Except collusion only happend in 86, 87 and 88. How does that explain every other year during that stretch?
Collusion was PROVED or DETERMINED for 86, 87 and 88. That’s not to say it may have not been going on, or something like it, before that.
And as for this:
**
I couldn’t disagree with you more. And the 4th-place, 5th-place schedule thing is overrated. If you finish fourth in a very good division, yes you’ll play lesser-lights from around the league. But you may still have to play six games a year with three playoff teams.
The lack of player movement and lower player salaries are a direct result of the NFL having a salary cap and a different free agency structure than MLB.
Actually, RT, there certainly was a big disparity between the top stars and the ordinary MLB players back in days of yore. But even the stars were paid a relative pittance. All a team ever had to do was pay a player enough to keep him from quitting the game altogether, because that was a player’s only choice: play for the team that owned him under the reserve clause, or don’t play at all. If you want to know how little that was, read Jim Bouton’s classic memoir, Ball Four. Thank god for the union and free agency.
Of course, there has never been much competitive balance in MLB, and the last decade has been pretty much dead average in competitive balance. (See Bill James’ excellent new version of his Historical Abstract.) I hate the Yankees with a white hot passion, but the Yankees have won World Series after World Series for 80 years–the last six are anything but an aberration on that count.
And the NFL sucks ass ever since it adopted a salary cap. Who the hell wants to watch nothing but mediocre teams fighting it out each year to see which one is the least mediocre? Yuck. I’d rather have the game come to a halt altogether than watch enforced mediocrity.
Irrespective of how they publicly justify them, they would charge just as much if salaries were cut in half tomorrow. MLB teams have essentially no direct costs at all. The ticket prices are based purely on revenue maximization.
If salaries were cut, you don’t REALLY think MLB owners would give any of that money back to the fans, do you? Dream on. And in any case, MLB ticket prices are hardly all that daunting. I could take a family of four to see a ballgame in most parks for forty bucks plus parking.
As for the claims that so many MLB teams have no chance of winning, I have a two word response to that:
- Bull,
- Shit.
By my count there is exactly one (1) team that really hasn’t any chance of ever winning in the current model: The Montreal Expos. You show me any other so-called small market team, and I’ll show you the Oakland A’s and Cleveland Indians, both in small markets and both recently quite successful.
CONSERVATIVELY speaking, by my count, there are at least 21 teams that very obviously have the market size and revenue potential to win the World Series; both New York teams, both L.A. teams, both Chicago teams, Boston, Toronto, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston, Texas, St. Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Arizona, Colorado, Cleveland, Oakland, and Seattle. Every one of those teams is either winning right now, has won just in the last few years, or is in a large market. There is Minnesota, whose owner wants to kill them but who are winning their division by two weeks anyway. You have four small market teams who have been so hopelessly mismanaged that they couldn’t win with billion-dollar budgets - Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Tampa Bay. You have the two teams MLB now seem intent on destroying, Florida and Montreal. And finally, there’s San Diego and Cincinnati; jury’s still out there. So realistically, how many teams can you HONESTLY point to and say “That team would have won, or would be winning now, if only they weren’t in such a poor market?” Maybe Montreal. Maybe. And that team USED to be a high-revenue team until it was run into the ground.
I cannot think of a single team in the major leagues that honestly could have built an excellent team but could not translate it into championships because they just could not make enough money, except for Montreal - and to a large extent, that was Montreal’s fault.
Which one?
Rick - there’s something to this “some teams can’t win” stuff. I, too, hate to quote George Will, but in a recent column, he pointed out:
So there you have it: since the last strike, the higher-paying half of the teams have won 219 playoff games, and the lower-paying half have won five. The top 1/4 of teams, payroll-wise, have won all the World Series games during that time; the bottom 3/4 have won none.
It’s nice to say, “these teams could win,” but until they do, I think Will’s got a case: big differences in money, overall, make a big difference in who can contend. And the differences are big (Will again):
minty:
With all due respect to Bill James, I think the decade-by-decade analysis he does, while a good tool for avoiding cherry-picking bias over a long stretch of time, misses something that seems to have happened to baseball coincident with the last strike; it seems to have somehow been a watershed event in reducing the level of competitiveness in the game.* Not having the Historical Abstract at hand, I’m not sure whether his decades run 0-9 or 1-0, but either way, his 1990s include four or five pre-strike seasons, back in the world where the Reds and Expos were still competitive.
I agree that the recent stretch of Yankee dominance is not that out of line, over MLB’s long history, but frankly, that historical disparity sucked. James pointed out a decade or more back that baseball’s disparity between best and worst teams had decreased, slowly but surely, from each decade to the next; IMHO, that made for some very exciting baseball by the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s. Whether it’s a return to historical norms or not, I think we’ve seen a genuine reversal of that trend in the 1995-2002 period, and I don’t think it’s good for the game.
