Football's popularity vs Baseball's

[Buccaneer]

Nothing insightful at all...

Football leaves baseball in the dust

By Sean McAdam
Special to ESPN.com

<!-- template inline -->More out of habit than anything else, we still refer to baseball as the national pastime.

In truth, the tag hasn't fit for some time. Football began making inroads as far back as the 1970s, and two decades later, it wasn't much of a contest anymore. If baseball still had the hearts and minds of the American sports fan, then football could lay claim to everything else.

By any measure -- TV viewership, merchandise sold, fan surveys -- football rules. The game may not be superior, but it undeniably is more popular.

Some of that is baseball's fault; some of it is not. A look at what switched America's sports pecking order around.

1. TV
If ever a sport seemed made for television, it's football. Neatly packaged into three-hour programming blocks, it provides networks with dependable programming.

What's more, it's as if football moves across the screen, as though developed by a TV executive. While baseball features a one-on-one matchup who stand 60 feet apart from one another, football involves 22 players, all of whom are lined up in an area far more compact.

At the snap of the ball, all but a handful of players are within camera view. In baseball, the opposite is true.

Football's unique setup allows each game to (potentially) be a national telecast. With baseball, it's a hodgepodge lineup with an array of local broadcast options.

Baseball's Game of the Week takes place on warm summer afternoons when people are at the beach, the mountains or amusement parks. Football's national telecasts take place in the late fall and winter, when inclement weather in many parts of the country forces people inside to gather around the electronic hearth.


2. Violence
Football is chartitably called a contact sport. In actuality, it's a collision sport. You can watch a nine-inning baseball game and never see two players come in physical contact with one another.

Not so with football, which guarantees high-speed crashes between players of ever-increasing size and strength on every play.

The more fierce the collision, the better. And once again, TV helps out here, zooming in on these crashes and showing them in slow motion, giving them the look of a stylized ballet.

A very, very violent stylized ballet, that is.


3. Gambling
Football easily lends itself to wagering. Team A is favored by three points over Team B. Pick one and watch your investment play out for the next several hours.

Ever try to decipher baseball odds? There's something in there about one team being plus-130, and the other being a minus-120. You need a degree in calculus to make sense of it all.

Meanwhile, tens of millions watch an otherwise uninteresting Monday Night Football matchup to the very end because they've got the under, or they've picked the team with the nice blue uniforms in the office pool.

The league -- unofficially of course -- helps sanction this interest. While baseball investigates Pete Rose to the ends of the earth, football demands that its teams compile a full and accurate injury report by mid-week.

For the, um, fans.


4. Attention span
Colletively, we don't have one. Not a very long one, anyway, and it's baseball's bad fortune to demand focus and involvement.

Not so with football. A play is run, a replay or three is shown, and before you know, the offense is breaking from the huddle. And never mind that studies have shown that there's actually about 10 minutes worth of action in a given NFL game.

Thanks to TV, it sure seems more.

Baseball, meanwhile, is languid and leisurely. A single at-bat, producing no more than foul balls, can last for several minutes. To the hard-core fan, this can be fascinating and provide time for conversation and analysis.

For too many others, however, it makes baseball d-u-l-l.

For a culture accustomed to the quick-cut edits of MTV and instand satisfaction, baseball is hopelessly out-of-date.

The fact that football is generally played one day a week -- while every baseball team plays every day for six months -- is another point in the NFL's favor.

It's a serious investment of one's time to watch a team for 162 games. Not so with football, whose 16-game schedule better suits the busy lifestyle.


5. Labor peace
Football has it. Baseball can only dream of it.

The last work stoppage in football came in 1987, almost a generation ago, and lasted only a few games. The last baseball stoppage came in 1994 and wiped out half the season, the World Series, and part of the next spring training.

Only 18 months ago, baseball stood on the brink of another disaster, and though it was averted at the 11th hour, the mere possibility of another stoppage did some damage.

It's a perverse dictum, but as a general rule, the weaker the union in a particular sport, the more popular the game seems to be with the American public.

That's bad news for baseball -- whose Players Association is mighty and nearly undefeated in the legal arena -- and good news for the NFL, which runs roughshod over its Players Association.


6. Socialism
Forty-something years ago, former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle had the brilliant business sense to determine that what was good for one team was good for all. Revenue sharing has made it possible for a team in Green Bay to compete on equal footing with two teams in New York and other large cities.

Not so in baseball, where it's every club for itself. Parity has improved in baseball, and likely will continue to do so under the current collective bargaining agreement. But beyond poor management in Phoenix -- and until recently in Cincinnati -- NFL fans don't feel disenfranchised.

Try telling that to baseball fans in small-market cities likes Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and others.

None of which is to suggest that baseball has completely lost its hold on the sporting public. It's still the game that more people attend in person than any other. It's mid-season exhibition game draws more viewers to TV than any other during the summer months. And it's important grab on the American psyche was never more apparent than in the days and weeks following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But baseball has ceded its title of American pastime, and more than likely, it's not going to get it back anytime soon.
I accept this but I think baseball has two things going for it that football will never come close to meeting:

1. History. As each baseball season goes by, it adds one more layer of frosting on an extremely rich cake that can take a lifetime to analyze and enjoy.

2. Arguably, baseball's greatest moments are far better and more memorable than football's greatest moments. Part of it is baseball's focus on individual achievements and throughout our history, we have celebrated heroic or extraordinary achievements of the individual.

[Ksyrup]

Baseball's also got a better set of definable and defining statistics that makes the game more interesting to follow.

The bottom line for me is, I just like baseball better. But I'm in the minority and accept that fact.

[cthomer5000]

Baseball also has a lot more boredom.

[Dutch]

I respect Baseball, I love football. Both have a place in American sports.
But the switch is obvious to me as to which one is the most popular. And it's #1 on the list Buc posted.

Baseball is the newspaper era's creation.

Heavy stats. If you can read baseball stats, you can read players abilities. If you can read a box score, you can nearly recreate the game batter by batter. People didn't even need TV's to know the Yankees were awesome and that Mickey Mantle was the man (or Mays or whomever)

Football is the Television era's creation.

The game lends itself to being viewed on TV so much better than baseball. (as was pointed out). A guy can score an 18 yd TD run in the newpaper, but he can make 4 tacklers miss, keep his balance, and run over a DB for the score on TV. All Baseball HR's are basically the same, without trying to sound disrespectful.

[lynchjm24]

Game 7 of the ALCS got a higher rating at Midnight on a Thursday then the Patriots Super Bowl title did on a Sunday evening.

Edit: I was speaking of the Boston television market. I think the baseball game got a 53+ and the football game got a 52.

[lynchjm24]

But I'm in the minority and accept that fact.

It's a minority I'm proud to be in.

[Craptacular]

Baseball is a great game, but MLB is ruining it for a lot of people (myself included).

[FBPro]

Football is BY FAR more exciting and fun to follow, if baseball execs don't get a clue soon they are going to flush the game completely down the toliet.

[Dutch]

I agree with that FBPro, baseball isn't ruining baseball.

[sterlingice]

This is just going to degrade into the typical "I like baseball better" "No, I like football better" thread (as if it hasn't already).

SI

[Chubby]

This is just going to degrade into the typical "I like baseball better" "No, I like football better" thread (as if it hasn't already).

SI


I like football better.

[Godzilla Blitz]

I think there are two more points that need to be made about the current plight of baseball.

1. Image: Baseball's drug/steroid policy is laughable. In my mind, this has tainted the last decade of stats, and tarnishes the image of the sport tremendously. At least football is trying.

2. Youth movement: I've got no stats to back up my argument, but I would have to think the participation rates of youth playing baseball (little league, etc.) has dropped over the past decade. Instead, soccer is everywhere. If I jog near my house on a typical summer evening, I can go by five parks in 30 minutes. Four of them will have youth soccer games going, most of them with their nets and field markings perched on top of ex-little league fields. Only one of the parks will have a baseball game going.

I think the long-term impact of this trend in youth sports participation is only beginning to play a role in reducing the interest in baseball even more. I believe the most fanatic baseball fans grow up with the game. I grew up with baseball in Boston, and it will forever be a part of me. But I played the game. All my friends played the game. All we talked about in the summer was baseball. Now? Kids play soccer (itself a great game, of course). For every diehard baseball fan that dies in the US, we're replacing them with a kid who grew up on soccer and may only have a casual, spectator interest in the baseball. I believer the long term impact of this trend will be a further erosion of fan interest in baseball in the upcoming two decades.

Lastly, I think Buc is correct when he speaks of baseball having a richer history, but Major League Baseball does a horseshit job of taking advantage of this. Think about the jumpy, scratchy video clips you see of old baseball games and players, then compare that with the juggernaut that is NFL Films. NFL Films blows baseball away in presenting its sport's history to the public. I love baseball, but I can't remember the last time I saw a good documentary on some memorable series or event. Football? NFL Films cranks out new videos every year, all of them polished pieces with high production values. They're making games that happened 30 years ago look like they happened yesterday. Amazing stuff.

In short, baseball will have no one to blame but itself twenty years from now when they look back on another 20 years of declining fan interest in the game.

