Salaries

For whatever reason, the big baseball news this week is salaries, which - shockingly - went up last year. Nerdy pet peeve of mine: it drives me nuts when stories talk about averages without saying whether it's a mean or a median. (Like when Bush said the "average American" would get a huge tax cut back in 2001; by using the mean salary rather than the median salary, the "average American" earned something like $200,000/yr. Which pisses me off.) Back to baseball: the $2.7M average MLB salary is a mean; the median salary is around $1M.

Anyway, what shocked me about the article is that it pointed to Houston's huge payroll. This last year the Astros quietly became the highest-salaried team in the NL (or at least came very close). The reason is a few gigantic contracts:

Roger Clemens $22M (prorated at $12.5M)
Jeff Bagwell $19.3M
Andy Pettitte $16.4M
Lance Berkman $14.5M
Roy Oswalt $11M

Damn, those are 2007 numbers. I have to say I've never really thought of Houston as a big-market team, but I guess they are now. Of course, Bagwell and Pettitte are gone in 2007, and Clemens maybe (I bet he'll be back), but Carlos Lee's $100M contract should keep them up there for a while.

(Also: I like this. That's a lot of $327,000's.)