World Baseball Classic vs injuries

[seanofjapan]

Originally Posted by carlsonjok

This seems to me to be a bit of an oversimplification. Yes, he is a baseball player who was injured as a result of playing in a baseball game. But, you are overlooking that he is baseball player under contract to play baseball for a specific baseball team and he was injured playing in a game for someone other than that team. Given the salary that these guys pull down, I don't think it is unreasonable to expect that they will refrain from engaging in activities/behaviors that could reasonably jeopardize their ability to perform under their contract.

To be sure, that wouldn't be, in and of itself, reason to ban participating in these types of tournaments. What tips it over the edge for me is that there is something of a moral hazard issue at play. Injured players still get paid. Teams that employ injured players likely have insurance to cover their salary losses during the injury. Who isn't covered in this scenario? The fans who ostensibly pay for all of this. Now, I get that there is a lot of second order effects that accrue to the players/teams, but at the top level, players and teams are still indemnified in a way that fans aren't.

I don’t see moral hazard being an issue here. Moral hazard is about poorly aligned incentives. No player has any incentive to behave recklessly just because they are insured. Yup, they’ll still get paid, and the team will be covered, but the player will still suffer significant losses. The injury could affect their abilities and severely dampen their marketability long term. Time lost to injury often turns HOF careers into Hall of Very Good careers. They can also lose endorsement opportunities and a lot of other things. In short, even with insurance, players have strong incentives to avoid injury, and teams also have obvious incentives to keep their players healthy despite insurance.

Fans? Yeah, it sucks if a player on your team gets injured, but cancelling the WBC would also harm fans. Not the same set of fans of course (most fans of specific WBC teams like Puerto Rico aren’t Mets fans, and vice versa) but still, baseball fans.

Its also not true that fans aren’t indemnified, they are the stakeholder with the least at stake financially and the easiest way of protecting themselves. Fans always have the option of exit. If your team sucks due to injuries, you can just not buy tickets to see games, not buy team merch, etc. Fans have diverse lives and investments, while players and teams have much more specific, non diversified investment in the team.

What you are really complaining about is that fans suffer from disappointment that their team will not play as well as they otherwise would, but this feeling isn’t something one would normally expect to be compensated for.