Why Baseball Needs a Salary Cap.
My first ever blog is happening because of the recent spending spree of baseball’s most loved and hated team. The signing today of Mark Texeira made me think, how many teams have the ability to even sign these high end talents? Here you have a team spending $430 + million so far this offseason, a number most of the league can’t even afford to spend. If my team has no chance at signing high end talent then why should I even bother to watch baseball anymore. The Indians will never have the ability to spend anywhere near the kind of money the Yankees are and if they can’t spend the money then the chance of them getting the talent necessary to compete with the Yankees is slim. I know the Yankee fans will say look at Tampa Bay this year, they got to the World Series didn’t they? Yes they did, but how often does that happen? Baseball’s free agent market is becoming a monopoly and if we won’t allow it in business why are we allowing it in sport? The fact of the matter is the Yankees are going to spend more in payroll this year then over 80% of the league’s team revenues. The Yankees payroll last year was 209 million and change. There is only 4 teams in the MLB that have team revenues above that number (Mets $235m, Red Sox’s $263m, Dodgers $224m, Cubs $214m). That is absurd to me. There are 25 MLB teams that have less revenue than the Yankees have in payroll. That means 83% of the league cannot take in as much revenue as the Yankees are spending on payroll. Forget about all the other expenses involved with a baseball organization like coaches, general managers and ballpark staff. Most of the league just can’t compete with the Yankees in trying to sign the Manny Ramirez’s, the Mark Texeira’s, the C.C. Sabathia’s of baseballs free agent market. Which brings me to my main point, why should I even bother watching my team, the Cleveland Indians this season? They can’t go out and sign guys with talent that can help the club and even if they draft the good players they will leave in the prime of their careers because they know the small market teams can’t pay them anything close to what they Yankees and a few others can. So why should I even bother watching them? There is a very small chance that they will be able to compete for a World Series each year. I think it is a tough sell for baseball to ask fans in Cleveland to follow baseball for 5 months and 182 games hoping for a World Series win when history shows us that once out of every ten years a small market might win the World Series. It just seems like a lot to ask.
Thoughts?