Quote:
Originally Posted by mpejkrm
Yes, OOTP has long since had problems with arbitration process. Players very rarely LOSE money in arbitration no matter what. I've seen players earn up to $15 million in arbitration. David Price the reigning Cy Young winner only got $7.5MM this past year.
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I'm not sure that this is true. I think that OOTP may very well model the pre-FA arbitration process pretty well, which is precisely why more and more real world GMs are going way out of their way to avoid it. Good players get extensions as they enter arb year 1 to buy out the remaining arb years and 1-2 years of FA, while mediocre players get traded or DFAed in year 1 or 2 or arb because they aren't worth the consistently escalating salaries that come with 1-year arb contracts.
"I took my player to arb 3 times and his salary went up every time. This isn't realistic!" doesn't work as a statement because we have a ridiculously small sample of real world players who actually go to arbitration at all, nevermind in 3 consecutive seasons.
To take a look at Beorn's original question, I'm going to offer up one example of a player I can think of who has a similarly wide variance in performance, but with still escalating arbitration values - Jacoby Ellsbury
I *think* that the OP used the previous season's stat line with resulting arb figures, so I'll do the same for Ellsbury. All values from baseball-reference.
Jacoby Ellsbury: CF with good glove
made $496.5k in 2010
2010 hit .192 with 0 HR .241 OBP WAR -0.1 (lost war with Adrian Beltre); got $2.4 million thru arby
2011 hit .321 with 32 HR .376 OBP WAR 8.1; got $8.05 million thru arby
2012 hit .271 with 4 HR .313 OBP WAR 1.0; got $9 million thru arby
So, while there is clearly a tie between player performance and the "arbitration" year contract agreed to (team and player agreed to a number prior to hearing, so this deviates a bit from OOTP unless you do this manually), the gravity of the minimum salary, then arb1, then arb2, then arb3 contracts increasing in value trumps all. I find the numbers posted in beorn's original post to track reasonably with what I would expect *if* a similar scenario played out in reality.