My maternal grandfather was both conservative and a huge fan of Ted Williams. That’s why he would have appreciated Thomas Sowell‘s baseball-related discussion of the value of labor in the new third edition of Basic Economics.
Sowell bats away the idea that each worker has some “real” worth that might or might not be reflected in his pay. Instead, the worker’s pay is based on his productivity. That productivity depends on his own talents and skills, as well as factors over which he has little or no control, including the quality of the equipment he uses, his managers’ skills, and the efforts of co-workers.
The same principle applies outside what we normally think of as economic activities. In baseball, a slugger gets more chances to hit home runs if he is batting ahead of another slugger. But, if the batter hitting after him is not much of a home run threat, pitchers are more likely to walk the slugger in a tight situation, so that he may get siginificantly fewer opportunities to hit home runs over the course of a season.
During Ted Williams’ career, for example, he had one of the highest percentages of home runs — in proportion to his times at bat — in the history of baseball. Yet he had only one season in which he hit as many as 40 homers, because he was walked as often as 162 times a season — averaging more than one walk per game during the era of the 154-game season. By contrast, when Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961, breaking the record at that time, he was walked less than a hundred times because Mickey Mantle was batting right after him, and Mantle hit 54 home runs that season. There was no percentage in walking Maris to pitch to Mantle with one more man on base. Maris’ productivity as a home-run hitter was greater because he batted with Mickey Mantle in the on-deck circle.
On a separate note, I’m so distraught about the Earl of Shaftesbury’s untimely demise that I think I’ll stay home from work Monday.
