MLB parity

Ahhhh…I remember when knuckle-draggers would cry about MLBs lack of a salary cap and try and point out how the other major US sports have more parity.

Unh-huh.

You’ll probably want to request this to be moved to the game room. I do happen to think the knuckle-draggers are right though, and that the disparity in the MLB due to a lack of a salary cap favors the bigger markets over the small ones moreso than in any other sport.

The luxury tax system has helped ameliorate that problem immensely.

Yeah, but the biggest evil empires with their own cable networks don’t care about that much. The Tigers, Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers all have payrolls over $200 million right now.

And yet the Giants, Royals, and Cubs have won the last three World Series.

Uh, the Giants and Cubs both have payrolls in excess of $172M. Royals are a little less but far from the bottom.

Guys…the point I was making was …the NBA???

And to a slightly lesser degree…The Patriots??

I admit I haven’t paid attention enough to the NHL, but MLB has much greater parity than the NBA or NFL and it has fewer playoff teams.

trivia: In the last 11 years, six teams in the bottom 15 have been in the WS. 9 of the top 15 have.
There’s a lot of white noise in that though. But I’m certainly not arguing higher salary doesn’t help, but I will maintain it’s not as great as one might think. (Cough, Red Sox last place in 3 of the last 5 years…and yes they won a WS one of those years. It took lead spontaneously turning to gold, but it happened.)

Moving to the Game Room.

FoieGrasIsEvil:

Yes, but the flip side of the luxury tax is that the smaller-market teams which had bad records get money from the pool that the luxury tax pays into. That makes a big difference to them, and helps with the parity.

I was really just trying to snark on a third consecutive Warriors-Cavs match-up…but sure, I’m down for thorough MLB discussion!

Could have made that clear in your OP.

Obviously, the Royals and Giants had lower payrolls the years they won the World Series. It’s rather normal for payroll to increase AFTER a World Series win.

“Parity” in a sports league can mean a number of different things, but going straight up by payroll doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, really. The first question is the ABILITY to spend money. If you need a minimum amount of payroll to win the World Series - which is doubtful, given that a mid-range team won the World Series in 2015 and damn near did again in 2016 - the question is whether every franchise has the ability to do that. Spending money is a choice, and if a team is not going to win a World Series even if they spend money, chopping unnecessary salaries is just smart. If they don’t pull off a huge comeback, the Toronto Blue Jays will cut payroll as much as they can by July, not because they cannot afford it, but because it just doesn’t make any sense to pay a lot of money to old players who aren’t going to help you win; you may as well save your dough for a few years until spending that money will change things.

It would be different if Toronto didn’t spend the money because they were simply unable to do so, but that’s not the case. Toronto can’t go cheap and cry about parity; they’re a popular team in a larger-than-average market.

Now, another definition of parity would simply be how close the results are to randomness. In that case baseball does just OK; there is a fair degree of repetition in recent champions, even though no one has gone back-to-back since the Yankees in 1998-2000. One has to think there’s an element of randomness to that, but we’ll see.

One or two guys can’t dominate the MLB on a championship level the way they can in the NBA or even the NFL.

I thought it was a given since it was in “mundane pointless…”

Since when is it a given that “MLB” means the Warriors and the Cavs? Not to mention “mundane pointless…” being the wrong forum. :dubious:

True, but how much money is that really and is their any compunction on the part of MLB to force teams collecting it to spend it on payroll rather than pocket it? Is there a “salary floor” like there is in the NFL?

This is also very true. Hard to compare this way though, the rules of the game dictate wildly different roster sizes/specialist roles, etc.

What are you talking about? There has never been anything resembling “parity” in the NBA. It has always been this way.

10 teams have won 87% of all NBA championships, with the Celtics and Lakers alone accounting for nearly half of them. Almost half the league has never won one, and a quarter of the league has never even played for one.

.

In the past ten years,
8 different teams have won the Super Bowl, and 13 different teams have gone.
7 different teams have won the World Series, and 13 different teams have gone.
6 different teams have won the Stanley Cup and 13 different teams have gone.
6 different teams have won the NBA finals and 9 different teams have gone.

Break it down to Championships for me so I can cherry pick the NFL and the Patriots.

Some of this might be due to the nature of the sport. In NBA you’ve got 5 players on the floor and you probably only need 2 or 3 studs to win a title. Sign them to 3 or 4 year deals and grab a few scrubs, and you’re gonna compete for at least 2-3 years. Baseball and football are different. I can’t comment on NHL – I honestly don’t know shit about that sport and don’t pretend to.