#5: Meet the man who brought detailed MLB salaries into the public eye
Plus: How to talk to your non-baseball fan friends about the torpedo bats
Hello and happy April, Zach here. Hannah has a fascinating conversation today with the reporter whose dogged and detailed work is the reason you know MLB payroll numbers, information it’s hard to imagine not having. But first: A different conversation. The Torpedo Bat Conversation.
If you’re the resident baseball-knower in anyone’s life, you’re probably fielding questions you never anticipated, from people you never anticipated asking them, all of a week into the new season. Thanks to a confluence of the Yankees’ record-setting homer day and the “reinventing the wheel” novelty of a ubiquitous object shifting shapes, just about everyone has heard about baseball’s present fascination.
So I’ve compiled a cheat sheet for helping the non-baseball fans in your life who might be confused, or even alarmed, by news of the common baseball bat’s transformation.
Q: They changed the bats?!
Yes, some players are experimenting with bats shaped differently. Where bats have traditionally been widest at the very end, the “torpedo” or “bowling pin” bats are widest around the sweet spot where hitters intend to hit the ball, and slightly thinner at the end to balance out the weight.
Q: The Yankees whacked so many homers with them. Isn’t it unfair?
What the Yankees did to the Brewers over the weekend certainly felt unfair, but it wasn’t.
For one thing, the bats are totally legal by MLB standards. Further, the Yankees aren’t the only team using them. And to top it off, Aaron Judge — the homering-est homerer of the Yankees lineup — isn’t using one.
Q: But it obviously makes a difference, right?
We don’t know yet.
An MIT-educated coach reportedly launched the idea with the Yankees in 2022, with the logically sound theory that shifting more mass into the area where hitters are trying to make contact would help them hit the ball harder more often. Eventually, it could be like choosing the right golf club for your swing, but most players are still in the “just pick one up and see what it feels like” stage.
That coach, who has since jumped to the Marlins, told The Athletic that major leaguers have been using the bats in games since 2023.
Q: Wait, so these weird looking bats just went unnoticed?
Yup. The world became alert to their existence via YES Network’s Michael Kay and Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s particularly shapely bat, but Giancarlo Stanton may have hit several booming, nationally televised homers with a torpedo bat last October. And many, many others experimented with them in spring training with nary a peep from observers.
Frankly, this whole thing might sound different if the bat had become a story via Elly De La Cruz doing extremely fun things with one Monday night. Instead, the Yankees bludgeoning a former teammate into oblivion gave the discovery just enough of a (false) twinge of impropriety to set the worst of the internet’s conspiracy impulses in motion.
Q: Should MLB ban the torpedoes?
Only against submarine pitchers. (Kidding, but now you know the most obvious joke in circulation.)
There’s not enough information yet on how these actually affect results, if at all. But if they boost offense without steroids or sign-stealing or a juiced ball — the last three reasons you’ve asked me about baseball, come to think of it — it seems like that would be fine.
Check back in a couple months, but don’t hold your breath.
Ron Blum is why we have pitch-level records dating back to 1988 and why we know the details of players’ salaries
by Hannah Keyser
I was 45 minutes into talking to Ron Blum when he mentioned that he built and sold to Major League Baseball the first-ever pitch-tracking system. It was on his mind because of the Yankees’ instant onslaught of home runs over the weekend. He noticed that the three home runs on the first three pitches of the game Saturday against the Brewers was said to be the first time that had happened in the pitch-tracking era, dating back to 1988. It’s an era that started when he and a friend built the first computerized scoring system for a company called Sports Information Database. When the company went bankrupt, he and the friend finished the program themselves and sold it to MLB.
“When they say records go back to 1988 that's because of our program,” Ron says. He estimates they got about $75,000 or $80,000 for it.
“Paid off all the college loans.”
I didn’t yet know this fact when I asked Ron if I could interview him. But as a shorthand for what he’s like: It’s perfectly typical of him. Ron has been covering baseball since the early 1980s. First while he was at Columbia University (where he and classmate Gary Cohen called soccer games together), then as a freelancer, for radio stations, and ultimately for the Associated Press. That means he currently works with my husband, who is an editor there, which maybe made him more inclined to grant me this interview, but I assure you has nothing to do with my fascination with his career.