[sabotai]

Baseball, for me, is fun to play and nice to go watch in the stadium. The few games I have gone to watch, I enjoyed it (except for one...it ended 1-0 and the only score was at the top of the first and we were in the nose bleeds seats). But as far as watching baseball on TV, I'd rather sharpen a pencil and shove it in my eye.

This is, right now, a TV nation and the sport that translate best to TV will dominate, no matter what anyone does. Baseball do not translate well to TV, football does.

[ISiddiqui]

Arguably, baseball's greatest moments are far better and more memorable than football's greatest moments. Part of it is baseball's focus on individual achievements and throughout our history, we have celebrated heroic or extraordinary achievements of the individual.

I agree with this. Baseball is more focused on the individual (although 'team' is definetly important for defense... which is an underrated part of winning you championships) which allows for more identification with individual players. Also it allows for the 'underdog' player to singlehandedly win the game and become immortalized (such as Bucky Fucking Dent), while in American football, the winning score is led by the superstar.

Baseball is my favorite, even in these times.

[Ksyrup]

Soccer has always (at least since I was a kid) been a popular sport to play as a kid. For whatever reason, it doesn't stay with us. I can't stand the game, but I played for several years during grade school. I don't notice any difference now.

So, I don't see soccer taking away from the interest in baseball.

[DanGarion]

I like football better.
I like baseball better! ;)

[BishopMVP]

Game 7 of the ALCS got a higher rating at Midnight on a Thursday then the Patriots Super Bowl title did on a Sunday evening.

Edit: I was speaking of the Boston television market. I think the baseball game got a 53+ and the football game got a 52.
Yeah, but remove the Red Sox and the Patriots from the two games and the Super Bowl will be much higher.

I don't watch baseball games on TV if they don't involve the Red Sox, NBA games without the Celtics, NHL games unless it's the playoffs, but college basketball and football I'll watch all day. FWIW.

[Travis]

I would have easily said I'd prefer to watch baseball up until around 10-15 years ago, since the 'muscle' outbreak though, it's just a glorified home run derby in most situations now, so give me the grid iron, hell, even a game of the local little league over MLB.

[McSweeny]

I would have easily said I'd prefer to watch baseball up until around 10-15 years ago, since the 'muscle' outbreak though, it's just a glorified home run derby in most situations now, so give me the grid iron, hell, even a game of the local little league over MLB.

because there is no "muslce outbreak" in football

[oykib]

I read something interesting about the declining popularity of baseball. Baseball requires training from a pretty early age in the fundamentals. Which, of course, requires that fathers be in the home with the youngsters.

With the divorce and unwed, un-partnered rates for homes today, the fathers are not in the home to play catch and whatnot. They are also unavailable to learn the nuances and history of the game at the feet of. Baseball is a somewhat boring sport when you take those out of the eqaution. These aren't things that it's easy to pick up when you're older.

One of my brothers who didn't have as close a relationship with my father couldn't understand how I could watch sports all day-- particularly baseball. It was only after becoming interested in Iaido after reading and studying about Musashi that I could explain baseball in a way that he could viscerally comprehend. That's all because he hadn't spent as much time with my father watching sports as a kid. I don't think that his road to semi baseball fandom is ever going to be common.

Most people who miss that early opportunity will never come around.

[yabanci]

These are some interesting facts that were noted in the Clarett opinion:

"According to one economist, the NFL, as a league, is valued at
slightly less than $18 billion. The National Basketball Association, the next most
valuable league, is valued at slightly less than $9 billion, Major League Baseball at
approximately $7 billion, and the National Hockey League at less than $5 billion.
At $19.6 billion, the NFL’s television contracts (the sale of the rights to air its
games) are more than the value of the NBA ($4.6 billion), MLB ($3.3 billion), and
NHL ($600 million) television contracts combined."

See Justin Wolfers, The Business of Sports: Where’s the Money?, at http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/wolfers/Papers/Comments/The%20Business%20of%20Sports.pdf

[sterlingice]

I would have easily said I'd prefer to watch baseball up until around 10-15 years ago, since the 'muscle' outbreak though, it's just a glorified home run derby in most situations now, so give me the grid iron, hell, even a game of the local little league over MLB.
And, see, these are the kind of quotes I predicted earlier in the thread as things to avoid. I'll even lump GB's post in with this. There are so many people out there just lining up to take whacks at the baseball pinata with things that other sports just don't suffer from. When people complain about baseball they use things like steroids or players making too much or that there is too much offense/defense. Aren't these problems in other sports? Just come right out and say it: you don't like baseball. Or you just like taking a jab at it. It's far from a perfect game- there are many problems with it, but at least try not to be hypocritical about it. If you don't like steroid use, then don't like all sports because I'm sure it's pretty widespread in all of them. Does it matter that the NFLs drug testing policy catches 3% versus baseball's 7%? Is that extra 4% really what makes you not like the sport?

SI

[HornedFrog Purple]

Baseball is made for radio. In fact I like listening to a game rather than watching it on TV. When the MLB website started doing the audio broadcasts for the season for every team I was in heaven.

The NFL has done a great job of getting a larger fanbase, but in my case its continuing parody is starting to wear me down. There were people that said it would just be a phase as teams adjusted themselves to a hard cap but it just hasn't happened that way.

[ice4277]

2. Youth movement: I've got no stats to back up my argument, but I would have to think the participation rates of youth playing baseball (little league, etc.) has dropped over the past decade. Instead, soccer is everywhere. If I jog near my house on a typical summer evening, I can go by five parks in 30 minutes. Four of them will have youth soccer games going, most of them with their nets and field markings perched on top of ex-little league fields. Only one of the parks will have a baseball game going.
I have always maintained that baseball's popularity base will gradually erode as people my age (mid-20's) and younger grow older. Not only is soccer gaining in popularity, but just look at the huge jump in participants/specatators of 'extreme sports'. Heck, when I was a kid in the eighties, you never saw anything like this on TV. Now they are everywhere. Plus, with the 'MTV effect', many my age group and younger do not have the patience or the time to watch baseball. While the games may not last any longer than those of the other sports, they just 'seem' to last longer. Much too deliberate and plodding of a pace for today's kids. I hardly think baseball will die, but I seriously doubt it will ever again reach its heyday in the '50's, or even the popularity level of the 1980's. I think long-term, it is destined to stay as they number-three or four most popular sport in this country.

[cthomer5000]

Baseball is made for radio. In fact I like listening to a game rather than watching it on TV. When the MLB website started doing the audio broadcasts for the season for every team I was in heaven.

The NFL has done a great job of getting a larger fanbase, but in my case its continuing parody is starting to wear me down. There were people that said it would just be a phase as teams adjusted themselves to a hard cap but it just hasn't happened that way.
First of all, it's "parity." Secondly, I don't but this parity arugment for a minute. The Patriots just won their second super bowl in 2 years. The Eagles just reached the 3rd straight NFC title game. The Packers, Rams, Colts, Broncos have all been playoff regulars.

You get a few teams making the playoffs for the first time in a while (and 1 making the Super Bowl) and people just say "oh, parity." I think that the scheduling format is going to proved the total parity concept is crap.

I'm confident that the norm will be 8 of 12 playoff teams being perennially good teams, and i think 4 of 12 will be teams either coming out of nowhere or who've been building and improving.

[rkmsuf]

I'd rather have parity compared to having over half the teams hopelessly beaten before the first game and stay that way for at least half a decade and possibly forever...see basketball and baseball...

[HornedFrog Purple]

No it's parody. :D

The level of play in the NFL has degraded, I don't care what anyone else says. It is so painfully obvious to me that I at times lose interest. There is little cohesion from year to year anymore.

The Super Bowl was a good game and most of the playoff games were also, but the bulk of the regular season was at times painful to watch.

I don't want 10 teams that have an equal chance to win the Super Bowl, I want 4 or less. That's what I miss.

[rkmsuf]

No it's parody. :D

The level of play in the NFL has degraded, I don't care what anyone else says. It is so painfully obvious to me that I at times lose interest. There is little cohesion from year to year anymore.

The Super Bowl was a good game and most of the playoff games were also, but the bulk of the regular season was at times painful to watch.

I don't want 10 teams that have an equal chance to win the Super Bowl, I want 4 or less. That's what I miss.

yeah because your team was probably one of them. I think the cohesion is fine and balanced well between new faces and franchise stawarts.

[HornedFrog Purple]

Naw the Cowboys show up every other decade, that has nothing to do with it. I have only 6 more years to go.

Would you bet the farm that both Super Bowl teams this season will make the playoffs next season? I wouldn't.

[oykib]

I'd rather have parity compared to having over half the teams hopelessly beaten before the first game and stay that way for at least half a decade and possibly forever...see basketball and baseball...

You're right about basketball. But baseball?

Tell me again-- who won the last World Series? Did any major publication even pick that team to go to the playoffs.

Wait. Last year must've been a one-year fluke. I'm sure the year before that we didn't have any suprise teams.

At least, we didn't see three of eight playoff teams in the bottom half in overall salary...

