I don’t see what the reserve clause would have to do with it. Selling a player under contract would simply be trading him for cash. (Which baseball, at least, has a policy against.) Relegation shouldn’t effect free agency at all.
Prior to the 1970s, baseball players were bound to their teams by the reserve clause. Basically, it meant that the team controlled the player’s contract rights until they sold or traded them to another team, no matter what. Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause in 1970 when the Cardinals tried to trade him to Philadelphia, and while he lost the eventual Supreme Court case, it led to the 1975 rulings that established free agency (essentially, players control their own contract rights after accruing a certain amount of service time, and can sign a contract with anyone after their current deal expires. They can also negotiate for no-trade and/or limited no-trade clauses in addition to the 10-5 rule that gives players with 10 years of service, 5 with their current team to refuse any trade.)
So there’s no way the MLBPA would ever consent to giving up free agency. In fact, I’d argue that the MLBPA is the most powerful of the unions at this point.
The reserve clause basically tied a player to his team forever. Even if his contract was expired, the only team allowed to negotiate with him was the team he had previously been under contract with. It was overthrown by an arbitrator in the mid-70s.
It certainly would, because if the Royals get sent down, none of their players would accumulate MLB service time (barring a change in how service time is calculated) and therefore pensions and policies like the 10-5 rule would no longer apply.
Ah. Good point. Yes, the agreement would have to be completely rewritten. Unlikely, at best.
Presumably a reorganization of the major leagues into a Unified Baseball League would allow for service time to count in both the upper and lower divisions. That’s a rather easy problem to solve.
You have to ditch the baseball paradigm of major and minor leagues; we’re not talking about sending a team from the majors to Triple-A. The existing Triple A leagues would not serve this proposed system because those are not real competitive baseball clubs; they’re just hothouses for prospects. A relegation system would mean all the teams were major league teams - in effect, independent franchises. You’d just have an upper and lower major league.
What would be cool about this system would be the power plays some of the lower teams would make; maybe the San Antonio Mustangs or the Calgary Dinosaurs decide to invest a whole pile of dough in snagging Miguel Cabrera.
I honestly think that if you did this right - not to say that I believe for one instant this can ever happen - you could vastly, vastly improve a sport’s standing and popularity. I’m using baseball as my example because I know it best, but imagine if the major league baseball structure included not 30 teams, but 60 or 70, serving all kinds of unserviced markets - San Antonio, Vegas, Raleigh, Vancouver, San Juan, Buffalo, Memphis. A few new teams in New York City, and why not? Hartford, Monterrey, Montreal, Calgary, Salt Lake, Oklahoma City! Give those cities real teams who have an actual chance to in the World Series, rather than faux-pro AAA teams. So what if teams like Kansas City or Pittsburgh might fall back into the lower level? Sure beats having the team pack up and move. I think you could create a swell of new grassroots interest.
RickJay, it could be done, but only one way: kill the antitrust exemption. Take control of the minors away from MLB, then draft a new league agreement that incorporates relegation/transfers/etc. and open the MLBPA to all professional players.
There would have to be some sort of compensation to the current MLB teams for their prospects, and possibly a roster expansion to accomodate a few of the AAA players.
Interesting. Each of the major North American team sports has seen a stronger league absorb a weaker league at some point in its history, but in no case did anyone conceive of a First and Second Division, with promotion and relegation, as a format for the survivor league.
In particular, baseball saw the stronger National League merge with the weaker American Association in 1892. Four of the AA clubs transferred into the NL, and five disbanded. How different things might be today if they had kept all of the AA franchises alive as a Second Division.
Regarding expansion, the frenzy when a North American league expands is probably baffling to Europeans. Expansion is the only way to get a major league franchise, other than the occasional sale and relocation of a financially ailing team. The inevitable result is a stadium bidding war between rival wannabe-major cities, and huge profits for the prior franchises which charge enormous “expansion fees” to the new guys, in return for which they make a few of their lesser players available via an expansion draft.
Re. free agency - thanks for clearing that up. However, a similar situation exists in European football, thanks to the EU equally ruling that perpetual contracts just weren’t cricket 
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosman). This doesn’t stop there being a healthy trade in players who are under contract.
I think you guys are overlooking the most obvious point. In the American system, no one would benefit form the change.
Onwers franchises would lose value due to the chance of it being relegated. Players would lose control of their freedom to work for whomever they chose and negotiate contracts in their best interests.
The only people who could be said to benefit are potentially the fans (if you believe that it’d increase competitiveness, I have my doubts) and the networks since it’d probably create fewer meaningless games.
Why would you possibly think this is the case? The players have no real attachment to the city that would essentially be losing out. The good players could be certain that their contracts would be purchased from the team in the even they are demoted, and in the example of teams like Kansas City losing out might be advantageous to a player who wanted to be in a big market.
Long term it would probably hurt fan support. Why would you want to invest decades of your life to support a team that could, at any time, be demoted from the highest level of competition? Take the Brewers, they’ve got fans that have been rooting for them their entire lives through thick and thin. With their history it’s not unlikely that they’d have been demoted and promoted a handful of times over the last 40 years or so and I suppose that with each demotion a certain proportion of fans would be lost permanently.
Frankly, while relegation has a certain appeal conceptually, I think in reality the leagues with it are more the exception than the leagues without. A smarter question would probably be “what will it take for Eurpoean leagues to abandon it”.
However, when you take the monetary aspect out of the equation it works much better. In the example of high school and lower-level college sports the concept works nicely. It allows teams to better compete within their level and provides a certain goal for the administrators to strive towards.
Of all the reasons given; I think this is where it begins and ends. In the US, certain teams have an inherent right to compete in the best leagues (because their owners have purchased those rights.) In Europe, teams have to earn the right to be in the league, by winning games and proving they are good enough. The two systems are completely different.
