If teams went out and gave big money all their young players who have obvious potential, they’d end up with a bunch of busts and injured players who never reach their expectations, and a lot of blown cash. Let’s leave that dumb idea to the NFL (See: Vick, Michael).

As to me being Bavasi think do you actually think any of those incompetent FO people read these blogs and forums?
The current FO’s only real mission is to insure a fat profit not a winner however they do just enough to give M’s fans hope thus keeps them coming.
ONly 100% housecleaning top to bottom of present FO with only few exceptions will the M’s ever see a World Series contender in Seattle.
Then the new FO takes the tact that is combination of Beane’s methods in Oakland with the real money needed to back it up with FA signs to make it work.

From there it becomes easy to see how Billy Beane exploits the margins and ends up getting those second-tier players at bargain basement prices because they weren’t the “hot” names on that list. Then they walk after he (probably) gets more than his money’s worth out of them, and he gets the compensatory picks in return, thus exacerbating/maximizing the operational efficiency divide between the A’s and the reckless spenders.

I agree, and I also believe that many teams aren’t very effective at separating players into the appropriate tiers. The result is that a lot of top talent money is given to players who aren’t.

Increases in “extreme” salaries might also result from some teams deciding that mid-tier talent has been overpriced, but top tier talent is more scarce and more valuable. That doesn’t need to be a universal perception; only a handful of teams need reach that conclusion to cause top salaries to ratchet up more quickly.

But seeing as how salaries (in my mind) seem to be escalating at an ever increasing rate, I’ve got no idea what’s the price for an “average” player at various positions.

Actually, that isn’t true. Using USA Today’s payroll numbers, total MLB payroll growth over previous year:
‘99 19%
‘00 16%
‘01 17%
‘02 3%
‘03 5%
‘04 -3%
‘05 6%
‘06 6%
‘07 7%

So salaries continue to grow, but not at an “ever-increasing” rate; in fact, growth has been pretty steady (and low, in historical terms) for six years now. Of course, that’s the total, which conceals the variations: the “extreme” salaries like Zito and (it would appear) ARod and Santana, do get ever more extreme — though some of that is the product of more years. (And yes, league-wide total payroll actually dropped from ‘03 to ‘04, mostly because Texas cut its payroll in half from $100M+ in ‘03, but several others cut their payrolls by $14M-$20M that year; interestingly, the big drop in growth occured the year before the luxury tax, which was agreed in ‘02 and first implemented in ‘03).

I have a spreadsheet where I was trying to figure out the average salary at each position, but it’s a little hard to figure out the right calculation: do you throw out the league-minimums and just do the average of the free agent salaries? Do you include only starters, or anybody who played that position at least n times (what do you do about platooned outfielders, for instance)?