Ummm... Oh yeah...
:rolleyes:

[rkmsuf]

You're right about basketball. But baseball?

Tell me again-- who won the last World Series? Did any major publication even pick that team to go to the playoffs.

Wait. Last year must've been a one-year fluke. I'm sure the year before that we didn't have any suprise teams.

At least, we didn't see three of eight playoff teams in the bottom half in overall salary...

Ummm... Oh yeah...
:rolleyes:

I guess we've had this discussion before but it feels like there is more hopelessness in baseball. Maybe because it's a long, drawn out hopelessness over 162 never ending games...

[cuervo72]

Baseball is made for radio. In fact I like listening to a game rather than watching it on TV. When the MLB website started doing the audio broadcasts for the season for every team I was in heaven.


Which is why I still miss Jon Miller...

(edit: not doing the O's broadcasts, that is)

[RendeR]

I'm really torn on this whole issue. Honestly, I love Baseball. I always have., but I simply can't make myself sit and watch the pathetic excuse for games that are being offered by MLB these days. They are tedious affairs. Maybe its just me changing as I grow older, but when I was growing up I couldn't wait to get home from school just so I could turn on the cubs game and see who was pounding them this afternoon. When the Reds played them I'd leave school early just to see the entire game.

I also disagree completely with the whole broken home-no time with dad theory. Its crap, pure and simple. I grew up in a single parent home (mother) and my summers were spent with the neighborhood kids playing baseball, constantly. mom would have to scream at me to come inside for meals or to go to bed at night. We had the benefit of a large enough yard to play almost full games and there were light poles around it from the street, night baseball at its best. There may be many reasons for kids not putting the time and effort into learning and being passionate about baseball, but the loss of the Nuclear family is NOT one of them. If the kids wanted to play the game, they would, period.

I also spent my falls growing up playing soccer, love the game, and devoted massive amounts of time practicing and playing it. The advantage it has over baseball is two fold. When you're playing the game its not nearly as boring as standing in right field for 3 hours and maybe seeing the ball twice. and secondly you can get more players involved at the same time for less money. Soccer requires a ball, nothing more. Its the simplest and easiest game for anyone to pick up learn and play, and even play with some level of ability.

Chris Berman of ESPN said it best many years ago regarding the status of Baseball and football.
"Baseball is and always will be America's Pass-Time, but Football is America's Passion."

Baseball is a wonderful game, and I think they need to take a long hard look at some "traditional" situations and change them.

Some possible changes:
The season is too long and tedious, shorten it to 100 games or whatever level really balances out to get the most fans in the seats at each game. Space them out a bit more and schedule them to work better with the region /city they are being played in so the most people can make it to the games.

Single Television contracts. Kill off the "everyone for themselves" bullshit and get the TV time handled in a package deal as the NFL did 30 years ago. Which of course leads to the next item...

Revenue sharing, I know all about the arguments for and against it and frankly, its a matter of logic. without it, the teams will never be able to compete regularly on a level field. It isn't fiscally possible. Set a hard salary cap, make the teams get a grip on reality and make everyone stronger for it.

lastly, find a way to get some excitement into the games. Speed it up a bit, something. When you can go into the snack venues, stand in line for 20 minutes and come back and still be the same half of the inning as when you left, you're not going to keep people's attention. I don't have any real ideas on this, but I know its gotta happen. Snooze fests don't hold fans in the stands.


blah, anyway, I miss the passion I used to have for Baseball. It sickens me to see the way its being played and managed right now. Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and all those other historic figures are spitting on this era's version of their great game.

[PittFan]

And, see, these are the kind of quotes I predicted earlier in the thread as things to avoid. I'll even lump GB's post in with this. There are so many people out there just lining up to take whacks at the baseball pinata with things that other sports just don't suffer from. When people complain about baseball they use things like steroids or players making too much or that there is too much offense/defense. Aren't these problems in other sports? Just come right out and say it: you don't like baseball. Or you just like taking a jab at it. It's far from a perfect game- there are many problems with it, but at least try not to be hypocritical about it. If you don't like steroid use, then don't like all sports because I'm sure it's pretty widespread in all of them. Does it matter that the NFLs drug testing policy catches 3% versus baseball's 7%? Is that extra 4% really what makes you not like the sport?

SI
I think GB's post was right on. I don't think that people are taking whacks at baseball just because they don't like the sport but because of what baseball does, says and handles the problems it does have (steriods, juiced baseballs, corked bats, teams not making money).

Look, I was a huge fan until the strike of '94. The writing was on the wall then that teams were not going to be competitive because of the CBA, and what was done? Nothing. Business as usual. Sooo, teams like the Pirates have to tread water to survive every year (as do some other teams), but thats O.K. to the big market teams and baseball in general. This is ridiculous. A-Rod gets $25 million a year to be a shortstop? C'mon, this was the entire Pirate payroll a few years ago. Basically baseball brings this on themselves.

As to GB's post about kids playing soccer more, I think that this is two-fold. Soccer as a youth sport must be cheaper to do (I don't know for fact but it would stand to reason) and is a sport that almost all kids can play regardless of height, weight, physical skills, etc.

Just my 2 cents.

[Ksyrup]

Shortening the baseball season and speeding up the game are horrible ideas. Those two elements, as unfashionable as they may be in the year 2004, are what makes baseball the game it is.

People question whether baseball players are athletes - a game in and of itself is not particularly grinding, it's true. But they play everyday. It's a different kind of endurance than running up and down a basketball court or a football field. And while the games can be tweaked a bit as far as the length of each game goes, the back and forth between pitcher and hitter or runner, and manager against manager, are part of the game. Plus, I believe the minor changes they made last year cut a decent amount of time off of regular season games, and they were down to around 2:45. Which, I might add, is less than an NFL game.



On the parity issue:

By Sean McAdam
Special to ESPN.com

It's Super Bowl week, which means the NFL and its dutiful chroniclers will spend a good portion of their time extolling the virtues of excess and reminding everyone how much parity exists in football.

We'll be reminded -- again and again -- that no Super Bowl champion has repeated since 1994. It will be pointed out -- time after time -- that the last six teams making Super Bowl appearances have failed to even qualify for the playoffs the following season.

Whether all this minutia is actually meaningful is open to debate. It could be argued, after all, that there is something inherently wrong with a sport in which it's not only possible, but likely, to reach the championship game one year and fall under .500 the next (see: this year's Bucs and Raiders).

Interestingly, for the first time, there were recent signs that even the NFL was becoming a bit self-conscious about its "champs-one-year, bums-the next'' pattern, issuing a press release at its conference championship games that took pains to remind everyone that some teams actually qualify for the postseason in consecutive seasons!

If only baseball did a better job trumpeting up its parity. Because, believe it or not, the playing field is more even in baseball than you've been led to believe.

Consider:

Since 1998, covering the last six World Series, the National League has had six different representatives (pennant winners).



<LI>Over the last 10 World Series, the National League has been represented by seven different teams. Put another way, almost half of NL teams have visited the World Series in the last 10 Fall Classics.

Back up a step and focus on the LCS, the baseball equivalent of the NFL's conference championship games:

In the NLCS, seven different teams have occupied the eight slots in the last four meetings for the pennant: Arizona, Florida Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, Atlanta and New York. Only St. Louis has made multiple appearances.
<LI>

In the American League, the picture is admittedly different, with the New York Yankees serving as the AL standard-bearer in six of the last eight seasons.

But go back to, say, 1991 -- hardly a lifetime ago in the bigger scheme of things -- and the AL has had six different champions, or again, nearly half of its membership.

Indeed, while the Yankees have clearly dominated the American League over the last eight seasons -- though they haven't won a World Series since 2000 -- there's been widespread representation in the ALCS.

Since 1997, a total of seven teams have reached the ALCS: Baltimore, Cleveland, New York, Boston, Anaheim, Minnesota and Seattle.

Translation: In the last seven seasons, exactly half of the AL's teams have played for the pennant.

Baseball's spread-the-wealth nature is even more evident in playoff appearances.

Again, using 1998 as the cutoff point, 10 American League teams have made at least one trip to the postseason in the last six Octobers: Baltimore, Boston, New York, Minnesota, Chicago, Cleveland, Anaheim, Texas, Oakland and Seattle. Only Tampa Bay (an expansion franchise), Toronto, Detroit and Kansas City have finished out of the running. Toronto, though, has finished with a winning record in four of the six seasons and Kansas City was in first place in the AL Central as late as last September.

Detroit (10 consecutive losing seasons and counting) and Tampa Bay look truly hapless. But is that so much different than such perennial NFL losers as Arizona, Detroit, and, until this past season, Cincinnati?

It's much the same picture in the National League, where since 1998, nine teams (or 56 percent) have been to the playoffs at least once: Atlanta, Florida, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, San Francisco, San Diego and Arizona. Of those nine, every one but San Diego has made multiple appearances.

Go back just three more seasons to 1995, and add three more participants: Cincinnati, Colorado and Los Angeles. That means in the last nine seasons, only four NL teams have failed to qualify for at least a Division Series appearance: Montreal, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh.

Nineteen of baseball's teams, then -- or one team shy of two-thirds -- have made it to the postseason since 1998.

