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GERALD SCULLY (Audra Scully via New York Times) |
Gerald Scully; applied economics to professional baseball
NEW YORK - Gerald W. Scully, a sports economist who offered an early statistical argument that major league baseball players were being exploited by their teams, died May 4 in San Diego. He was 67 and lived in San Juan Capistrano, Calif.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his daughter Audra said.
Mr. Scully wrote on many economic issues, including the relationship between government spending and economic growth; he argued that the optimum size of government is about one-fifth the size of the economy as a whole. But he is best known for an article, "Pay and Performance in Major League Baseball," which was published in The American Economic Review in December 1974, long before the economics of sport became a common field of scholarly inquiry.
The article described a method of determining the contribution of individual players to the performance of their teams, not only in the won-lost column but in the balance sheets. He used statistical measures like slugging percentage for hitters and the strikeout-to-walk ratio for pitchers and devised a complex formula for determining team revenue that involved a team's won-lost percentage and the market characteristics of its home stadium, among other factors.
By his calculations, Mr. Scully wrote, Hank Aaron was worth $520,800 to the Atlanta Braves in 1968, and Sandy Koufax $725,000 to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1966, his final season. Aaron never earned more than $250,000 a season in his career, which ended in 1976, and Koufax was paid $130,000 in 1966.
"Even mediocre players contribute in excess of $200,000 to team revenues," Mr. Scully wrote.
The article was significant in its use of sport to attack the economist's conundrum of determining the value to a company of an individual's work product. The standard major league player contract at the time included the reserve clause, which essentially restricted the market for a player's services to a single team.
In arguing that the clause amounted to economic exploitation of the players, Mr. Scully anticipated an arbitration decision the next year that considerably modified the reserve clause and opened baseball's era of free agency.
Among his several books are "The Business of Major League Baseball" and "Constitutional Environments and Economic Growth."
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