I've long wanted to uncork this one, and what better occasion than steroid freak Barry Bonds
hitting his 709th home run?
I'm rooting for Barry, not because I want to see him succeed personally, but because I think it would be just what baseball deserves.
I'm not here to talk about steroids, though they are an obstacle to fair competition.
I'm here to talk about fair competition itself.
I'm a little surprised that a liberal discussion group like ours doesn't see (or just ignores) the obvious comparison between baseball today and laissez-faire capitalism.
I grew up a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and I used to love watching baseball. But as I helplessly saw the team fall apart in the early 1990's because it could no longer afford to keep up with the big-payroll teams, giving away players (Barry Bonds, Andy van Slyke, Bobby Bonilla, etc.) and getting nothing in return, I soured on the game. I have not attended a game since 1993 (Atlanta at San Francisco, rented blanket and everything) nor contributed monetarily to baseball in any way.
Competition is supposed to be about balls and strikes, hits and errors, and home runs and strikeouts. But it's turned into a mere money-raising contest, where the haves succeed and the have-nots watch from their sofas.
You've seen the payroll numbers:
1 New York Yankees $208,306,817
2 Boston Red Sox $123,505,125
[...]
28 Pittsburgh Pirates $38,133,000
29 Kansas City Royals $36,881,000
30 Tampa Bay Devil Rays $29,363,067
Why don't we just give the Yankees four outs per inning?
I've heard the counterarguments before:
A salary cap would be communism. No, it would be a LEAGUE, which is supposed to ensure fair competition among franchises. I have no problem at all with the big-market teams MAKING MORE MONEY than the small-market teams, but they shouldn't be able to translate that into an unfair advantage on the field by luring all the proven stars without having to take any risk.
Money doesn't make plays on the field. But it put the player who just made that great diving catch into your uniform.
Winning teams have good farm systems. But the losing teams with good farm systems can't afford to keep their players, so it doesn't matter.
A big payroll doesn't guarantee success. But a small payroll DOES guarantee failure.
Baseball has become a microcosm of what happens when an aristocracy is allowed to form. There is no social mobility, despite claims of equal opportunity for all. Hey, everybody gets 25 players and 27 outs, right? Sure, just like every kid has the freedom to interview anywhere (s)he likes and pursue whatever field is of interest. Baseball is a great parallel of what is now referred to as the Ownership Society (or Reaganomics, or trickle-down economics):
Yankees - Dad went to Yale on inheritance, got cushy job in own company, gets nice tax breaks and capital-gains rates, can afford to send kid to Buckminster Stuffed-Shirt prep school
Royals - Dad stacks toilet paper at Wal-Mart, kid faces occasional gunfire and ridicule for being a bookworm, even in-state college tuition totally out of control
Hey, but that's life, right? Yes, in America, increasingly, it is. But it doesn't have to be that way. That we tolerate unfair competition and huge obstacles to upward mobility in our national pastime says a lot about us. Is that our idea of fairness? Is that the kind of nation we want to be?