How does this compare to the on-any-given-Sunday NFL? Very favorably.

Over that same time span, just three teams have failed to qualify for the NFL postseason tournament, and one is an expansion franchise (Houston).

But it's important to remember several important distinctions:


<LI>The NFL has six playoffs spots per conference, while baseball has just four (per league). Comparing the NL and the NFC -- each conference or league has 16 teams -- there are one-third again as many playoff berths to be had.

It should follow -- and does -- that more spots means more appearances for more teams.

While only three NFL teams have failed to make the playoffs since 1998, another four -- Cleveland, Washington, Detroit and New Orleans -- have made just one appearance each in that six-year span.
<LI>

That's particularly unimpressive, especially considering ...


<LI>Unlike MLB, until recently, the NFL did a bit of social engineering with its schedule, where teams finishing with poor records were rewarded with easier schedules the following year. Conversely, successful teams were punished with more demanding schedules.

The NFL purposely set its lesser clubs on an easier road to the postseason. By virtue of its schedule, MLB provided no such help, yet yielded parity anyway. To the contrary, in some divisions, the unbalanced schedule is a hindrance to poor teams trying to improve. The lowly Devil Rays must play nearly one-quarter of their games each season against the Red Sox and Yankees.

None of which is meant to detract from the NFL's week of self-congratulatory hoo-hah.

But the next time some football apologist begins spouting about the NFL's parity, remind him or her that baseball, all things considered, isn't very far behind.

Sean McAdam of the Providence (R.I.) Journal covers baseball for ESPN.com.

[sterlingice]

Single Television contracts. Kill off the "everyone for themselves" bullshit and get the TV time handled in a package deal as the NFL did 30 years ago. Which of course leads to the next item...

Revenue sharing, I know all about the arguments for and against it and frankly, its a matter of logic. without it, the teams will never be able to compete regularly on a level field. It isn't fiscally possible. Set a hard salary cap, make the teams get a grip on reality and make everyone stronger for it.
Good post, Ren. Tho, I'll contend that if the owners had their way, the vote would be about 29-1 to have a hard cap and revenus sharing. If the Yankees want to take their ball and go home, good riddance, but even the Red Sox, Dodgers, Braves, etc would like some salary relief and those large revenue teams will always find some way to get around the system (more extravagant foreign operations, much higher scouting budgets, more money thrown at coaches, etc) but it would be much more balanced, that much is certain. Unfortunately, there's no way in hell it gets past the players union until the state of baseball is already in the crapper- the players just have too much power right now and aren't at all willing to sacrifice some of their own money and success for future generations.

SI

[Ksyrup]

It sickens me to see the way its being played and managed right now. Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and all those other historic figures are spitting on this era's version of their great game.
You know, it's funny, but Bill James and Rob Neyer have quoted fans from the late 1800's, early 1900's, mid 1900's, late 1990's and now we have your quote in February 2004, and they all say the same thing. It's just like owners griping about how much players are making - the same arguments were made over 120 years ago.

You may honestly not enjoy baseball as much as you did before. But you are kidding yourself if you think it's because of "how the players play the game these days." You've simply outgrown the game, or lost interest in it for whatever reason, and you have fond memories of when you used to like the game. If anything, players put more effort into their preparation for games in 2004 then they did 25 years ago, and they give as much effort on the field as they did then. The perceived differences are revisionist BS, even if you aren't aware of it.

[sterlingice]

You're right about basketball. But baseball?

Tell me again-- who won the last World Series? Did any major publication even pick that team to go to the playoffs.

Wait. Last year must've been a one-year fluke. I'm sure the year before that we didn't have any suprise teams.

At least, we didn't see three of eight playoff teams in the bottom half in overall salary...

Ummm... Oh yeah...:rolleyes:
Spoken like a true Yankees/Red Sox fan. Clearly, we need to brush up on the phrases about "the exception rather than the rule". I wouldn't be so glib but, well, one good turn deserves another.

I've never understood why some baseball fans can't get over their myopias: "Waaaaah! My team has the advantage and I don't want to lose it for the good of the game!" Do I really have to explain what your mom should have taught you about sharing when you were 3? Or fairness when you were 5? Does it prove anything if your team with 4x the budget beats Tampa Bay? Don't you want to beat someone on a level playing field rather than just fielding an all-star team, boring your fans by playing those meaningless games with nothing to gain but everything to lose (after all, you have better talent than them), finally reaching the postseason crap shoot (hm... I bet that has a lot to do with the recent world series winners) and risking disappointment because your team doesn't always win the short series.

Hell, why don't you ask the commish to completely abolish the World Series and just award the title based on best regular season record since that would play even more into your plan. It's a lot easier to trounce teams over the long haul when you have unbalanced resources: just load up on 5 Cy-Young caliber pitchers and let 'er fly.

SI

[Ksyrup]

Clearly, we need to brush up on the phrases about "the exception rather than the rule".
Read Sean McAdam's article and then talk to me about the exception to the rule. It seems to me that plenty of teams have a shot at the playoffs over a 5-7 year period, and then you've got the Yankees.

[sterlingice]

I think GB's post was right on. I don't think that people are taking whacks at baseball just because they don't like the sport but because of what baseball does, says and handles the problems it does have (steriods, juiced baseballs, corked bats, teams not making money).

Look, I was a huge fan until the strike of '94. The writing was on the wall then that teams were not going to be competitive because of the CBA, and what was done? Nothing. Business as usual. Sooo, teams like the Pirates have to tread water to survive every year (as do some other teams), but thats O.K. to the big market teams and baseball in general. This is ridiculous. A-Rod gets $25 million a year to be a shortstop? C'mon, this was the entire Pirate payroll a few years ago. Basically baseball brings this on themselves.
This, I will agree with pretty much wholeheartedly. Baseball does the worst job of handling their problems- they have the absolute worst PR in the world and an incompetent head who would at least look less so if they had some good PR. One of their biggest problems is image and they need to hire someone *competent* who can do something about that. I will freely admit I don't know the answer to that one and really wish I did.

Also, you're preaching to the choir about Pittsburg (aside from hearing about it from my sister who goes to Pitt)- ever since moving to KC, that's kindof been the mantra here. Hell, they had a five thousand person group (thrown together in 2 weeks by a local radio station) come out the game before the strike date two seasons ago in favor of the owner because this city badly needs that revenue sharing. As I said in another post- if this were left up to the owners, it would already have been done but their hands are tied. KC was one of the few places where the decision was heralded as a loss- baseball got to go on but no problems were actually solved and were just pushed off until the next inevitable labor negotiation.

SI

[The_herd]

You're right about basketball. But baseball?

Tell me again-- who won the last World Series? Did any major publication even pick that team to go to the playoffs.

Wait. Last year must've been a one-year fluke. I'm sure the year before that we didn't have any suprise teams.

At least, we didn't see three of eight playoff teams in the bottom half in overall salary...

Ummm... Oh yeah...
:rolleyes:

Do you watch the same game everyone else does? Tell me how there is parity in baseball when you look at payrolls?

In a sense, the Marlins were a 1 year fluke. They lucked out and landed Pudge to a cheap contract with most of the money defered, because no one else wanted him at the time. Unlike the Yankee's and Red Sox, they had to make major decisions on who to keep and who to let go because of money issues.

When you see see the Yankee's, Red Sox, Braves, and Dodgers competing for a division crown each season, while the Marlins and Twins struggle to stay afloat, you can't call it parity.

There are 30 major league teams, we see the same teams every year, with a small-mid market team thrown in. These teams can spend the money to stay competetive each season while the others need to rebuild after working their asses off for a 1-2 year window to get into the post season.

As I said, you're watching a different game than most.

[cincyreds]

I like football, but baseball is the best stat game there is. I with me being a stat fanatic, baseball is KING!

Baseball = STATS, STATS = Fantasy Baseball!!

WHOOO HOOO!! It is just around the corner.

[albionmoonlight]

Baseball is not made for TV, and, just as important, it is not made for SportsCenter.

There was a scene in Sports Night where Jeremy was making highlights for a baseball game, and the highlights ran 20 minutes. They told him to cut it down to 15 seconds (numbers approx.). His point was that the only way to really understand what happened in the game was to see the physical and psychological battles between the pitchers and batters as they developed over the course of the game. I think that that's true. I also think that SportsCenter will continue to give us baseball in 15 second bites that consist of nothing more than 3 homeruns without any context.

[Ksyrup]

Do you watch the same game everyone else does? Tell me how there is parity in baseball when you look at payrolls?

In a sense, the Marlins were a 1 year fluke. They lucked out and landed Pudge to a cheap contract with most of the money defered, because no one else wanted him at the time. Unlike the Yankee's and Red Sox, they had to make major decisions on who to keep and who to let go because of money issues.

When you see see the Yankee's, Red Sox, Braves, and Dodgers competing for a division crown each season, while the Marlins and Twins struggle to stay afloat, you can't call it parity.

There are 30 major league teams, we see the same teams every year, with a small-mid market team thrown in. These teams can spend the money to stay competetive each season while the others need to rebuild after working their asses off for a 1-2 year window to get into the post season.

