over the last 3 years. How often do the highest salaried teams have the best records?
  2. In 2016, how many of the top ten teams in the MLB had a team payroll lower than the MLB average. Which team(s) were these? Is this a trend in 2017 and 2018, or an isolated event?
  3. In 2016, how many of the top ten teams in the MLB had a team payroll higher than the MLB average. Which team(s)? Is this a trend in 2017 and 2018, or an isolated event?
  4. What do these results seem to imply? Does a higher payroll always mean a better team?
  5. Are there outliers in the data (i.e. teams with a low payroll that did exceptionally well, or teams with a high payroll that did poorly).
  6. Are any of these outliers the same across all three years?
  7. Pick an outlier to research. Write a brief summary of why sports analysts think that team performed as they did. Include a link to your information source.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a movie based on a book by Michael Lewis. It reveals how the Oakland A’s manager, Billy Beane, used in-depth statistical analysis to field a team that made it to the play-offs while having one of the lowest team payrolls.

When finished, save the Excel document as, “baseball-salary-win-loss” and upload it to Google Classroom along with the doc called “Baseball Salaries 2”

When finished, save the Excel document as, “baseball-salary-win-loss” and upload it to Google Classroom along with the doc called “Baseball Salaries 2”

Activity 3

Create a final Google Doc and call it “Baseball Valuations”

The number of games (or World Series Championships) a team wins is just one measure of success for MLB team owners. Most MLB team owners, like other business owners, are concerned about a great many things including bottom line profitability. While it is important to win games (as this puts fans in the seats at stadiums), teams receive revenue from a number of sources in addition to ticket sales. Use Forbes sports team valuations  to answer the following:

  1. How many MLB teams lost money (had a negative “Operating Income”) in 2018?
  2. Year-to-year operating income is only one way to measure an owner’s return on his or her investment. Look at the first and second columns of the Forbes chart. The first column indicates how much the franchise is currently worth. The second column indicates the percentage change (from 2017 to 2018) of the value of that franchise. How many teams increased in value from 2017 to 2018?

Use this table in the Forbes article to answer the following questions.

  1. Take the case of the Florida Marlins. How much money (Operating Income) did the Marlins make in 2009?
  2. What is the estimated current value of the team (if sold now) for owners of Florida?
  3. Did the team’s value increase or decrease from 2009? by how much?

Use this opening day payroll and answer the following:

  1. Have the top 3 performing teams increased or decreased their payroll?
  2. Have the bottom 3 performing teams increased or decreased their payroll?
  3. How were the Miami Marlins able to increase their payroll from 2017 to 2018?