I don’t think we’re in disagreement here, minty. I was responding to Jodi’s ideal of how baseball should work - free agency, but no union. I think that if such a situation were possible, there would be genuinely competitive bidding for a handful of top stars; most owners would still open their wallets to land a Derek Jeter. But I think the bidding would drop off rapidly between the stars of the game and the merely better-than-average ML players. And of course, I don’t know what device keeps a viable free agency in existence, in the absence of a union.
[sub]And I’ve read Ball Four, several times; IMHO, it’s the most sheer fun of any baseball book ever.[/sub]
*[sub]My personal theory is that the economic blow of the 1994-95 stoppage simply hit the small-market clubs a lot harder than the large-market clubs, simply because they would have gone into the stoppage poorer, and would have had less of an income stream to build themselves back up with afterward. The income disparity was a problem that hadn’t yet surfaced on the field in 1994, but it was - as James pointed out in his annual that year - the real issue that caused the stoppage. The 1994-95 strike, IMO, took what would have been a slow decline in the fortunes of small-market teams, and made it happen almost overnight.
At least, that’s my theory. But it’s backed up by exactly zero in the way of numbers and hard research, so it really is the proverbial “just a theory”. :)[/sub]
The players resistance to contraction is irrational. It would improve the game of baseball immensely, by getting the worst players back in the minors where they belong. It eliminates a total of 50 full-season roster spots (if you eliminate 2 teams). Compared to the huge number of players in the A-class minor leagues, 50 roster spots just isn’t worth fighting over. Frankly, I’d like to see 4 teams contracted. The best solution would have been not to expand in the first place, because eliminating these franchises is becoming more troublesome than opposing their creation would have been. Absent a time machine, contraction is the best solution.
Still, the players are quite on the right side in opposing the salary cap. As I often say, the San Francisco 49ers stopped being a football team and became an accountancy firm by the mid-90’s, and the salary cap is to blame.
So I’d say each side is a little wrong, and both are colossally wrong if they think baseball will survive another strike and get back its fan base intact. If they go on strike, dwindling attendance and TV money resulting from a diminished fan base will take care of rising salaries – there won’t be any money for payroll. It will also take care of revenue sharing – what percent of zero would you like to share?
You can side with whomever you want. But contraction killed my last bit of sympathy for them. I mean, two days after a great World Series, they kill the afterglow by bringing up the issue. They didn’t seem the least bit interested in discussing ways to eliminate the need for contraction. (This says it all, IMHO.) In a sport with deeper ties to its history than any other, they were willing to kill a hundred-year-old franchise rather than move it back to the city from whence it originated, where it would have made gobs of money.
As a sometimes fan, it’s hard for me to see how these guys have my interests in mind, in any way, shape, or form. (The players don’t either, but at least they don’t make the pretense.)
Every owner can exercise the self-control to not make free-agent bids that are grossly in excess of the market, without colluding in the least.
It’s hard to pin the competitiveness of baseball in the 1980s to collusion. Contrary to your suggestion, there’s no evidence I know of that they tried it for other than the 1986-88 seasons. Baseball was quite competitive in the decade that ended in 1985, and it was competitive in 1989-94 too.
Collusion seems to have been their fallback from when Ueberroth made them settle the 1985 strike (the one almost nobody remembers :)) in a couple of days, rather than having it turn into a replay of 1981.
The players agreed to this.
Now this I don’t get. The players’ union is irrational to oppose the elimination of between 50 and 150 major-league roster spots, the ones that pay the big bucks?
I’ve long been curious about how dilution of talent is measured. I mean, there are always players in the major leagues who shouldn’t be there. How do you establish how bad the problem is?
You think all the Class A players, combined, earn as much in a year as the Twins and Expos players are earning this year?
If baseball really needs to contract, then let it contract. But first, let them try alternatives. The players have already agreed on 50-50 revenue sharing, which ought to help. The owners could put one ailing club in D.C., and move another into the NYC area, which once had three teams, and can support three teams now better than many smaller markets can support one.
Let me ask this: since the MLBPA has said that the real problem is essentially an intra-mural one between the owners, in that they cannot agree on a mechanism to divvy up revenues, in particular local TV revenues that the Yankees have access to but the great majority of other teams don’t now- and won’t ever- have, then why do the players have a say in that question? That is, if the owners unilaterally agreed among themselves how to divide such revenues, the MLBPA would sue for collusion because the owners’ revenue-sharing mechanism wasn’t part of the collective bargaining agreement. Isn’t this an example of the players being disengenous? How can the union maintain “This isn’t really our fight” while simultaneously insisting that their point of view has to be included in its resolution?