As I said, you're watching a different game than most.
Can anyone here read? Read Sean McAdam's article! We do NOT see the same teams every year with a "token" small-market team thrown in. Baseball is comparable with football, over the pat 5-7 years or so. And considering the NFL has 2 more playoff spots per conference, baseball looks damn good in comparison.

And as for the rebuilding to get that 1-2 year window to get into the post-season...that pretty much describes 90% of NFL football teams, doesn't it? Why is it acceptable in the NFL, but ruins baseball? Aside from the Yankees, I think people put way too much emphasis on payroll. And hopefully, over the next couple of years, even the Yankees will prove that having a huge payroll means next to nothing if you don't spend it on the right people.

[clintl]

Both baseball and football are great games. I like baseball better, but I have no problem understanding why someone else might like football better.

However, I think baseball takes a lot more criticism than it really deserves. Yes, it has an economic system that has its problems. However, anyone who thinks that an NFL-like system could work for baseball is smoking something. It can't. Baseball can't get a national TV contract that covers over half of its revenue like football does, so it has to rely on local revenue sources for the bulk of its revenues. And that means the only real options it has are revenue sharing or diluting the market power of the big markets by adding some expansion teams there (mostly in New York and Los Angeles), and the latter is not going to happen. I don't think a salary cap would help that much because the Yankees and other big market teams would just spend their extra revenue on scouting and the minor leagues. The Yankees are no more dominant now than they were in the reserve clause era, when in effect, teams had a defacto salary cap by not having a free market for players at all.

As for the steroid issue - no NFL fan has any legitimate beef there. Steroids have had a much bigger effect on play in the NFL than they ever will in baseball.

My opinion is that the main reason people beat up on baseball is that the players actually are empowered, and that unsettles people.

[Ksyrup]

Baseball is not made for TV, and, just as important, it is not made for SportsCenter.

There was a scene in Sports Night where Jeremy was making highlights for a baseball game, and the highlights ran 20 minutes. They told him to cut it down to 15 seconds (numbers approx.). His point was that the only way to really understand what happened in the game was to see the physical and psychological battles between the pitchers and batters as they developed over the course of the game. I think that that's true. I also think that SportsCenter will continue to give us baseball in 15 second bites that consist of nothing more than 3 homeruns without any context.
Clearly, this is the case. Not only is the game of football good for TV, but the once-a-week setup is perfect for creating "must see" sports TV. Baseball can never compete with the inherent advantages football has in TV - and that includes revenue sharing. The only reason revenue sharing is possible in the NFL is because of the way the TV contracts are done. If football was like the other sports, you wouldn't see teams willing to sacrifice for the common good. But the nature of the game makes it easy for them to do just that.

Coupled with baseball's PR problems and the nature of its game, it's no wonder baseball is where it is these days. However, I'm fine with baseball being relegated to 2nd or 3rd most popular sport, as long as I can still pay to see the games. Although I would point out that even in that respect, baseball has it wrong - they restrict the number of games in the baseball package to 35 per wweek, which is ridiculous. In fairness to them, though, I think they are forced to do that because without a guarantee to Fox and ESPN of exclusive rights to Saturday afternoons and Wednesday nights, they'd have an even worse TV contract.

[The_herd]

Can anyone here read? Read Sean McAdam's article! We do NOT see the same teams every year with a "token" small-market team thrown in. Baseball is comparable with football, over the pat 5-7 years or so. And considering the NFL has 2 more playoff spots per conference, baseball looks damn good in comparison.

And as for the rebuilding to get that 1-2 year window to get into the post-season...that pretty much describes 90% of NFL football teams, doesn't it? Why is it acceptable in the NFL, but ruins baseball? Aside from the Yankees, I think people put way too much emphasis on payroll. And hopefully, over the next couple of years, even the Yankees will prove that having a huge payroll means next to nothing if you don't spend it on the right people.

I don't give a damn what Sean McAdam's wrote, I know what every baseball fan outside of a major city knows, saying that there is parity in baseball is a joke.

Name one NFL team that has no shot of making the playoffs within the next 2 seasons.

You can name several in baseball. Pittsburg, Milwaukee, Tampa Bay, Detroit, Texas, and Colorado. You probably throw some more on that list as well.

Atlanta, Yankee's, Red Sox, Seattle, San Francisco, and L.A. Baseballs teams that have the resources to make sure they are never far from 1st. While it also takes good management for these teams to stay on top (thats what seperates them from the Mets and Cubs), they have a much larger margin for error than most teams. Oakland has managed to stay on top because they have been run damn near perfectly over the past few years.

[The_herd]

par·i·ty1 ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pr-t)
n. pl. par·i·ties

1. Equality, as in amount, status, or value.
2. Functional equivalence, as in the weaponry or military strength of adversaries: “A problem that has troubled the U.S.-Soviet relationship from the beginning has been the issue of parity” (Charles William Maynes).
3. The equivalent in value of a sum of money expressed in terms of a different currency at a fixed official rate of exchange.
4. Equality of prices of goods or securities in two different markets.
5. A level for farm-product prices maintained by governmental support and intended to give farmers the same purchasing power they had during a chosen base period.


Can someone please tell me how this definition fits baseball.

[rkmsuf]

enter oykib...

[oykib]

On revenue sharing...

I have an idea. Let's raise the tax rate to 50% for everyone. I'm sure the gov't could provide the services that it needs to with 65% of the money collected. Then, we just redistribute the remaining amount evenly to every tax payer. I'm sure we'll all sign up for that.

If you're rich, then you'll still be richer than the people who started off poorer than you. How much more money do you need, anyway?;)

It's just as ridiculous in baseball as it is in real life. The guy who just spent hundreds of millions for the Dodgers, was paying four to six times what he'd have had to pay for the Brewers. The Red Sox group spent over half a billion dollars. They expect that kind of return on their investment.

It's just that same as you guys who spent $200,000 on law school-- not to mention opportunity costs. You don't want to be payed like a high school droput.

Football has an easy revenue sharing system based on the shared revenue of a national TV contract. When they set it up, there was not nearly as much money in TV as now. Setting up revenue sharing as it's been fancifully proposed stands to lose the top owners hundreds of millions of dollars.

Realistically, any real revenue sharing would first have to be seperated from payroll and total revenue and tied instead to market opportunity. You can't punish the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mariners for running their businesses well. Secondly, you would have to indemnify the 'rich' owners for the loss of franchise value. If the bottom twenty teams took out loans to compensate the top ten teams, it might fly.

That would solve the problem going forward, because the 'poor' teams stand to gain while the 'rich' teams lose. The 'rich' teams are not likely to see the rising tide benefit their owners-- owners don't stay that long. But they'd get the windfall now to compensate them for what they lose when they sell their teams.

The new 'rich' owners would be getting their teams at a discount as compared to what they would have payed for them before revenue sharing went into effect. So theyreally couldn't complain about the system. If the vast majority of the fans who wine about this aren't full of shit-- which, of course, they are-- baseball would have a rising tide of popularity that would raise all the franchise's boats, but particularly the ne'er-do-well franchises.

This would compensate them for the chunk of change that the doled out at the beginning of our exercise. That's the only "fair" way to do it that I've come up with.

[ISiddiqui]

Detroit (10 consecutive losing seasons and counting) and Tampa Bay look truly hapless. But is that so much different than such perennial NFL losers as Arizona, Detroit, and, until this past season, Cincinnati?

I have to disagree with this for the simple reason that EVERY team in the NFL has hope. Even Cardinal fans will have hope when they get Manning or Rothlesburger in the draft. The Lions have hope with Mooch coaching the team. Look at the Bengals this year. In baseball, Tiger fans, Brewers fans, they don't have any hope. They have little to look forward to.

[Buccaneer]

I don't give a damn what Sean McAdam's wrote, I know what every baseball fan outside of a major city knows, saying that there is parity in baseball is a joke.

There's a word for this...can't quite think of it....

[clintl]

You can name several in baseball. Pittsburg, Milwaukee, Tampa Bay, Detroit, Texas, and Colorado. You probably throw some more on that list as well.

Atlanta, Yankee's, Red Sox, Seattle, San Francisco, and L.A. Baseballs teams that have the resources to make sure they are never far from 1st. While it also takes good management for these teams to stay on top (thats what seperates them from the Mets and Cubs), they have a much larger margin for error than most teams. Oakland has managed to stay on top because they have been run damn near perfectly over the past few years.

Detroit and Texas have no excuse - they should be big market teams. They are in two of the largest metropolitan areas in the country, and are bad only because they are being run ineptly. And some of those others you listed are no smaller than St. Louis, which is competitive every year. Colorado is a problem mostly because no one has figured out how to put together a team that's good both at home and on the road under the conditions it has to play in, which has nothing to do with economics. Its economic base is solid if it can solve the geographical handicaps. Pittsburgh and Milwaukee are the only two that are really small market teams with small market economic limitations on your list, and they are not really any worse off than some small market teams that have been successful in recent years. They just have not been able to put together the front office needed.

