Earlier in the year and during the offseason, I helped Kevin Creagh from The Point of Pittsburgh in calculating inflation with respect to payroll in the game of baseball and then looked at the Pirates payrolls from 2010-2018 and compared the inflation adjusted numbers between the Pirates and the rest of the league. In April, Forbes released their business of baseball numbers which provides a quick look into a team’s revenue, costs, and profits. It’s an estimate, but it’s the best publicly available estimate that there is.
When originally looking at inflation, I simply created a market basket of opening day payrolls and created an inflation rate based off of that.