Damn Yankees

Well, after a month or so of pouting, I'm ready to poke my head from the emptiness which is the football season back into the emptiness that is the internet. The Beard is still out of the solar system, we may not see him again until pitchers and catchers report, but until then, I'll keep you company.

The team everybody loves to hate won another World Series, beating a Phillies team that gave Pedro Martinez's corpse two starts (0-2, 6.30 in the WS) and couldn't get a big hit when they needed one. The worst thing of all is that Alex Rodriguez, possibly my least favorite pro athlete of all time, now has a championship. Ugh.

Have you ever listened to A-Rod answer a question? One gets the feeling that he's practiced his cliche answers in front of the mirror every night, to make sure he gets them just right for the camera. I bet he even practices his sex faces, too.

This is OK sex, but not great. I think I'm going with good old #3...

Whoa there!!! No, nononono! Where'd that come from?

A-Rod don't do that, honey... I don't want that in the papers.

I'm calling the shots here! I'm A-Rod!

Ok then, #3 was clearly a bit too much A-Rod.

I don't want this chick calling me back or anything, it ain't that great.

I mean, check me out. I can do better than this! I'm A-Rod!!!

Man, I'd totally do me if I got the chance. Ka-Bang.

Maybe #11 would get me out of this mess.

That's my "Not really enjoying it, but it's your fault, not mine" look.

Haven't used that one in a while... see if I can remember how it goes.

Oh, man, that didn't work at all! She just called me 'teddy bear!" I never get #11 just right, now she thinks I was digging it! Gotta break out the big guns... this always sends 'em home lickety-split.

You made A-Rod sad, baby. Now, get out!!!

But back to the Yankees... Yankee haters can take solace in the fact that this is their first World Series in nine years, so it's not like their ridiculous payroll has bought them championship after championship (although they have made the postseason 14 of the past 15 seasons). But that's not to say there isn't a problem with the system... there is.

I have recently found a blog entitled "Bowling in the Dark," an interesting, apparently themeless stream of well-written, often heavily-notated consciousness. In the most recent entry, one of the authors brings up some evidence to argue against the creation of a salary cap in Major League Baseball. Here is my response:


Nicely done. But I feel the focus on the $-to-success ratio allows for a huge factor in the salary cap discussion to be overlooked: the extremely detrimental effect the huge spending has on the mid and lower-market teams. The best argument for a salary cap is not that we must hinder the big-money teams, but that we must allow the small-money teams the opportunity to compete fairly for the players they develop.

Bowling in the Dark correctly demonstrates that spending tons of money doesn't guarantee success. The Yankees spent a billion dollars between World Series titles, so clearly the top-spending team does not necessarily have an inside track to a World Series title. Teams like the Mets and Cubs have spent immense amounts on their rosters, yet have been failures on the field more often than not. However, Bowling fails the logic test when it offers this data to support the notion that a salary cap is unnecessary... all it truly proves is that poorly managed organizations don't win, no matter how much they spend.

Design is the engine of success...

The Yankees, Phillies, and Red Sox have had success, not merely because they have outspent other teams, but because they've invested that money into strong, smart organizations. Organizations with a good framework of scouting, drafting, and player development are those which field winning teams, and such teams should be rewarded, whether they spend a lot or a little. And so, as much as I despise the Yankees and everything they stand for, their most recent Series victory does not particularly stoke the fires of my salary-cap-now! furnace, because this year's Yankees are more than a collection of all-stars... this was a very, very good baseball team.

...but once an engine is built, it must be fueled.

The lack of a salary cap does not guarantee that a high-spending team will win... winning still depends on the organization. With no cap to player salaries, though, it's a virtual guarantee that an organization which does assemble and grow a great young team will be unable to keep them together for any significant amount of time, because the free-spending teams -- wise and dumb alike -- will soon offer star players far more than their original teams can afford to pay.

The current system rewards teams who have both solid organizations and lots of money, but actually punishes solid organizations who lack the big revenue. In fact, it punishes those teams far more severely than it does those teams like the Pirates and Reds, who are both cheap AND bad at developing young players (which might give us a hint into why those teams seem to be OK with long-term failure).

Ask the A's and Twins how far you can get with a fantastic organization, but no money to keep it together. Both have long been model franchises as far as player evaluation and development is concerned, and in recent years both have fielded some very strong teams... and then watched helplessly as those teams quickly dissolved. Two model organizations, yet it's been nearly 20 years since either has made it to the World series. Right there is the perfect example of the problem facing Major League Baseball.