As far as the Giants go, they do have $22M stadium debt service per year, so they do not have the resources you think they do. They are basically succeeding on Barry Bonds' bat and Brian Sabean's resourcefullness and guile at spotting offseason bargains and making midseason trades to fill the holes left over.

[Ksyrup]

I don't give a damn what Sean McAdam's wrote, I know what every baseball fan outside of a major city knows, saying that there is parity in baseball is a joke.

Name one NFL team that has no shot of making the playoffs within the next 2 seasons.

You can name several in baseball. Pittsburg, Milwaukee, Tampa Bay, Detroit, Texas, and Colorado. You probably throw some more on that list as well.

Atlanta, Yankee's, Red Sox, Seattle, San Francisco, and L.A. Baseballs teams that have the resources to make sure they are never far from 1st. While it also takes good management for these teams to stay on top (thats what seperates them from the Mets and Cubs), they have a much larger margin for error than most teams. Oakland has managed to stay on top because they have been run damn near perfectly over the past few years.
You've just proven my point. What you or other fans "believe" and what happens in reality are two completely different things. You don't care about the facts he presents that documents how many teams have made the playoffs since 1991, you only care about what you "know" is going to happen for the next 2 years. Boy, that makes a lot of sense. :rolleyes:

I don't give a crap about margin of error - it exist in football as well. Seemingly well-run teams like Tampa Bay can go from Super Bowl to out of the playoffs in a year...and that's good for the game?! There's something to be said for parity, but there's also somthing to be said for continuity. And I think it is realistic for teams to go - GASP! - more than 2 years without a shot at making the playoffs. Because in most cases, those are teams with bad management, or unlucky breaks (injuries, players wanting to leave for whatever reason, etc.), or both. The payroll issue is there, but it doesn't play as big of a part in this as you would be lead to believe. Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay, and Detroit are poorly run teams. Period. Colorado is in its own league because of the uniqueness of where it plays and how that affects players. In case you didn't notice, football has its headcases as well (Detroit, Cincinnati, up until 2003, Arizona,etc., at any given time).

Look, you can turn a blind eye to the fact that many teams actually make the playoffs in baseball, but don't try to tell me that that's the reason you don't watch baseball. Just admit you don't like the game.

[The_herd]

Look, you can turn a blind eye to the fact that many teams actually make the playoffs in baseball, but don't try to tell me that that's the reason you don't watch baseball. Just admit you don't like the game.

Sorry, I actually love baseball. I spend most evenings watching games during the season. The fact remains, there are major issues with parity. Teams are not playing on an equal playing field. Tell me how good the Marlins or A's would be if you gave them an extra $70 million to spend on their roster?

[Ksyrup]

Sorry, I actually love baseball. I spend most evenings watching games during the season. The fact remains, there are major issues with parity. Teams are not playing on an equal playing field. Tell me how good the Marlins or A's would be if you gave them an extra $70 million to spend on their roster?
And I'll ask you - how much better can you be than 2 World Championships in 6 years, or 4 straight playoff appearances?

[Ksyrup]

Although this is purely anecdotal, another thing about baseball that slows down a team's ability to "get good quick," is player development. Most guys are signed out of high school and even guys who play in college spend a significant amount of time in the minors. You can rarely "plug and play" a guy from a draft on to your team, and even guys who can make that jump fairly quickly, like a Mark Prior, only have so much influence on the team's performance. In football, you add an Urlacher or an Edgerrin James as a rookie, and you've significantly improved your team.

[oykib]

And my perfectly volatile post languishes as a widow on the first page...

:(

[clintl]

The player development cycle Ksyrup mentioned is a huge difference. Also, scouting and prospect evaluation is a lot more difficult in baseball than in other sports, and you see a lot of early picks who never make it.

[cthomer5000]

And as for the rebuilding to get that 1-2 year window to get into the post-season...that pretty much describes 90% of NFL football teams, doesn't it?
90% of the league is rebuilding? That's absolutely insane.

90% of 32 NFL teams would be 28.8 teams. Can you honestly say that 28 or 29 teams are "rebuilding?" If so, your definition of the word is way off.

I would say that every year 12 NFL teams are expected to make the playoffs (think Philly, St. Louis, Tennessee), 8 are expected to miss them entirely (think Arizona, Detroit, Houston, Jacksonville), and 12 or so are average teams where some hot or cold streaks can send them to the bottom or top (Giants, Cowboys, Jets, 49ers).

Again, that 90% figure is way off.

[The_herd]

And I'll ask you - how much better can you be than 2 World Championships in 6 years, or 4 straight playoff appearances?

Difficult to imagine, isn't it? How good would the Yankee's or Red Sox be if they slashed $70 million in payroll?

I agree that having complete equality in Baseball, in the end, would be bad for the game. But there is no excuse for such ridiculous differences in payrolls. If the Yankee's want to spend $120 million, then there shouldn't be any teams spending less than $60-$70 million. That's still a large amount, but its much better than what we are seeing today. It also gives baseball the continuity that the NFL lacks at this time.

Parity is all teams on equal footing, baseball isn't even close to it, regardless of what playoff numbers someone whose sole job is to research and do such, can spit out. I'm sure that if I had the time and resources Sean McAdam's does that I could come up with an article to prove that payroll is closely tied to a team's chance to make the postseason.

[Sun Tzu]

I don't have much time to get a long post in here, although I would love to because my heart is deep in both of the sports. However I will say this.

Nothing...<b>nothing</b> to me is better than going to a baseball game with a couple buddies on a beautiful summer day, eatting a hot dog and some cracker jacks, and rooting on the home team.

[rkmsuf]

I don't have much time to get a long post in here, although I would love to because my heart is deep in both of the sports. However I will say this.

Nothing...<b>nothing</b> to me is better than going to a baseball game with a couple buddies on a beautiful summer day, eatting a hot dog and some cracker jacks, and rooting on the home team.

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

[oykib]

Difficult to imagine, isn't it? How good would the Yankee's or Red Sox be if they slashed $70 million in payroll?

I agree that having complete equality in Baseball, in the end, would be bad for the game. But there is no excuse for such ridiculous differences in payrolls. If the Yankee's want to spend $120 million, then there shouldn't be any teams spending less than $60-$70 million. That's still a large amount, but its much better than what we are seeing today. It also gives baseball the continuity that the NFL lacks at this time.

Parity is all teams on equal footing, baseball isn't even close to it, regardless of what playoff numbers someone whose sole job is to research and do such, can spit out. I'm sure that if I had the time and resources Sean McAdam's does that I could come up with an article to prove that payroll is closely tied to a team's chance to make the postseason.

As a side issue-- and I've seen plenty of members post about this before-- I find the inability of people to deal with facts really disturbing.

Okay.... it's the general perception that half the teams in basebll don't have a chance before the season begins. But we can and have demonstrated that it's wrong. It wasn't only wrong last year, but it's been wrong since before the first moron brought it up as a an unsubstantiated claim.

Good teams have higher payrolls than bad teams. Well..duh?!

Good players cost more than bad players. But the teams in the playoffs will always have higher payrolls-- If only because if a team is out of it they ship off high priced veterans for prospects to the teams that are still in it.

Even the Marlins and Royals added significant payroll last year as they got into the stretch drive. I'm not saying that the Yankees et al have no advantage. They clearly have a huge advantage. But the advantage is not big enough to stop baseball from having nearly as much parity as the NFL despite a post season that is significantly more exclusive.

Those are facts. If you can find facts that refute them, then do so. But don't give that, "Well I could get numbers that would say anything I wanted to.." garbage. If you've got the nubers, then post them. If they're out there and you just don't have them handy, go find them.

[The_herd]

As a side issue-- and I've seen plenty of members post about this before-- I find the inability of people to deal with facts really disturbing.

Okay.... it's the general perception that half the teams in basebll don't have a chance before the season begins. But we can and have demonstrated that it's wrong. It wasn't only wrong last year, but it's been wrong since before the first moron brought it up as a an unsubstantiated claim.

Good teams have higher payrolls than bad teams. Well..duh?!

Good players cost more than bad players. But the teams in the playoffs will always have higher payrolls-- If only because if a team is out of it they ship off high priced veterans for prospects to the teams that are still in it.

Even the Marlins and Royals added significant payroll last year as they got into the stretch drive. I'm not saying that the Yankees et al have no advantage. They clearly have a huge advantage. But the advantage is not big enough to stop baseball from having nearly as much parity as the NFL despite a post season that is significantly more exclusive.

Those are facts. If you can find facts that refute them, then do so. But don't give that, "Well I could get numbers that would say anything I wanted to.." garbage. If you've got the nubers, then post them. If they're out there and you just don't have them handy, go find them.


Umm, the discussion is about parity in baseball. Parity is in large part defined by payroll. You just made my point. Teams with a higher payroll are going to be better, in general.

Again, thank you for making my point, for that I'll forgive the typical Yankee fan point of view.

[Ksyrup]

90% of the league is rebuilding? That's absolutely insane.

90% of 32 NFL teams would be 28.8 teams. Can you honestly say that 28 or 29 teams are "rebuilding?" If so, your definition of the word is way off.

