Exhibit A: The Baltimore Orioles. Their history in the 90s is primarily one of overspending for over-the-hill free agents and failing – miserably – to compete on the field.
Exhibit B: The Minnesota Twins. Despite owner Carl Pohlad’s mandate to spend even less on payroll than the team receives in revenue sharing from MLB, they are one of only two teams with a double-digit lead in their division this year – after dodging Bud Selig’s contraction bullet over the winter.
Exhibit C: The New York Mets. They spent like drunken sailors over the winter for guys like Vaughn and Alomar, and are at the back of the pack in the NL East.
Exhibit D: The Oakland As. David Justice and Jermaine Dye between them account for nearly half their payroll, which is among the lowest in the majors. Yet they just won their nineteenth straight game.
Ability to compete on the field is still determined, as it always has been, by acquiring and developing the best players. The As are a perfect example. Yes, they’ll face challenges in trying to retain their best home-grown players, as evidenced by losing Giambi to free-agency. But they have managed to cope with that loss: their winning percentage this year so far is .630, exactly the same as last year’s. Moreover, it’s difficult for any team to remain consistently near the top of the standings, money or no. It’s even tougher with a tight budget, but the best manage to do it. And does anyone really believe that the Yankees of 2002 have any advantage over the Devil Rays that the Yankees of 1952 didn’t have over the St. Louis Browns?
There was a chart in Forbes recently that showed the growth in payroll, revenue, and debt overall in MLB. The growth in payroll over the last half-decade was significantly less than the growth in either revenue or debt – the problem isn’t that the owners aren’t earning enough revenue; the problem is that several owners are just plain stupid about how they spend the money they do make, and about spending money that they haven’t made – and not just for player expenses.
Sure, there are a few teams that are currently losing money – a lot fewer than the owners claim, but a few, and they’d probably manage to lose money even with a salary cap.
I’m glad the players agreed to greater revenue sharing; frankly, I’d prefer to see teams share 50% of gate and broadcast revenues – after all, the Yankees aren’t going make much money if there are no teams for them to play, or if they turn into the Harlem Globetrotters playing an assortment of Washington Generals-level competition. The luxury tax is probably the least onerous form of salary restraint, in that it doesn’t prevent a team from paying its players whatever it wants, it just makes it more costly to do so, and funnels additional money to the other teams. I’d have preferred to see this coupled with a minimum total payroll, so that owners like Pohlad don’t just pocket the revenue sharing funds and still spend nothing on player salaries; for some reason,the players opposed this notion.
After 100 years in which the owners basically dictated terms to the players, the players are understandably very much opposed to anything that directly restricts their ability to offer their services to the highest bidder, just as I would be if software development firms had salary caps and exclusive rights to my services for a certain number of years from the time I was hired. The players’ position in the last couple of labor disputes has never been that they wanted more money – they just didn’t want the owners to be able to artificially limit how much they could make. Players are never going to make more than at least one owner thinks they’re worth, and even the richest team can’t stockpile more than 40 players on their major league roster at a time.
The owners have done a good job, however, of convincing the public that the players are greedy, and the press has played along, with story after story about A-Rod’s quarter-billion-dollar contract. The average fan is bound to think that that’s too much money for one player to make. How would they react if the press was just as forthcoming with the personal finances of the owners? Publish what George Steinbrenner, Peter Angelos, Tom Hicks, Peter Magowan, Mike Illitch, Bud Selig, et al. earn each year on the sports pages alongside the salaries of A-Rod, Randy Johnson, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Mike Piazza, and Roberto Alomar, and we’ll see how long the fans continue to side with the owners. Intuitively,though, people have less of a problem with guys in suits and ties with law degrees making several hundred million a year than they do a guy in formfitting double-knits making twenty million a year – maybe that’s the answer: make the owners wear uniforms and describe their occupation as selling beer and hot dogs.