PARTICIPATION IN THE SCORING ASPECT IS STRICTLY OPTIONAL SO FEEL
FREE TO FIND THE CACHE AND WATCH ALL THE ACTION FROM THE GRANDSTAND.
GAME ON!
Welcome to the 2025 Home Run Derby! Every Saturday morning a new cache will be released. After it is published you will have roughly a week to find it and select a slugger to represent you in that week's edition of the home run derby. Select one player and include his name in your log. The number of home runs he hits the following week (starting the Friday after cache publication) is your score; don't worry, we will handle all the scoring.
The series will be cumulative points from April through September with a week off over the All Star break. The "catch" is every player must be unique, so FTF has choice of any player, second to find will have second pick and so on. The cache hiders will also be playing so the cache owner will select fifth each week. Additionally, participants are only allowed to a pick a player once during the season. In all subsequent weeks your pick must be different than any other player you had used in previous weeks.
This is week 13 of the series (13 of 25). All scoring will take place Friday June 20th through Thursday June May 26th.
In the context of Major League Baseball "wins divided by payroll" refers to a metric that measures the cost-effectiveness of a team's payroll in terms of wins achieved. It's calculated by dividing a team's total payroll (the amount of money they spend on player salaries) by the number of wins they have. This metric, sometimes called "cost per win" or "dollars per win," provides insights into how efficiently a team is using its payroll to achieve success.
Unlike the NFL, where teams have equal resources regardless of television market share, MLB has very little revenue sharing. Teams in large television markets enjoy virtually unlimited resources to field a competitive team while teams in markets like Tampa Bay or Denver compete for their scraps.
If Wins Divided by Payroll were used to determine the standings, this is what the NL West would have looked like last season:
If you account for the fact that Colorado had less than 40% of the Dodgers payroll, they are, in fact, still winning more games when you account for that discrepancy. Isn’t that interesting?
I wonder what the standings would look like if you took into account deferred payroll (salary paid out over future years for players on the current roster). Perhaps I will explore that further in the next hide.