Oh No! I Cheered for the Team With The Largest Payroll in Baseball!*

An Occasional Advice Column, Vol. 4

Oct 31, 2024

A requiem for another baseball season, and how anchoring bias works in the moral life.

It’s Never Morally Permissible to Cheer for the Yankees

Let’s just get that out of the way. You’re already wrecked for supporting the pinstripes, and may God have mercy on your soul, or at least draw you to ally with a different team before next April.

Since time immemorial, the Yankees have been and will always be the exemplification of all that is wrong with baseball: the over-bearing owner interfering with team play of the late George Steinbrenner, the obnoxious fans, outrageous prices, the self-serious importance. When you’re one of only two teams in the league that doesn’t put their players’ names on the jerseys, you’re emphasizing that your team is a legacy, and that the individuals in the shirts are just passing through, to be replaced by the next superstar to be poached.

This is absolutely true about the Yankees, and even the Yankee fans know it. It’s fun to read about folks like Anthony Volpe who grew up as Yankees fans and now get to play for the Yankees. But the Yankee lineup routinely reads like a shopping list of an MLB video game: former Cy Young winners, former MVPs, former stars of mid-market teams scooped up by a franchise willing to pay ridiculous amounts of luxury tax money to field the best team money can buy.1

Over the years, I’ve followed several American League teams: the Red Sox before they won a series, the Tigers before and after Cabrera, and now the Astros2. But no one is safe from the Yankee wallet3. Their payroll is five times that of the lowest payroll in baseball, the defunct Oakland Athletics, and three times the payroll of the Miami Marlins, the former team of….wait for it….Yankee designated hitter Giancarlo Stanton.

My teams—the Astros and the Tigers—faced each other in the first round, forcing the Astros out, and the Tigers collapsed before the Guardians. I have no love for the Dodgers, as the Astros had to fight it out with them for years in the same division.

But, they weren’t the Yankees, and so, the Dodgers were the team to cheer for. And it was a great series: the Yankees and the Dodgers have met twelve times in the World Series, and have featured some amazing clashes. This year’s was as good as they come: the first ever walk-off grand slam, Freddie Freeman homering four games in a row, back and forth lead changes. Last night, the Dodgers came back to win the Series, overcoming the largest clinching game deficit of all time, playing really smart ball, and capitalizing on errors by the Yankees, which I confess I relished.

But it’s all a trick of the eye. As much as I inflate the sins of the Yankees—of which there are many—they’re only slightly worse than the Dodgers. The Dodgers, after all, recently signed Goliath-mega-star Shohei Ohtani for an eyepopping 700$ million dollars over ten years. Their lineup is equally littered with former MVPs, Cy Youngs, mid-market superstars. Series hero Freddie Freeman was a Braves superstar before the Dodgers offered him an annual salary which is one third as much money per year as the now defunct Oakland A’s spent on their entire payroll.

The other team that obnoxiously doesn’t put names on their jerseys?

The Dodgers.

It’s all monsters under the hood if you look hard enough.

Anchoring Biases and Other Moral Tricks

If you go to a fast food place, and there are two sizes—regular and large—the large version looks large by comparison. But when there are three options—the regular, the medium, and the large—the second one (the former large) no longer looks exorbitant—and this is the important point—even when the price is exactly the same as in the first scenario. This is what’s called an “anchoring bias”, that we make judgments relative to where we start from.

If I ask you to estimate what affordable housing is, you’ll most likely give me a figure which is comparable to what you spend on housing. It’ll be a few dollars one way or another, but by and large, you’ll estimate “affordable” on the basis of what you can afford. A similar phenomenon shows up lots of places: if I was looking at two prices, and then I add a third option, the third and pricier one becomes the new outlier, and the second and formerly pricy one now seems more reasonable.

Examples of this phenomenon are everywhere, and illustrate a very basic principle about our judgments: when made in relative terms, we are very susceptible to being persuaded on the basis of where we ourselves stand. This doesn’t mean that judgments are always wrong—it’s entirely possible for me to make a judgment about housing that fits within the mean of housing prices. It’s just that we tend to make our judgments relative to subjective standards pretty often, and usually in areas about which we have little expertise.

If, for example, I know that a burger costs little to make relative to the price on the board, I’m less affected by the comparison trick that’s in play here. And similarly, if I know that certain moral habits cause demonstrable harm, or have it on Good Authority that certain moral habits are worse than others, then introducing comparisons won’t do much in terms of how I think about what a thing is worth. The mythos of the Dodgers as a scrappy underdog evaporates in the cool light of payroll comparison.

Jesus and the Anchoring Bias

Escalating prices are bad for the game: they destroy the ability to follow a team reliably across time, because you have no idea who will be on the team. The Ship of Theseus comes to life in the MLB offseason as players skip from team to team, such that even my 2024 Tigers—a mid-market team—looks nothing like the 2021 roster. We’re left with two alternatives here: abandon all hope of reasonably enjoying major league baseball, or come to terms with your own team’s Mammon.

The anchoring bias is particularly tough when you have affection toward one of the options on the table. If I think that gluttony is particularly bad, but struggle with, say, avarice, I might be on good historical grounds by pointing to John Cassian’s taxonomy to say that gluttony is worse. But it doesn’t mean that my avarice isn’t any less the root of all kinds of evil, or that it’s not corrupting me in different ways. It just means that I have particular work to do which isn’t always overlapping with gluttony. I can overlook that the Tigers still paid their active roster 33 million dollars in salary….even if that’s one-eighth of what the Yankees shelled out.

The point of the parable that Jesus tells about the tax collector and the Pharisee is most directly that the tax collector went home justified before God because of his penitence, and in terms of how to make sense of allying ourselves with bad things, there are worse places to start. But I want to go a step further, and ask how it was that the tax collector didn’t see it in the first place.

In light of what I’ve sketched above, it seems likely that, before coming to the synagogue, the tax collector may not have even been aware of the disparity in his piety because, as we see with other places in the Gospels, tax collectors tend to hang out with other tax collectors. But remove that frame, and the avarice of the tax collector comes shining through. Similarly, the Pharisee, in hanging out with other Pharisees, fails to repent in the synagogue, because it’s home turf. He’s fully in the sway of anchoring bias: he’s the plumbline, the Tigers, the regular sized meal. Nothing to notice here, until, of course, he’s in the presence of Jesus.

Being forced to watch a Series of two of the most monied teams in baseball illuminates things that remain obscured so long as I only follow my only amply-monied team. And I’m tempted to say that the same holds for Christian introspection. All the more reason to cheer occasionally for the poor Dodgers, or perhaps more seriously, walk alongside the poor, the prisoner, the burdened, as I consider my own invincible pieties.

Christian Ethics in the Wild

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