What makes the Pats so amazing is that in pro football, you have a roster of 53 players and you have 22 starters – that’s a lot of damn personnel. And it’s also a rough game. Very few of those starters are going to make it an entire season without missing at least a significant portion of a game, and a fair number will miss multiple games. NFL football requires genius management structure. That’s why even though I can’t call myself a Pats fan, I frickin admire the Patriots. What they’ve accomplished, especially in the era of salary caps, is nothing short of business management genius. The Kraft family could write the next big book on how to win friend and influence people, or the 7 habits of effective people, or whatever. What they do is technically superior to what most ‘good’ businesses do in most fields.
Yeah, like 'em or not (and I don’t), you’ve got to give the Patriots credit (even if you think they’re cheaters). Football is won as much, sometimes even more, on the sidelines as it is on the field, and they have managed to maintain excellence in both for going on 15 years. Looking around the league, other teams that maintain that same standard are Green Bay and Pittsburgh, and it is not a surprise to anybody that these three teams have easily, objectively been the most consistently good franchises in the game for a very long time now.
But the playoff structure should make MLB look like it has less parity. MLB has the fewest teams qualify for the playoffs. A lucky streak can’t really get you into the playoffs, but ti can get you through them. Also in the NFL being in the right division can get you into the playoffs in the first place. At least two sub-500 teams have won divisions and so not only qualified for the playoffs, but had home field advantage in their first game. Two more teams made it in the strike years, 1982. sub-500 teams have also made it into the NHL playoffs and I’d be quite surprised if it hasn’t occurred in the NBA.
Actually the Yanks are below $200 million, even with the ARod $21 million still being paid out this year. By next year they’re expected to drop below the luxury tax threshold. The big money will be CC & ARod removing $42 million.
No actual salary floor, but IIRC, the deal is that if the money is not being placed back into baseball operations, they lose the right to receive it the following year (or it might have to happen several years in a row). I can’t (in brief searching) find a cite for that, so I might be wrong.
Say you have a team that has $X budgeted from its own money, and then receives $Y in revenue sharing. All it has to do in order to comply with the rule is to spend all of $Y on baseball operations, and simply take some money out of $X and put it back into the pockets of the owners. Is there a way for the league to prevent that from happening?
The problem with sports, unlike many other areas of business, is that putting out a clearly inferior product (on the level of individual teams) doesn’t necessarily mean that you lose money. This article from 2015 notes that, since revenue sharing and the luxury tax were put in place, the overall payroll inequality among MLB teams has remained essentially unchanged. On the whole, the difference between the high-payroll teams and the low-payroll teams has stayed the same through multiple collective bargaining agreements and multiple tweaks to the revenue system.
Personally, i don’t think this is the end of the world. I really don’t have any complaints about the level of parity in baseball. I’ve been following baseball since i moved to the United States in the summer of 2000, and in that time i’ve seen 17 World Series, with 11 different winning teams.
Not only has there been a reasonable variety in terms of champions, but i can think of numerous teams that have, in that time period, been both real contenders and total duds. Some perennial losers have managed to turn themselves into playoff teams, and some winners have dropped into the realm of also-rans. My own team, the Orioles, didn’t get above .500 for my first 11 years in the US, but has made the playoffs three of the past five years, if you include last year’s Wild Card Game appearance. The Astros were frequent division winners in the early 2000s, then they spent years in the doldrums, including three consecutive seasons with fewer than 60 wins, and now they’re leading their division by 9 games before the start of June.
I’m also a big fan of soccer, and especially of the English Premier League. In the same time period, there have been a total of 5 Premier League Champions, and that includes one champion (Leicester) that just about everyone agrees was a once-in-a-lifetime fluke. Basically, each year in the Premier League there are about four teams with a real shot at winning. My own team, Liverpool, is a good team that came fourth this year, but they haven’t won the top division in English football since 1990. But for a couple of late slip-ups, they could have won the title in 2014, but they didn’t.
Other European competitions, like the German Bundesliga and Spain’s La Liga, are, if possible, even less open than the Premier League. Each has had about the same number of champions since 2000, but in both countries the competition generally comes down to one or two teams every year. In Germany, it’s Bayern Munich basically all the time, with Borussia Dortmund sometimes getting a championship, and in Spain it’s generally Barcelona or Real Madrid.
I’ll take MLB levels of parity over those competitions any day.
Of course, in terms of champions, perceived parity can sometimes be increased by the use of a playoff structure. None of those European soccer championships have playoffs; the champion is simply the team that has the most points at the end of the season. Such a system tends to favor strong clubs, because it eliminates the element of luck that comes with single playoff games, or even a short playoff series of three or five or seven games.
For example, going back to the 2000 season, the Yankess have won the World Series twice, but they have led the American League in Wins on six occasions.
But even if we look at regular season wins, MLB has had a pretty good variety. Since 2017, 10 different clubs have led the NL in wins, and the number is the same for the AL (although in the AL, there were two seasons where it was a two-way tie). That means that, in each league, fully two-thirds of all teams have, at least once since 2000, been the most successful team in their league in regular-season play.
Of course, not all of these clubs have won the World Series. The Nats, Braves, Astros, Rangers, Rays, Indians, Athletics, and Mariners have all topped the regular-season standings without winning it all.
According to this site: http://www.spotrac.com/mlb/payroll/ the Yankees payroll is almost $245 million and the most in baseball if you factor in the disabled list, retained and buried payroll along with the 25 man roster.
Even from the link you showed, it is the Dodgers that are far above everyone else at $245m. I’m not sure I understand how the Yanks are still being shown as having $5.5m for McCann but that seems to be the main difference in our figures.
But check your link again, at worst Yanks are barely second and I’m doubtful your link will match MLB’s calcs.
They have $5.5 million for McCann because that’s how trades often work. Surely you’ve been following baseball long enough to recognize that? It is incredibly common for teams to trade players while picking up part of their ongoing contracts. This is especially true with players who are being overpaid, or who can no longer be usefully carried on the club’s roster.
The Yankees will be forking out another five and a half million for McCann next year as well. The Baseball Reference page for McCann gives the same figure, and this story about the trade from November last year lays it out quite clearly: