There’s episode of ESPN’s Outside the Lines on right now regarding incentives being added to players contracts. The first case that they discussed is Curt Schilling’s $3 million dollar incentive for winning the World Series. The ever-pompous Jeremy Schapp (or was it Steve Nelson?) suggests that Schilling’s incentive is ridiculous because it essentially pays him extra for doing his job. <\/p>\n
There are certainly many issues that arise when incentives are tied to particular statistics or individual awards, but I see no problem with a player being given a bonus for the performance of his team. In fact, this is preferable. When incentives are tied to individual performance, players and teams can be forced to make decisions that do not reflect the best interests of the team. When bonuses are tied to team performance, a player is encouraged to do everything he can to win. (Seen any bloody “sox” lately?)<\/p>\n
A perfect example of what can happen with individual statistical goals happened this year with Corey Dillon and the Patriots — Dillon was 29 yards shy of his $375K bonus for reaching 1600 yards with one game to go — a meaningless game that had no playoff implications. Dillon, who was pretty banged up at the time, really could have used the week off to prepare for the playoffs, but instead played the game and got his bonus. You can bet Pats fans would have been up in arms if Dillon had further injured himself during this meaningless game, and they’d have every right to be. Perhaps the Pats brass should have sat Dillon and given him the money anyway — that would have been the best thing for the team.<\/p>\n
Back to Schilling — in his situation, the bonus is not technically tied to anything he does individually, but instead to the team’s overall performance (which in reality is the true merit of any great player). The fact that major league baseball took issue with Schilling’s bonus structure in particular (while his contract was initially approved, MLB banned team-based performance bonuses shortly afterwards) is particularly ridiculous. It is still ok as far as the MLB is concerned to offer an incentive based on number of starts, strikeouts or homeruns, but paying a guy extra for winning the ultimate prize is not allowed? <\/p>\n
The fact of the matter is this: a players regular salary carries the expression that the player will work as hard as he can to be the best player possible, but carries no guarantee in line with performance. Sure, it makes sense that a player can only do so much (especially in a sport like baseball), but when it comes down to it, the greatest players win games. Good players on mediocre teams (Jim Thome on the Phillies, for example), may never have the ability to claim a championship bonus, but this is no reason to prevent a team from rewarding players based on overall team performance. In the end, individual players sell jerseys and put fans in the seats, but nothing brings in the cash like a winner. Why shouldn’t players be rewarded for doing what it takes to win instead of what it takes to pad their own stats?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s episode of ESPN’s Outside the Lines on right now regarding incentives being added to players contracts. The first case that they discussed is Curt Schilling’s $3 million dollar incentive for winning the World Series. The ever-pompous Jeremy Schapp (or was it Steve Nelson?) suggests that Schilling’s incentive is ridiculous because it essentially pays him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":637,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}