Baseball is in sad condition. The fact that some teams have to lure their fans using trinkets such as a “Barry Larkin Bobble-head doll” disgusts me.
RT:
Thank you for providing data showing RickJay’s assertion as utterly false on its face.
As for your point about the owners, don’t get me wrong. I think they are jerks, too. But when I look at issues such as revenue sharing, steroid and other drug-testing for the athletes, and internationalizing the draft, I think the owners are on the right side. (I hadn’t heard that the players had conceded on testing. they certainly didn’t do it initially.)
Contraction was a joke from the beginning. I truly believe it was a strawman set up to be offered as a concession during negotiations they knew would be tough.
**
I must admit I am going on anecdotal evidence, and my possibly faulty memory. I recall much less player movement in the '80s through free-agency, and home-grown players staying with their teams for more years throughout their careers.
This doesn’t offer evidence that owners were colluding prior to being found to have done it in the mid-to-late '80s, but these statistics on player movement, and the number of at-bats and innings pitched by moved players, seems to bear out that the trend has grown steadily, especially since the 1980s. And, not surprisingly to me, the gap between teams able to truly compete for championships and the many that can’t seem to coincides with when the trend widened for star (or more-than-marginal) players, as noted by the second set of stats.
RT, I suspect we’re simply going to have to disagree on current vs. historical baseball competitiveness. Neither one of us has the data to make an empirical evaluation isolating the post 1994-95 years, though that would surely be a very interesting exercise. I’ll simply observe that in all the recent years of Yankee dominance, they’ve been seriously challenged by any number of teams that could or should have beaten them in the playoffs.
They almost got beat by Juan Gonzalez and the Rangers in the first round of the 1996 playoffs, and the Braves blew a two-game lead in the Series. They did get beat by the Indians in 1997. '98 was theirs from start to finish, one of the greatest seasons for a team ever. '99 saw a great ALCS against the Red Sox (a hurt Pedro Martinez coming on in relief to dominate the Yankees was every bit as cool as Randy Johnson pitching for the win in game 6 and relieving for the win in game 7 last year). The A’s by all rights should have beat the Yankees in both 2000 and 2001, and Seattle looked like it could have knocked them off both years as well. And of course, Luis Gonzales blooped a single over Derek Jeter’s head last year, making me jump up and down with joy.
The Yankees have been very, very good. They have also been very, very lucky.
Also, I quite agree that complete free agency would depress some players’ salaries. A-Rod is not going to get $25 million a year if young players–currently tied to their teams by the labor agreement–like Rafael Furcal and Alfonso Soriano are also on the market competing for contracts. It would depress salaries at the highest levels, but raise them at the lower levels, where great athletes are making relative peanuts playing baseball every bit as well as some of the multi-millionaires. Furcal is probably going to be the AL MVP this year (A-Rod gets stiffed again for playing on a non-New York, non-playoff team), and he’s probably making right around $250,000 this year. Wanna guess what his market value would be as a free agent?
As for contraction, RexDart, the reasoning is quite simple. The owners don’t get a penny if they move a franchise to another city. By buying out two owners of low-value teams, then selling new franchises to the cities where they would have moved (especially D.C.) for vast amounts of cash, the owners make a substantial profit.
Every one of which has now been agreed to by the union.
I meant luxury tax; not revenue-sharing.
And, did you see the stats from the George Will column cited by RTFirefly? It’s not an issue upon which one can disagree. The numbers tell one story.
If this is a fair indicator of just what the impasse is, this whole thing is ridiculous. Come together at some number between $102 million (where the owners are) and $130 million (where the players are) for when the luxury tax kicks in, and be done with it.
(It also indicates that they haven’t agreed on a steroid-testing plan yet, or a worldwide draft, BTW.)
And according to this:
The reporter felt compelled to note that Reich was making his comments from his yacht.
Did the reporter think the fact that Reich was the owner who gave Alex Rodriguez $252 million didn’t make his comments ironic enough?
Considering that I just got back from a game in which Alex Rodriguez hit three home runs, I consider that $252 million well spent. There is much that is wrong with the game. Alex Rodriguez is not on that list.
And Hicks is just sore because he spent his millions foolishly, and now wants to have someone else prevent him from spending more money foolishly. Or rather, he wants to have someone else ensure that when he spends his money badly, he spends less of it.
