Screw baseball

So my buddy Dan is writing a 50-page research project for some class he's taking and he's turned to me for a little assistance. The purpose of his beast of an assignment is to see whether a salary cap and/or revenue sharing helps to maintain a competitive balance in professional sports.

The two biggest focal points of the assignment are naturally the National Football League and Major League Baseball, since they are the two biggest leagues in professional sports. And while both are great, they go about running their leagues in very different ways. The NFL is, in my expert opinion, the golden standard. Their model for revenue sharing should be immediately implemented in baseball, basketball and hockey (but not NASCAR, that would just be confusing).

First of all, I'd like to say this is genius - letting kids do college research papers on sports. Hell, you might have even been able to get me into a classroom with that kind of forward thinking. If every paper I had to write could have focused on sports; I could have tolerated four more years of school. Just think how much I hated schoolwork if I was willing to join the Army and get abused by drill sergeants to avoid midterms and exams. And, I'm a professional writer. And yes, I am not that bright.

Back to Dan's topic. Here's a quickie summary:
Through revenue sharing, the NFL makes each of the 32 owners empty out their respective pockets and dump his money into a pot. And at the end of the day, more than 60 percent of a team's revenue is put towards into that pot, which in turn is shared across the league.

That means, small market teams aren't penalized just because they don't reside in a major metropolis. When it comes to finances, cities such as Jacksonville or Cincinnati are on a level playing field with major markets like New York or Washington, D.C.

Taking matters one step further, the NFL also has a salary cap that sets minimum and maximum amounts a team is allowed to spend a year on its roster. Because of this, a team doesn't automatically benefit just because they have the richest owner. On the flip side, deadbeat owners have a minimum standard that they too must adhere to. They can't just sandbag by sending out 53 stiffs each season and watch as the rest of the league sends truckloads of money to their way year after year (this is known as the Arizona Cardinals rule).

In baseball things are run differently (which isn't a good thing). There is no revenue sharing, just a luxury tax, so an owner can spend as much as he wants and at the end of the day he'll have to pay a fine if he goes over baseball's spending "limit."

That's how New York Yankess owner George Steinbrenner can continually pump millions and millions of dollars into his real-life fantasy baseball team. (Quick sidenote: for years I played fantasy baseball with a group of guys I worked with back in my early Army days. And every year this one guy, we'll call him Jason, kept drafting Yankees players for his fantasy baseball team. He wanted all of them. Seriously, if you ended up with Mike Mussina or Derek Jeter on your roster, you could make him sweat it out a month and then rip the poor bastard off - just so he could get his beloved Yankees players. The best part, this strategy never worked. He was always one of the worst teams in the league because if the Yankees got shut out, so did his team. I like to think of it as karma for loving a team run by Steinbrenner).

Where was I? Oh yeah … baseball. Sorry about that.

This year, the Yankees' payroll is $194.6 million. In a related story, the Yankees have been to the postseason 10 straight years and won the division nine out of those 10 seasons. The Yankees payroll is higher than the Kansas City Royals ($47.2 million), Pittsburgh Pirates ($46.7 million), Colorado Rockies ($41.2 million), Tampa Bay Devil Rays ($35.4 million) and the Florida Marlins ($14.9 million) combined. That's right, those five franchises have a combined payroll of $185.4 million – still nearly $10 million less than those damned Yankees.

I don't blame Steinbrenner for taking advantage of the situation. I blame baseball for letting things get so wildly out of hand. In football, an owner like Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys can't stack his roster with quarterback Peyton Manning and running back Shaun Alexander when they become free agents. Well, he can. But the end result would be that there'd be no money left for fielding the rest of his team. That's why the Indianapolis Colts lost star running back Edgerrin James. They couldn't fit his salary under the cap after dishing out money to Manning, wide receivers Marvin Harrison and Reggie Wayne, so James had to decide whether to stay with the only team he's known, or take the money and run. For the record, he's now a resident of the state of Arizona (where he'll have plenty of money to spend on rehabbing himself after getting demolished behind that terrible Cardinals offensive line).

The most glaring issue when comparing the business side of baseball and football is that football encourages parity. They really would love it if all 32 cities felt like they could win the Super Bowl every year. In baseball, they don't care. So if you live in Milwaukee or Pittsburgh or Tampa Bay, you come into each season thinking the Packers or Steelers or Buccaneers can win it all (well, if Brett Favre stopped throwing so many damned interceptions). But you also know that there is almost a zero percent chance that the Brewers, Pirates and Devil Rays will even finish .500 for the season. How does that seem right?

So let's pretend you're a Pittsburgh native, and you're still basking in the glow of the Steelers fifth Super Bowl championship. Feels good, huh? Well, enjoy it because the Steelers are the only team your city has capable of winning a championship. The Pirates and even the Penguins aren't going to be in shape to win any time soon. Because if the Pirates finish in dead last every year for the next five years and use the first pick in the draft to pick five bona fide superstars, financially, they won't be able to keep all five of those players.

As soon as they begin the field a semi-competitive team, those players will be ready for bigger bucks and some team like the Yankees swoops in to steal away your homegrown talent. Then, the Pirates are back in the cellar ready to start all over again. That's what the man meant when he said "when it comes crashing down and it hurts inside."

So to Dan and all of you I say, turn your back on baseball. Stop supporting America's pastime until they give every team a legitimate chance to win. Don't do it for me - do it for the little guy who is drowning away his sorrows in Milwaukee watching two of his team's best players run into each other in the field in hopes that they might get injured and therefore distance themselves from another forgettable Brewers season.

Brian Murphy does not want to be on your radio show. Stop asking him. Contact him at murf@the5holes.com.