There's The Rub

Now, if certain teams lacked revenue simply because they were poorly run, then we'd be into Business 101 territory: manage your business well, and you succeed; manage it poorly, and you fail. Even in an industry such as pro sports, that should be a reality of any business. But as we've seen, many of the wealthy teams are poorly run, and many of the well-run organizations are far from wealthy. Revenue generated by each team in baseball is NOT tied to how well each team conducts business, and that is precisely why a salary cap (or some other normalizing feature) is necessary.

Baseball from both ends of the food chain.

Colorado has seen both sides of this issue: with their enormous gate receipts in the mid-90s, they were a free-spending yet poorly organized team which, after a brief taste of success, became a decade-long failure on the field. They learned the hard way that they did not have the resources to continually rebuild a team through free agency, retooled in the Oakland/Minnesota mold (a process which took a great deal of time), and are now recognized as one of the best organizations in baseball. As such, the Rockies have had recent success on the field, but they now find themselves staring up the opposite end of the free agency feeding chain, having lost Matt Holliday, one of the best hitters in either league.

One can make the argument that Rockies' management made a good move getting what they did for Holliday, but that's largely beside the point. The problem here is that they were in that position with Holliday in the first place: forced to either trade him or lose him, because they could not possibly sign him. Furthermore, a team that is continually in the position where they must trade proven players for prospects, will eventually find itself taking more steps backwards than forwards. The Athletics are a particularly good example of this right now.

Of course, we've seen the occasional smaller-market team (such as the D-backs and Marlins) that is able to catch lightning in a bottle... combining a few wise free-agent pickups and a solid core of young players, and win in the extremely brief window of opportunity they have with their team before it inevitably crumbles (in both the above examples, leaving a colossal wreck behind). This shows us that any team which makes the playoffs has a chance... but it also demonstrates how watered-down the baseball postseason has become (the two Marlins championship teams finished a total of 19 games back in their division).

Free agency: good to a point, but not past it.

Free agency allows players to decide for whom they want to play; the fact that, for so long in baseball's history, a player was essentially "owned" by a team is shocking from today's perspective. So it's not as if free agency itself is at fault here, but there MUST be a check in that system to account for the vast imbalance from market to market. Matt Holliday may be worth $150 million to the Red Sox, but that doesn't make him a $150 million player in EVERY market. Free agency cannot go so far as to allow the price structure in one or two markets to dictate the pricing structure in all markets. The fact that a two-bedroom condo in Manhattan goes for $1.5 million does not make my home in Fort Collins, Colorado worth the same amount.

Solutions to tough questions.

I see two solutions to this problem. Either true revenue sharing must be put in place, in which all revenues are pooled and then divided equally, so that each team is given the exact same amount to spend on payroll; OR salaries must be capped, in order to prevent a half-dozen teams from artificially inflating the value of players in all markets.

The "luxury tax" fails to address this issue, because all it was really meant to do was specifically to slow down the Yankees' spending. It clearly did not work, but even if it had, it wasn't the correct approach. Limiting the Yankees is not the goal here, normalizing salaries across the board is.

True revenue sharing will never work for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that baseball does not have a national TV contract like the NFL has. Until that happens (and it is infinitely unlikely it ever will) then a true sharing of revenue among all MLB teams is an impossibility. That leaves a salary cap.

Would a salary cap hurt today's high-spending teams? Perhaps slightly, but teams like the Yankees and Red Sox would still have every opportunity to be successful, because they are strong, high-revenue organizations that can afford to make offers to many high-end players. Wealthy teams like the Mets would still suck, because they just do.

Would a salary cap create good teams in places like Pittsburgh and Kansas City? No... again, the ability to afford better players might make them slightly more competitive, but it would be nothing more than a band-aid. Without solid organizations and increased revenue there first, those teams would still struggle... and there would be nothing to force those teams to spend to the limit of the cap (something that would likely be a necessity, were a true revenue sharing plan ever adopted).

What a salary cap would do -- and what baseball needs -- is to create an atmosphere where well-run, talented teams could hold onto most of the star players they produce, and remain a competitive team for long periods of time. The game's best players would still receive large free-agent offers, and some stars would still change teams. Player salaries would likely slow their exponential growth, but would remain very high. But with a salary cap in place, the original team could still have a reasonable opportunity to match the offers the player would find elsewhere, and hence have the chance to keep their teams together, and reap the rewards for doing things the right way at all levels of their organization. That would be good for the fans, good for the owners, good for the players, and good for the game.