Your assumptions go completely against all the evidence. Of the 92 teams in the English league, only a minority have ever won anything (certainly within living memory, anyway). Some of the most fanatical supporters are associated with small teams with no proud or illustrious history (Millwall come to mind!). And where teams have dropped down several divisions, the fanbase remains. Man City were still getting 30,000 into Maine Road when they’d been relegated twice. Nottingham Forest, former European champions, are still getting gates well over 20k, despite being stranded down in League 1.
You need some evidence to claim that we’re the exception. And hell would freeze over before the English system would be dropped. Don’t overlook the fact that the system extends beyond the four main divisions, into the National League System
I’m not arguing that it hurts fan support in Europe. This is the way it’s always been there and it’s all fans know.
However, I will say with a certain amount of confidence that if a league (MLB for instance) which never had it before adopted it, those small market teams would steadily lose fans to attrition. I think you underestimate the amount of competition for the sports fan dollar in the US compared to England.
If the perenially hapless Cubs lost their place in the MLB those alienated fans would quickly throw their sports dollars at the Bears, Bulls, Sox, Blackhawks, Fire and various college teams (which totally ignores all the individual sports and motorsports). Can you honestly claim that any European city has a similar variety of team sport franchises? In Europe it’s Soccer and then everything else, that’s why it’s so rabid, not the relegation system.
Don’t know how you define ‘variety’, but to take Manchester as an example: OK, there’s four premiership teams and four more league football clubs in Greater Manchester. But there’s also two big rugby league teams & one rugby union side, professional basketball & ice hockey, Lancashire cricket club, one of the main racing circuits is just down the motorway (Oulton Park), there’s the country’s main velodrome, there’s speedway, greyhounds, and so on. Nobody’s being starved of alternatives to football.
I can’t debate you on the particulars of Manchester sports, not having ever lived there, but I’m not sure it’s reasonable to place individual sports and lower/minor level teams in the same discussion. I excluded them in my Chicago example because the argument was that a team dropping from the highest level of compeition would lose fan dollars to other top level franchises. Of course the Cubs wouldn’t lose fans to any of the local minor league ballclubs if they were demoted to that level.
OK, fine, I think I understand the point. However, I’d argue that the promotion & relegation system discourages fans from abandoning a club, just because they’re going through a tough spell, because there’s always the opportunity to turn things around.
This logic doesn’t jibe for me. The promotion system certainly would improve fan support for minor league teams due to the potential of their reaching the big time someday, but I see no argument for how it could help the teams which are, and have always been, major league clubs. A team being demoted in no way would inspire loyalty beyond the loyalty that already exists in teams that lose consistently.
Let me try and explain with another Cubs example. They have some of the most loyal and rabid fans in all of baseball, yet they haven’t won anything of note for 98 years. Fans have stuck with them through an endless tough spell in hopes they’ll put it together. If in that time they’d been demoted to a lower league that “tough spell” becomes much tougher and more bleak. In any given year the fans start with the hope that they could finally win a World Series, that hope keeps them fans and keeps them buying tickets. If they spent a season or two in a lower division, hope for a World Series would be non-existent for that multi-year span. Even if they quickly got back to Major League play a certain portion of those fans would have given up permanently in that 2-year span and a certain number of fans wouldn’t have kept their season tickets.
What possible scenario exists where fan retention is better when a team has no chance of winning the biggest prize?
Well, every team has a chance of winning every spring. 
No one’s mentioned another factor: bad teams can draw fans when the quality of the opponents is high. If the Yankees are coming to town, you can be sure some of the fans showing up are there to see the Yankees (most with the hope they get clobbered). Or back when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were going for the home run records. Steroids or not, fans went to the park to see the stars, even if their team was dismal.
Then there’s natural rivalries. Yankees/Boston is big for both teams, even when they field poor teams. If one was relegated, it hurts both. Giants/Dodgers is another big one: neither team wants to miss a chance to play the other.
Well, depends on your definition: failed franchises are bought up and usually moved elsewhere. The Seattle Pilots and Montreal Expos both failed relatively recently.
I’m no fan and not even aknowledgeable about sports, but doesn’t the parallel cup/championship competitions takes in part care of this problem by giving a chance to clubs from minor leagues to win at least one of the two big prizes (the cup) if not the other (the championship)?
The only American sport where it could even concievably work would be college football. Which is something me and my friends have talked about. Now to be clear it will never happen, but it would be an interesting idea.
The way college football is set up you have 100+ teams in division I, and many more in division II and III and so on. Now division I teams can play division II teams and so on, but it is only the gutless loser sucksack teams [sub] coughNebraskacough [/sub] that do it.
So mostly you have 100+ division I teams divided into various conferences with a few independants. Some conferences are considered elite, some middleish and some not-very-good. The good conferences have teams that are championship contenders year after year, and then a couple teams that are occasionally awful. The middle and crappy confernces sometimes have very good teams, but it’s impossible to judge how good because the play most of their games against teams that arn’t considered elite. Then the winner is chosen by arbitrarily choosingthe top 8 teams, then choosing the top 2 and having them play each other. It is one hell of an ugly system that typically decides nothing.
I think it would be cool to take all of the division I and II and III teams, and set up them into twelve team leagues from best to worse. Of course there would be 20+ levels which would be pretty ugly too. Then you could have a relegation/promotion system, but the twelve teams in the top league could have a true regular and playoff season and really find a champ. The lower tier teams would have a shot at a real championship and a upgrade.
But it will never happen, because traditional rivalries are huge, and make shitgobs of money, and seperating the traditional conferences would kill those matchups, and would never be accepted. Plus with players having a max of 4 years, and good players staying only 2 or three, it is so volitile from year to year, some teams would end up horribly out of sync with competition some years.