Ron is both an institution and a character in a world that is full of people who self-style as one or both of those things with not nearly the bonafides. He is a rigorous, tireless, meticulous reporter. He wears a suit and trench coat everywhere and asks about international bonus pool space in the middle of the World Series. He’s also the AP’s opera writer.
I wanted to talk to Ron because I know him as one of the people most responsible for making player salary information public. The dollar figures associated with baseball players and teams have become such a significant part of how we interact with the sport. The concept of “value” in which money is the denominator has become integral to analysis conducted everywhere from the most sophisticated media outlets to the most casual fans.
Today, the AP is publishing their annual Opening Day payrolls for every team. This year, Ron tracked down and cataloged exact salaries for 953 players (Lawrence Butler, for instance, will make $2,678,571 this year). The numbers will make headlines and get cited for months to come. So for a little context, I wanted to get Ron’s insights on how this all came to be, and what it means going forward.
(Often Q&As will say that they’re “lightly edited for length and clarity” but Ron’s depth of specificity requires a heavier hand so rather than a raw Q&A I’m going to do a little more guidance through his quotes, which are organized thematically and not necessarily in the exact order they occurred.)
RB: The earliest lists of every salary were [put out by] the New York Times and Sports Illustrated in the ‘80s, and then it became more important as the amounts went up. ... At first, all the salary information in the pre-computer age was kept on three-by-five cards at the commissioner's office by Barbara Ernst and then it got computerized. …Everything became a lot more accountable once baseball computerized it, and every contract was available to all 30 teams.
What was your role in all of this?
RB: I was more pervasive. And then realizing, once the information was available to all 30 teams, that everything could be tracked down in detail, and you could figure out all the bonus provisions, which were certainly important. And then the information became more codified with the advent of the modest [Competitive Balance Tax] in 2003, from the 2002 [collective bargaining] agreement, and that put a lot more public focus on it for people wanting to be aware if teams were headed toward the threshold where they would have to pay tax.
The AP started publishing complete salary lists in 1989. Initially all the public payroll lists published anywhere were what Ron calls “frozen” reflections of the Opening Day 25-man roster plus players on the injured list. Then, one year, a mixup with the Seattle Mariners cost them — or credited them, he can’t remember — an extra $10 million for a player who had been released or traded. Ron became more committed to taking into account “cash transactions and trades and money due to players who had been released. Because obviously now, like last year with the Mets, that makes a huge difference, right?”
RB: And so I was involved in making the payroll information better reflect reality.
What I also did was track throughout the season. And then — in the CBT era, when it became computerized in 2000 — I put an effort into making sure end-of-season payroll final figures were published, which reflected all the transactions and changes and call-ups and releases during the season.
Did having all this information publicly available have any impact on free agency itself?
RB: Not that I could discern from my position, because once baseball computerized the information and made it available through EBIS to all the teams in the early 2000s, all the teams had that information. So that really was the change in behavior where they knew what everyone else was doing and they couldn't fib each other.
Before that, though, did they fib each other?
RB: To a certain extent in the early rise of free agency, yes. Agents could overstate deals, clubs could understate deals. So you look back at the papers from the ‘70s and for certain contracts, varying media reports had varying values.
Later, I asked what was the most mad anyone has gotten him in the course of doing this work and he said it was Mike Hampton’s agent at the Winter Meetings in 2000, who was trying to pull off some of this fibbing. “He deliberately overstated the deal by including supposed interest. So when we actually reported the deal, he was pissed off.”
Ron is absurdly thorough in how he reports on contracts now. Even if it takes him several weeks to nail down every detail, he likes to publish the complete payout schedule for things like deferred contracts or bonus structures. He figures that even if no one cares now, it could become relevant down the line.
RB: It's important to know how much they owe each year in these obligations, because that will affect behavior of the team and how they approach contracts 10 years from now. Whether it's a year that they owe $100 million in deferred money, or whether it's $40 million, in the end that cash flow affects decisions. Teams don't necessarily make decisions based on CBT payroll and [Labor Relations Department] payroll, it's an ongoing cash-flow basis. So in the year 2038, or whatever, let's say the Dodgers payroll that year is, on paper, $400 million, but it might be $280 million in actual cash, because $100+ million is going to the deferred obligation from the 2020s.