I would say that every year 12 NFL teams are expected to make the playoffs (think Philly, St. Louis, Tennessee), 8 are expected to miss them entirely (think Arizona, Detroit, Houston, Jacksonville), and 12 or so are average teams where some hot or cold streaks can send them to the bottom or top (Giants, Cowboys, Jets, 49ers).

Again, that 90% figure is way off.
The 90% figure was as to the process that teams go through, although I did not intend to suggest that they go through it on a yearly basis. Because neither do baseball teams. I'm talking about the cycle in football, as affected by the salary cap. You build a team up for a run that you hope can last more than a couple of years, and if it does, great. If not, you start over. There are only a few teams in baseball that don't also go through that process. That was my point.

You can cut the % down to 75% maybe, but it's not that far off in either sport, because at some point in time, regardless of your payroll, you have to decide to either cut bait and start over (in baseball, lowering your payroll; in football, it would be lowering the amount of signing bonuses given out), or try to win with what you've got.

This also brings me to another issue - the salary cap masks the fact that teams do spend in cycles in football, just like they do in baseball (for the Yankees, I understand that cycle is every 2 weeks...). The Washington Redskins in 1999 (?) - the year they signed Deion, Bruce Smith, and a host of other vets - spent far more than their salary cap would suggest. The cap is just the way to figure what's allocated to certain years - it is not a true picture of what the team actually spent in a given year. So, you can say that team X spent up to their salary cap limit from 2000 to 2004, but the fact is, that team may have spent 3 times their salary cap limit in 2000, and when that team was not successful for a couple of years, the team spent very little in actual cash over the remaining period, because the team sucked and they had no cap room. In baseball terms, that would be the same as a team signing a number of players in 2000, the team not being successful, and by July of 2001, deciding to blow the team up and lower its payroll for a couple of years to take another run at a playoff-caliber team.

So, my point is, the salary cap is a deceiving creature. All teams have allocated up to that limit for each year, but they don't actually spend that money every year. They have boom and bust cycles just like in baseball and other sports.

[oykib]

Umm, the discussion is about parity in baseball. Parity is in large part defined by payroll. You just made my point. Teams with a higher payroll are going to better, in general.

Again, thank you for making my point, for that I'll forgive the typical Yankee fan point of view.

The proof is in the pudding. The results are where parity is. The parity is what the results are on the field of play. The CBA gives teams control over their players for six years. During that period they can be afforded by any and every team in the league. It also takes these players past their prime seasons in most cases.

So, the wealthy teams can not count on getting the best players by simply spending money. They can pay to get the most reliable group of talent. But they can't reasonably expect to get playoff spots just based on payroll. The larger part still comes down to running the team well.

The true benefit the big money teams get is that they can sometimes stumble into a playoff appearance or even championship, despite being poorly run. I admit poor teams can't do that.

But even admitting the advantage of some teams, Baseball still manages as nearly as much parity as that bastion the NFL, while not having laughing stock one-year wonder teams all the time (although that too is overstated).

[rkmsuf]

The 90% figure was as to the process that teams go through, although I did not intend to suggest that they go through it on a yearly basis. Because neither do baseball teams. I'm talking about the cycle in football, as affected by the salary cap. You build a team up for a run that you hope can last more than a couple of years, and if it does, great. If not, you start over. There are only a few teams in baseball that don't also go through that process. That was my point.

You can cut the % down to 75% maybe, but it's not that far off in either sport, because at some point in time, regardless of your payroll, you have to decide to either cut bait and start over (in baseball, lowering your payroll; in football, it would be lowering the amount of signing bonuses given out), or try to win with what you've got.

This also brings me to another issue - the salary cap masks the fact that teams do spend in cycles in football, just like they do in baseball (for the Yankees, I understand that cycle is every 2 weeks...). The Washington Redskins in 1999 (?) - the year they signed Deion, Bruce Smith, and a host of other vets - spent far more than their salary cap would suggest. The cap is just the way to figure what's allocated to certain years - it is not a true picture of what the team actually spent in a given year. So, you can say that team X spent up to their salary cap limit from 2000 to 2004, but the fact is, that team may have spent 3 times their salary cap limit in 2000, and when that team was not successful for a couple of years, the team spent very little in actual cash over the remaining period, because the team sucked and they had no cap room. In baseball terms, that would be the same as a team signing a number of players in 2000, the team not being successful, and by July of 2001, deciding to blow the team up and lower its payroll for a couple of years to take another run at a playoff-caliber team.

So, my point is, the salary cap is a deceiving creature. All teams have allocated up to that limit for each year, but they don't actually spend that money every year. They have boom and bust cycles just like in baseball and other sports.

That's why the consistenly successful teams in football are the ones that learn who to manage the cap and spend wisely. It puts a premium on decision making and talent evaluation.

It's probably a worthless activity to compare the two sports anyway. Appeals to two different tastes with both sports having radically different structures...

[Ksyrup]

Umm, the discussion is about parity in baseball. Parity is in large part defined by payroll. You just made my point. Teams with a higher payroll are going to be better, in general.

Again, thank you for making my point, for that I'll forgive the typical Yankee fan point of view.
I'm sure the 2001-2003 Yankees are consoled by the fact that they won the Payroll Championship. Payroll plays a part in parity, but on the field performance is what it's all about, wouldn't you agree? And while the payroll disparity suggests that the richer teams are better off, that edge has not, to a large degree, translated itself to on the field performacne. And at some point, that "phenomenon" becomes a "trend" - which has clearly been established by a quick review of the historical facts presented in the McAdam article.

[The_herd]

The proof is in the pudding. The results are where parity is. The parity is what the results are on the field of play. The CBA gives teams control over their players for six years. During that period they can be afforded by any and every team in the league. It also takes these players past their prime seasons in most cases.

So, the wealthy teams can not count on getting the best players by simply spending money. They can pay to get the most reliable group of talent. But they can't reasonably expect to get playoff spots just based on payroll. The larger part still comes down to running the team well.

The true benefit the big money teams get is that they can sometimes stumble into a playoff appearance or even championship, despite being poorly run. I admit poor teams can't do that.

But even admitting the advantage of some teams, Baseball still manages as nearly as much parity as that bastion the NFL, while not having laughing stock one-year wonder teams all the time (although that too is overstated).


Baseball has managed to stumble its way into this "parity" though. Oakland has one of the best minds in the game running things, the Twins build an incredible farm team, the Marlins built a great farm system as well, but also made a couple great trades and lucked out in the free agent market. The fact is, these teams are going to have a hard time keeping it up as long as a larget market team could. Small Market teams with poor-average front office people have no prayer, while large market teams in the same boat at least have a chance at making the playoffs.

True Parity is having every teams resources on equal footing. The NFL made this happen by instituting the hard cap. Baseball's attempt is through revenue sharing, but thats definately not enough when the team that won the world series also lost $18 million. I don't like the idea of a hard cap in baseball, it just doesn't really seem to fit the sport in my mind. Something else does need to be done though. Small market teams are hoping to make the playoffs, large market teams are dreaming of World Series rings.

[The_herd]

I'm sure the 2001-2003 Yankees are consoled by the fact that they won the Payroll Championship. Payroll plays a part in parity, but on the field performance is what it's all about, wouldn't you agree? And while the payroll disparity suggests that the richer teams are better off, that edge has not, to a large degree, translated itself to on the field performacne. And at some point, that "phenomenon" becomes a "trend" - which has clearly been established by a quick review of the historical facts presented in the McAdam article.

2003-Marlins
2002-Angels
2001-D-Backs
2000-Yankee's
1999-Yankee's
1998-Yankee's
1997-Marlins (I remind people that this is the world series that was bought by running up the payroll for 1 season)
1996-Yankee's
1995-Atlanta
1994-Strike
1993-Toronto
1992-Toronto

I think the edge has translated itself on the field quite well.

[clintl]

Baseball has managed to stumble its way into this "parity" though. Oakland has one of the best minds in the game running things, the Twins build an incredible farm team, the Marlins built a great farm system as well, but also made a couple great trades and lucked out in the free agent market. The fact is, these teams are going to have a hard time keeping it up as long as a larget market team could. Small Market teams with poor-average front office people have no prayer, while large market teams in the same boat at least have a chance at making the playoffs.

True Parity is having every teams resources on equal footing. The NFL made this happen by instituting the hard cap.

Did it really? I don't think so. The only thing I see is that the hard cap made it impossible to keep good teams run by good front offices to keep teams together for long periods of time. It did nothing to help small market teams like Green Bay compete with large market teams like New York (not that the New York NFL teams have a history of being dominant anyway). The fact that the majority of NFL revenues come from the national TV contract, and not from local sources, is what makes financial parity in the NFL possible. There was parity before the cap.

[sterlingice]

The proof is in the pudding. The results are where parity is. The parity is what the results are on the field of play. The CBA gives teams control over their players for six years. During that period they can be afforded by any and every team in the league. It also takes these players past their prime seasons in most cases.
Unfortunately this is a horribly flawed because you don't take into account arbitration. Very few players reach their prime when the team has rigid salary control over them. When they start becoming even halfways good, they command salaries heavily influenced by the larger market teams (see: Beltran, Carlos and Pujols, Albert).

