With Baseball Day upon us, I thought it would be a good time to address some of the issues brought up in this
entry by upstate NY. There was a lot of backslapping about the "communitarian" approach of "NFL ecomomics", as opposed to the "Republican" approach of Major League Baseball. This was mostly followed by paens to the Salary Cap, and how much better those well behaved sports leagues like the NFL and the NBA were for it.
You're free to believe this if you like, but if you do, I think you've been had...
The NFL/NBA approach doesn't level the playing field so much as tilt it towards the owners. Instead of having to pay top dollar for top talent by outbidding every other team, they just have to outbid those teams that are currently under the cap (or, in the NBA's case, bid the maximum that the player is allowed to make. Glory, glory! Dem owners is so kind to allow us to make the maximum!). Same players, lower salaries. Where does that extra money go? The owners!
Even if some of that money goes to second-tier players, as on the Patriots, it's really not "that money", it's money that could have been spent on those players anyway without a cap. However you slice it, money that should be going to players is going to 32 of the richest people on the planet instead, all in the name of "cost certainty". Communitarian? Sounds like Dubya's Republican Party if you ask me. (Note: clicking below the fold is tantamount to asking me. Please read your NY Expat License Agreement for further details.)
Unlike football, where teams like the Bears can simply rake in the money year after year and coast on their incompetence, baseball teams have to win in order to make money (unless you're the Cubs, but even the thickheaded numbskulls at the Tribune Corporation recognized that putting a winning team on the field would make them more money than not, something that couldn't be done easily in the NFL).
"But you can't put together a winning team if you don't spend money first!" Actually, no. See, for all the talk about "levelling the playing field" in baseball, there's already a level playing field: the first six years of a players MLB experience. Pick good players in the Amateur draft, make good trades for minor leaguers (e.g., Bartolo Colon for Brandon Phillips, Grady Sizemore, and Cliff Lee), and you can have your own little nucleus of a winning ballclub. (For a similar example as in the trade above, see Belle, Thome, Baerga, and Ramirez, c. 1995)
In fact, one time, there was this club that hadn't won anything for over a decade, and had fallen to last place in their division. They didn't have anyone left from their pseudo-glory days (they had never made the playoffs in that time, always falling apart with their aging talent) but an aging, injured first baseman. They were a dysfunctional laughingstock, and noone thought they'd ever be good again. But then, within a few years they brought up some players from their minor league system, made a few smart trades and free agent signings, and just like that, they were in the World Series! Of course, they were up against the Best Team in Baseball, and noone thought they stood a chance against them, since this other team had been to the World Series 4 of the last 6 years, and had way more talent than anyone else. They'd even signed the best Free Agent on the market just a few years before! It just wasn't fair... It was even less fair when the Best Team in Baseball won the first two games by a combined score of something like 111 to 2. Surely it was all but over.
But, thanks to some fortunate bounces, a very lucky "at-em" ball to end Game 5, and a triple by a journeyman catcher against said best Free Agent, the Yankees managed to buck the odds and win the 1996 World Series.
Now it's true that the Yankees probably got to hold onto their core players longer than other teams would have, but look what they've done to themselves: By not keeping their farm system going, they're relying more and more on older players who they're hoping aren't past their Expiration Date. They could have pushed the clock back some by signing Beltran, but went for mediocre starters instead. Mark my words: this year or next the bill is going to come due, and the Yankees will fall from grace. Ash and Maple to bats, resin to dust...
Of course, even when that happens you won't hear the end of the caterwauling for a Salary Cap, because it was never about the Yankees, it was about the owners getting their way, and in order to get it, they have to push the frame of the players as selfish, unworthy of their salaries, and unwilling to take pay cuts "for the good of the team". To some degree, it makes sense for them to do this, although I don't think they realize how much collateral damage their businesses take as a result.
A bigger question, though, is why do so many fans believe it? Stay tuned for Part 2...