Ron’s biggest pet peeve in how other people report on contracts is a misunderstanding of how to talk about present-day value for these deferred money deals. I want to honor his efforts to correct the record but unless you quote sections of the IRS code from memory, this might too esoteric. In short, “present-day value” — which is especially relevant for things like Shohei Ohtani’s heavily deferred contract — is calculated differently for luxury tax payroll, regular payroll, and by the Players Association. Those numbers are not rigorously accurate reflections of what the contract is “actually” “worth,” they’re calculations for specific purposes.
OK. On to bigger picture stuff.
Does the concern over payroll disparity right now feel different to you?
RB: Yeah, because the numbers have gotten so much bigger, and what the Dodgers and [Steve] Cohen are doing.
But is that much different from when the Yankees were outspending everyone else?
RB: The Dodgers, because they're owned by Guggenheim and funded by pension funds, and Cohen, because he has billions of resources from his company, no matter what [CBT] rates they put, they're still spending.
Does the labor situation feel more precarious than in the past?
RB: Could be. But the bigger sign will be where the clubs in the middle, over the next year, side — if the clubs in the middle side with the little clubs and push Rob [Manfred] to propose a salary cap. But then none of it means anything until March 1-15, 2027, when people have to show their cards. You can bluff and you can say, ‘We need a salary cap,’ but when you face losing real games, that's when you have to show your cards. None of the bluster means anything until then.
But does that bluster feel different now?
RB: It feels exactly the same as before the 1994-95 strike.
Well, that's concerning! If you think it feels like ‘94-’95 again, then that is different than we've had in a long time.
RB: Yeah. On the other hand, Rob, having lived through ‘94-’95 is smart enough to know that he has to let it play out. And none of this really makes a difference until you take the plunge. And remember ‘94-’95 it was the Players Association determining the timing, because it was a midseason strike. This will be a Spring Training lockout.
The question is, when push comes to shove, what are the clubs in the middle going to do? And can the people who want to avoid a work stoppage get away with higher CBT levels and rates in lieu of an overall salary cap to do another patch for a five-year period? Rather than go to war and risk losing a season or two for a salary cap, where they’ll need probably $4 or $5 billion in credit lines to get through that.
What do you think will happen?
RB: I'm certainly not smart enough to read the tea leaves of how the teams in the middle are going to behave 20 months from now. You know the possibilities, but you don't know how it's going to turn out. And I don't think they know. I believe Rob when he says it's too early to guess what the clubs’ position will be.
Would a salary cap be better for baseball?
RB: There is no better for baseball. Is it better for the big teams, the middle teams, or the small teams? Certainly for the small teams, the salary cap is better. For everyone else, it's not. And certainly for the players, it's not. Because caps mean, by definition, money is being left off the table that would have gone otherwise to players.
Why do you find this stuff so interesting?
RB: Because nothing makes sense from what the teams do until you know what the resources are that they have and how they can spend it. Like Oakland1 spending money on players — [Luis] Severino and [Brent] Rooker — that's being done not because Oakland suddenly decided now, with three years in Sacramento, to spend money. It's because, in case there's a grievance by Players Association, they want to maintain the burden of proof on the Players Association, rather than on the club.
What we’re chatting about
Pitcher Erasmo Ramirez met his wife when she was working on the Tampa Bay Rays’ mascot crew. The story, relayed to People, is fun and heart-warming and all. If a person inside Mrs. Met ever found this sort of happily-ever-after, it might spell the end for baseball social media. —ZC
Thank you to Willson Contreras for bringing us a Jackass version of this week’s bat innovation. In case you were for some reason wondering, grip tape tastes “really bad.” —ZC
The Red Sox signed offseason trade acquisition Garrett Crochet to a six-year, $170 million extension that begins next year and runs through 2031. It’s a lot for a pitcher who has a total of 33 major-league starts under his belt, and also exactly what you should do if you trade a chunk of the farm for an ace. “We’re looking not just at what he’s done, but also what we believe he will do,” Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow told reporters. —ZC
Nathan Eovaldi twirled a Maddux — a shutout in fewer than 100 pitches — to notch the first complete game of 2025. He was also the first pitcher to go beyond seven innings this season. Of his 99 pitches, 36 were splitters, 23 curveballs and just 20 were fastballs. —ZC
My son was home sick from daycare so the extent of my contribution to our baseball conversation in the past 24 hours was, and now I’m quoting from our text exchange, GAH. —HK
Don’t know if this nomenclature was on purpose but I appreciate it.
Interesting interview!