Elimination of MLB teams

Factual Questions
1

I just read a report that the baseball owners voted to eliminate two teams. Likely candidates were the Twins, Marlins, or Expos. There wasn’t a whole lot of detail in the news report, though.

Does anyone know how this works? I would assume that even a team that is losing money each season still has some value. Also, this would mean that the profit-sharing split is greater for the remaining teams. Do the owners of the teams eliminated get any compensation, or is it just tough beans for them?

2

I don’t think MLB has profit sharing. That’s part of the reason that the teams are having financial problems.

As for the team’s players, they’ll be drafted by the left over teams with the teams with the worst record picking first down to the best team picking last . . . As for my Cubbies, it’s just their luck that they’d make a run at the playoffs this year.

Sorry, I don’t know the other answers to your questions.

3

Most observers seem to think it is all a negociating ploy by Bud Selig. There is a faction that beleives the only way to wring concessions from the players is to have a couple teams go out of business.

The Players Assoc. say they would have to OK any contraction. The PA would want those players under contract declared unrestricted free agents, and expanded rosters. The PA in no way would allow MLB to cut jobs.

If the matter ends up in court, who knows what would happen.

4

Right now, no one outside of Selig and the owners knows exactly how things will work. This page at espn.com has a pretty exhaustive blow-by-blow on what may happen. I’d rather not rehash it here, but basically the Twins & the Expos will go poof. The owner of the Expos gets the Marlins and Disney sells the Anaheim Angels to the Marlins owner. Then the leagues will have to be realigned once again because the American League will have 13 teams and the National League 15. Your National League & World Champion Arizona Diamondbacks would end up in the AL West.

But why is this happening? Contraction is a rather large stick the owners can wave at the Player’s Association in the upcoming labor negotiations. 50 MLB players are suddenly AAA players next year. The players have had the upper hand in every negotiation since the advent of free agency. This is an attempt by the owners to put the players on the defensive. The unspoken threat is that the owners are willing to contract further if the players don’t go along.

Will it happen? From what I’ve read recently, while the Twins owner, Carl Pohlad, is very much looking forward to getting a goodbye check from MLB, the State of Minnesota and the organization that runs the Metrodome may not be so willing to let the Twins pass into the history books. MLB’s special legal status nonwithstanding, I don’t think they are immune to a restraining order forcing the Twins to play ball next year.

5

Actually under plans suggested, the major league players would stay at the same number, actually a little greater, for the next few years. The roster limits would be expanded from 25 to 27 for the remaining 28 teams. So you would go from 750 major leaguers to 756 major leaguers.

The big savings would come from the elimination of the minor league operations.

As in most things in society, the rich guys will get richer, while the poor guys will get the shaft.

6

Not in the short term. I spoke with a representative of the Vermont Expos today, who stated that there is a contractual obligation of MLB to maintain a particular number of minor league teams. She said if the real Expos bite the bullet, Vermont will continue operations under a different team, or perhaps as a jointly operated farm club of two teams.

Delving a little further, I found this at the Minor League Baseball[sup]TM[/sup] timeline page:

**

7

What MLB needs to do to increase revenue at the stadiums is what is done in several other sports in the other parts of the world. For example in Italy, the bottom two teams get sent down to the minors and the two top leagues of the minors get sent up. So this would be like the Twins or Expos getting sent to AAA Ball and the Toledo Mud Hens or the Calgary Cannons being in the majors.

Tell me that NY Yankees playing against the Mud Hens would not sell out. Or (My Favorite) the Tucson Sidewinders playing against the Cubs. This would give MLB an incentive to schedule games that would increase attendance. It would also give the players in the Minors a chance to try the big leagues as a group rather than wait for someone to retire or get hurt.

Of course, there would be some sandbagging by the parent teams to make sure that if they are not going to be in the bigs the following year that their minor league team would. But with the length of the season, it would be difficult to plan such a scenario in advance.

Just a thought

8

This will turn into a debate, and there’s lots to debate, but I will try to answer the GQ.

  1. The basic idea is that two teams’ owners will be paid about $250 million to fold their franchises. The teams will cease to exist, and the leagues will be realigned to account for it.

If one team comes from the American League and one from the National League, the Arizona Diamondbacks would then switch leagues from the NL to the AL, which would give both leagues 14 teams again, as was the case from 1993-1997. If both teams are NL teams (the Expos and Marlins, in that scenario) then the NL would realign itself by having Pittsburgh, and possibly Cincinnati, switch to the NL East, giving both leagues two divisions with 5 teams and one with 4. More radical realignment is also a possibility.

The players currently on the rosters of the contracted teams would then either be taken by the other teams in a dispersal draft (the owners’ plan) or would become free agents (the players’ preference.)

  1. There is no profit sharing per se in Major League Baseball. There is a payroll luxury tax which has high-payroll teams make payments to low-payroll teams. the payments are NOT tied to market size or revenue, though, which is part of the problem, since a team can deliberately collect this money by just refusing to spend anything on the team, even if they have the money to spend. It’s a perverse incentive that doesn’t help small market teams but does motivate teams to spend less, which of course was the idea all along.

Theoretically, if two teams are contracted, they won’t figure into the luxury tax. But the next two cheapest teams would.

  1. The talks around which teams will be contracted are more complicated than you might think. One plan has the Expos and Marlins folding with the Expos’ owner staying in baseball by buying the Devil Rays with his contraction money while either Marlins owner John Henry buys out the Anaheim Angels with HIS contraction money. The Twins are an independent case; the team is profitable and in a good market, but Minnesota won’t build them a new stadium, so Major League Baseball sees an opportunity to punish Minnesota by taking the team away which, they hope, will motivate other cities to build stadia. The owner, Carl Pohlad, is willing to fold the Twins because he just wants the windfall.

Of course, this is what could really hurt MLB. Contracting the Expos is bad, but the Expos are a joke organization many of their own fans have given up hope for. If they’re contracted the province of Quebec won’t care and the fans are already resigned to it; you may get a lawsuit from the Washington Baseball Club guys but that’s a minor issue. Contracting the Twins, however, means contracting a franchise with a large fan base, a 100-year tradition, World Series championships, etc. In fact, the symbol of Major League Baseball is a silhouette of a Minnesota Twin, Harmon Killebrew. There’s the possibility there of significant legal action, and the backlash from baseball fans could mean an attendance drop in 2002.

  1. MLB is dangling the expand-the-rosters-to-27-players bit as a way of assuaging the MLBPA’s anger over losing jobs. That said, the players will still fight it, since the jobs being offered aren’t anything like the jobs being taken away. Adding 56 jobs by tagging two more players onto every team guarantees those jobs will be minimum-salary benchwarmers; those slots will go to third catchers and 12th pitchers who hardly ever play. The MLBPA won’t consider that equal to the high-priced starting roles that will be lost if teams contract.
9

Just a comment; I think it is a foregone conclusion that if there is contraction, the Twins and Expos will go. The two other teams that are in the worst shape currently are said to be Tampa Bay and Florida. Both were expansion teams in the 1990s. I think it is a much better PR move to say that “two old franchises have played out their glory days” than to pull the plug on a recent expansion team.