The very large, inherent inequalities in MLB are not caused by owners building stadiums with public funding. Actually, that’s the only thing that is somewhat equal about MLB: every team builds stadiums with public funding…including the New York Yankees. And by the way, I don’t give a crap about the owners any more than I give a crap about the managers, general managers, players or grounds crew. I care about the sport, Major League Baseball and my favorite team. All three of those things would be well served by either a much greater revenue sharing, a hard salary cap or both.

There’s no reason for MLBPA to go along with having players lose out on money like that.

They could trade Teahen or Buck or both, which would net them a savings of about $3M each. But I really don’t think Glass feels like the payroll needs to go down from where it is.

I thought CC was headed to SoCal, and Tex to Washington or Boston for sure. I was kinda hoping the Yanks got shutout and this marked a new trend in baseball.

The new trend is that the Yankees can spend eleventy billion dollars at players.

Still, after all this spending, isn’t their payroll going to actually be LESS next year than it was in 2008? They had a lot of dead weight on their payroll they got rid of.

I’m not too upset the Yankees got those guys for $400+MM… I think it’s incredibly stupid to invest that much money in just three players. Let them spend their money poorly. We all know it’s going to backfire at least a little bit… if not a whole lot.

If a team with limited resources spent $60M per year on just three players, that would be a bad thing. But this isn’t incredibly stupid for the Yankees. These were great signings for the Yankees. The Yankees signed a legitimate ace, a great first baseman and another pitcher who is an ace when healthy. Sure there’s risk in these long-term deals, but for the Yankees and their massive revenues, the risk is small. If one or more of those players fail, they can just go out and replace him with another $20M player. People bring up the bad Carl Pavano contract. But that didn’t hurt the Yankees at all. Pavano couldn’t help the Yankees, so they went out and signed Pettitte and Clemens. When you have massive revenues like the Yankees, you can fix mistakes by just spending more money.

Unless I’m missing something, I can’t see any reason to get a salary cap other than to appease the brewers GM who missed on CC Sabathia. If small market teams can make it to the playoffs and even to the world series, then why change the system?

So if small market teams can ever get to the playoffs and even the World Series, then the system is just fine? Is that the standard? I don’t think it should be. Small market teams can, if they do things just right, have windows of time when they can make it to the playoffs for a while before they have to tear the team down and rebuild. The A’s and Twins have had their windows. The Rays are in their window. Excellent front offices in those organizations allowed them to put together young, cheap talent for them to get to the playoffs occasionally, and that’s about it. But for a small market team, you can’t sustain success. The good, young, cheap players hit free agency and such a team can only afford to re-sign some of them. The rest have to be traded away to larger market teams.

Large market teams have no such problem. The Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers and Angels can re-sign any good, young player they develop. They can also afford to trade for these players, taking advantage of the poverty of small market teams. A small market team needs a very good FO in order to succeed. A large market team needs only a competent front office to experience success. Cashman and the Yankees front office aren’t particularly impressive. They’ve had lots of misses mixed in with their hits. But it doesn’t make any difference. When any mistake can be compensated for with another $20M per year signing of a superstar, mistakes become almost irrelevant.

I’m in favor for more penalties and taxes on the teams who spend over a certain amount… but the cap doesn’t make sense to me.

While I think significant changes to MLB’s economic system are necessary, I don’t know that a hard salary cap must be a part of the solution. I think creating a salary cap, along with greater revenue sharing would help deal with the large competitive imbalance in MLB. If that salary cap were coupled with much greater revenue sharing and the cap amount was set at a certain fair percentage of those revenues (as it is in the NFL), it would be fair to the players. It could also be coupled with a salary floor so that owners couldn’t just pocket the revenue sharing money and not spend it on their team. But I’m willing to give up the cap idea if MLB would just take revenue sharing seriously. Currently small market teams get scraps from MLB’s table. If TV money were shared equally, we’d have a much more equitable system.

Why is greater economic parity in MLB important? Cetainly not just because I want the Royals to win more. It’s because I want MLB to thrive for the long-term. Over the last 15 years, MLB has lost popularity when compared to the NFL and NBA. The fact that it is a slower paced game may have something to do with that. But I also think it has something to do with the fact that every season many markets know their team has little or no shot of contending. When you are consistently losing fan interest in many markets and indeed entire regions, that hurts the popularity of the sport. It leads to lower viewership of nationally televised games, fewer hits on MLB.com and less interest in the playoffs and World Series. Economic disparity could easily lead to either the contraction of some small market teams, or for them to move to larger markets. And if you start losing teams from Florida, the midwest and other smaller markets, the fan interest in those areas is going to dry up over the long-term. Baseball cannot succeed as a major national sport if its teams are concentrated merely in large and medium markets. The NFL’s socialist-like economic system has shown how popular and profitable a sport can be when every team has an equal chance to compete.

salary caps/floors are very inefficient regulatory devices in economics terms. Revenue sharing is much better. That being said, there probably is plenty of strong arguments that current revenue sharing is poorly structured and far too little.

DeJesus doesn’t make enough $$ to play in NY.

…and that it probably won’t happen.

Over the last 10 years, teams from the largest 10 markets have made it to the playoffs twice as often as teams from the smallest 10 markets. The average record of the large market teams is much higher than that of the small market teams. The large market teams have nearly twice as many seasons with winning percentages over .500 and more than twice as many seasons with 85 wins. The competitive imbalance is very significant. Small market teams are not entirely prevented from being competitive and large market teams are not guaranteed success. But there are inherent, structural advantages for the large market teams and concomitant disadvantages for the small market teams. And these have shown themselves in the large performance and success disparities between the two groups of teams.

So yeah, there is a lot of HORRIBLE unfairness in MLB, centered around its financial structure. The above metrics of the number of teams who have played for a championship is a really crappy way of determining competitive balance/imbalance. How many of those 16 baseball teams are from the 10 smallest markets? Very few.