And yes, I saw the stats from RT. They’re far from meaningless, but they don’t say near as much as you think they do. One of the primary reasons high-payroll teams win is because successful teams make more money. Go back a decade and see where Cleveland ranked in the salary scale–probably the bottom quarter. But they put an improved product on the field, were rewarded with spectacular attendance figures, and their payroll increased accordingly. Now that the Indians suck again, they’re cutting salary like crazy, and they’re not going to be in a position to win for at least another couple years.
That’s the way the game works. Good teams are rewarded with increased revenue, which allows them to hire or keep star players. Bad teams are punished by low revenue, which makes it difficult to hire or keep star players.
Moreover, the simple fact that teams turn out to be bad each year invariably leads to salary dumping trades. Why keep an overpaid superstar around on a team that’s not going to make the playoffs when you can trade him to a contended for low-paid prospects who will help you win in the future? Thus, George Will’s figures are to a large extent a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the bad teams dump salary and move into the bottom half of the pay scale, while good teams add salary trying to make the playoffs and get to the World Series.
The Tigers and the Rangers suck because they have been run abysmally, while the A’s and the Mariners kick butt because they have been run extremely well. It’s easier to do well with big bucks, but it’s anything but a guarantee. Just ask Tom Hicks.
Well, that’s really just George Will quoting Bud Selig.
And, while it is interesting on its face, it’s also interesting for what it doesn’t say: that there’s been a fair amount of variety in who’s been spending money year to year. It’s not like it’s Yankees v. Braves every year; it was in '96 (when the Yankees were actually the upstarts) and in ‘99 (which was predictable enough to be a legitimate bitch bitch bitch moan moan moan affair). But several NL teams have been the Yankees’ bitch the past 6 years.
Also, iirc, the way MLB counts payroll shades this figure some.
And MLB should acknowledge that its own expanded division/expanded playoff format has really helped out the Yankees. Having Cleveland in the Central bypassed some good pennant races, and the Yankees won the WS despite having the fifth-best record in the AL in 2000. They won it legitimately, of course, but the set-up allowed them to do this. By my reckoning, the Yankees would have either struggled mightily or wouldn’t have made the postseason in '95, '96, '97, '99 and '00, under the old system. The wild card may well be a “raving success,” but MLB should really acknowledge its other side: that it gives an extra pass to an extra rich team much of the time.
This is a semi-response to the point that there’s turnover in the list of teams that spend more money than others. I figured I’d get rid of that problem by simply seeing how many teams had made the ALCS/NLCS, total, over any 7-year period, and seeing if the number of teams that had played there in 1995-2001 was out of line.
So I looked at the number of teams that had played in the ALCS and NLCS over all the 7-year periods beginning with the first LCSes (1969) and ending with the last pre-strike year (1993). This gave me 19 overlapping 7-year periods: 1969-75, 1970-76,…1987-93. In 1974-80, for instance, 11 different teams made the playoffs.
Then I divided by the average number of teams in the league over those years. (E.g., in 1969-75, the average number of teams was 24, since there were 24 teams the entire time, but in 1974-80, the average number of teams was 25-1/7, since the AL added 2 teams in 1977.) This gave me a percentage (weighted, where necessary) of teams in any given 7-year period that had made the league championship series. For instance, in 1974-80, the weighted percentage was 11 divided by 25-1/7, which is .438 as a decimal, or 43.8% as a percentage.
The results for the 1969-93 period looked like this:
7 yrs
ending #teams %teams
93 15 .571
92 15 .577
91 16 .615
90 16 .615
89 17 .654
88 19 .731
87 21 .808
86 19 .731
85 19 .731
84 18 .692
83 15 .577
82 14 .544
81 12 .472
80 11 .438
79 11 .443
78 11 .448
77 12 .494
76 13 .542
75 11 .458
versus
01 12 .406
The 40.6% of teams getting to the ALCS in 1995-2001 was distinctly lower than any of the 7-year periods from the 1969-93 period, but how much lower? The 1969-93 numbers have a mean of .586, and a standard deviation of .114; I’m rusty at this, but according to my t-distribution table, there’s about a 93% likelihood that it wasn’t that low by chance. So whether it’s ‘too’ low to have happened by chance, depends on whether you’re working with an alpha of .05 or .10.
IOW, it’s low enough to strongly suggest that things are different now, but not low enough to statistically prove anything. (Dammit. ;))
Wouldn’t you pretty much expect a larger percentage of teams to make the LCS over any particular period when there are fewer teams in the league? I mean, since expansion teams have pretty much always been basket cases? (With the notable–and recent–examples of the D-Backs and '97 Marlins?)
Exactly how long have you been following baseball? Bobblehead dolls are new yes, but the general concept of give-away days and other special promotions have been going on for decades. My Google skills are lacking, so I can’t give you an exact time they started, but they were going full swing in the 70’s, and probably well before that.