The player development cycle Ksyrup mentioned is a huge difference. Also, scouting and prospect evaluation is a lot more difficult in baseball than in other sports, and you see a lot of early picks who never make it.
Hm... stole some of my thunder, but oh well, it's still in the next post...

SI

[sterlingice]

Rather than just go back and forth with silly jabs as we have been, here's some substance to address McAdam's article and why what he says is only a half truth. The article points out the numerous representatives in the playoffs, it fails on many other accounts. It fails to point out that many of those teams (Arizona, San Diego, Florida) greatly overextended their team's finances and have had to completely rebuild from the ground up after making their run. The same can be said of the AL lists (Baltimore, Cleveland). Take the records since the 1994 strike and I bet the composite records of those playoff teams is *below* .500 when the one successful year is removed. Thus if you are a large market team, you can afford to take shots at winning year after year whereas if you are a small market team, you have one or two shots before having to destroy your team and fan base before attempting to restart the development cycle. And that's where this is going: why the NFL and salary cap hell is not at all the same as building up your team because it's like placing the other 25 teams in a salary cap and letting the remaining five compete outside the rules.

The easy NFL comparision to make is a team that ran into cap hell after going all out. There are two problems with this. One, no NFL owner is dipping into his pocketbooks to pay for a winner. You can dispute some of the numbers, buy you can't tell me that playing to empty houses night after night in a city like Miami or Pittsburg generates a lot of revenue for your team when local revenue accounts for most of your earnings. But even if you discount that saying "well, they're billionaires, what should they be worried about", there's a much more serious issue of redistribution of talent.

Again, the perfect poster child is the Yankees. Their once-rich minor league system is all but barren yet no one expects them to not compete for the next 10 years because of their financial resources. They have run the system into the ground but don't have to pay for it. Sure, they will have to pay for it in that they will have to pay more salary to major leaguers, but they can afford it. This encourages them to run their business poorly, to the detriment of other teams who are actually trying to do well. When the Yankees said "we're going after Gary Sheffield" this winter (and tampered), did anyone else try to outbid them? No, of course not. Gary Sheffield is worth $12M to the Yankees but only $10M or $8M to everyone else and not because of need but because of affordability. In the NFL, a player doesn't have 3 different cap weights just because of where he plays for. Why should this be the case in baseball? This is just a small scale. On a much larger scale, they can do that across the boards.

In baseball, the gestation period of talent is too long for the draft to even things out and much more unpredicatable. Ultimately, this is why the NFL comparision doesn't work out. I don't have the stats handy, but I would venture to guess that the number of 1st and 2nd round draft picks who made significant contributions over the last 10 years is orders of magnitude higher in the NFL. In the NFL, if you want, you can keep your money at home, pay the guys you've brought up in your system or draft hole fillers who do pretty well within 2-3 years in the league. Baseball, you can't just jettison all of your major league talent and then hope a bunch of 20yos restock your team for cheap. To say nothing for TNSTAAPP (that's "there's no such thing as a pitching prospect" for you non-baseball prospectus reader), baseball puts a much greater emphasis on already existing big league talent.

But without the ability to redistribute the talent adequately through free agency and restock in the draft, this leads to different development cycles for teams which are inherently unfair. Back to the NFL, everyone has the has the same cycle of rebuild-rebuild-mediocre-playoff-super bowl-playoff-mediocre *repeat* because the playing field is level. There are a lot of factors that can upset this cycle (injury, poor draft, poor cap management) but everyone can use this blueprint. In baseball, this is not the case. Lower revenue teams such as the A's and Royals are forced to just throw everything away for 3 and 4 years at a time (even cap hell in the NFL is only 2 years long) which further separates the haves from the have nots. Then these teams have to bring all of their talent up at the same time in the hopes of building a solid core, only to lose it in 5 years when they become free agents. However, teams like the Yankees and Braves can build a solid foundation and never lose it because they have the salary to maintain it so they can essentially forego this development cycle that everyone else is subject to.

No matter how cap savvy the Patriots are, they are going to have to pay the piper sooner or later but the higher market teams in baseball never do. Or, when they do, it's because of hideous mistakes rather than just bad ones. Paying Derek Bell $5M a year for 3 years is bad, but paying Darren Dreifort $11M per year for 5 years is much worse! Yet, the Pirates mistake was harder to recover from than the Dodgers. In baseball, you get your one shot and if some injury happens to your star player or a couple of players fail to develop as they should, you've lost your chance because you've overextended your payroll, have to cut back, and have to rebuild from the ground up, alienating your fans for another 5 years (thus decreasing your cash flow, thus not allowing for any economic help, thus decreasing fan interest even more, thus decreasing...). But wait, if you're the Red Sox, you can just buy or trade for someone to plug the hole or two because you have the revenue but if you're the Expos, you're tapped out because you already overextended yourself just to get into contention.

And lastly, where this is all going is the fans because that's where we started. Bears fans are ticked- they haven't done well in quite a few years minus one fluke. But that's the fault of bad management. If they had even middle-of-the-pack management, they'd make the playoffs two or three times out of every 10 years. The same can't be said for baseball- if everyone had the same general manager, the Yankees, Red Sox, Braves, and Dodgers win 40 of 50 World Series while the Devil Rays, Twins, Pirates, and Royals finish with the worst record in baseball 40 of 50 years. Shouldn't the litmus test be that if all other things are equal, your team wins an equal number of championships. Shouldn't just having a marginally above average organization get you more success than the next guy and a marginally below average organization get you less? It should not requires an extreme such as a Billy Beane or Peter Angelos to send your team one direction or another.

SI

[vtbub]

Fantasy Football probably is the biggest reason the NFL grows in ratings. It's, for most people, six hours on a crappy Sunday afternoon following individual players. For hardcore fans, yeah, wins and losses matter, but more and more, it's the casual fan tracking Ricky Williams.

Football is made for TV, baseball is a sport enjoyed in the background. IMO, there is plenty of room for our pasttime and our passion.

[The_herd]

Did it really? I don't think so. The only thing I see is that the hard cap made it impossible to keep good teams run by good front offices to keep teams together for long periods of time. It did nothing to help small market teams like Green Bay compete with large market teams like New York (not that the New York NFL teams have a history of being dominant anyway). The fact that the majority of NFL revenues come from the national TV contract, and not from local sources, is what makes financial parity in the NFL possible. There was parity before the cap.

Well, if you look past the surface you will see that those players that good teams can't keep, end up going to the bad teams that can afford them. Thus making them better, and helping create parity.

Parity existed before the cap, but not to the extent that it does now.

[rkmsuf]

Well, if you look past the surface you will see that those players that good teams can't keep, end up going to the bad teams that can afford them. Thus making them better, and helping create parity.

Parity existed before the cap, but not to the extent that it does now.

That is a simple way to look at it.

In football when you are bad you generally can afford to add good players that really good teams can't resign due to the cap.

In baseball, generally if you are bad you can't afford the really good players but the really good teams can...outside of blind luck, horrid mistakes by the haves or some unbelievable wave of talent from the minors, bad teams remain generally bad...

[HornedFrog Purple]

There is great parody in the NFL and little parity in MLB.

That is all.

[clintl]

Shouldn't the litmus test be that if all other things are equal, your team wins an equal number of championships. Shouldn't just having a marginally above average organization get you more success than the next guy and a marginally below average organization get you less? It should not requires an extreme such as a Billy Beane or Peter Angelos to send your team one direction or another.

SI

Essentially, this whole point ignores the economic realities. The ONLY way you can get to such a point is to equalize the revenues. A salary cap will not do it because you would still have the Pittsburghs and the Milwaukees spending way under the cap. The Yankees might be able to go out trade for a guy they don't need to keep the Red Sox from getting him, but that does nothing to help the Pirates and Brewers.

And so far, there is no model that has a chance of being agreed upon by the owners to equalize revenues.

The NFL model works for the NFL only because more than half of the league's revenue comes from the national TV contract. If team revenues in the NFL were mostly from attendance and local media contracts, I guarantee you that they would have the same kinds of issues that baseball has. NFL owners can be united because their individual economic interests depend on the league success as a whole. That is not the case in baseball, or any of the other major team sports, for that matter.

[Ksyrup]

2003-Marlins
2002-Angels
2001-D-Backs
2000-Yankee's
1999-Yankee's
1998-Yankee's
1997-Marlins (I remind people that this is the world series that was bought by running up the payroll for 1 season)
1996-Yankee's
1995-Atlanta
1994-Strike
1993-Toronto
1992-Toronto

I think the edge has translated itself on the field quite well.
I tend to think that judging the success of an entire league on the basis of who won the league's championship is wrong. It should be enough that those teams made the playoffs, or even made it to the championship game. You can't tell me that a team's payroll is the sole indicator of whether they win a 7 game series. Ultimately, it has more to do with how you've spent your resources then what your resources are, plus a good bit of luck. The A's are an examploe of a small market team that continues to flourish, yet the fact that they have not made the WS should not be held against them.

[Ksyrup]

Rather than just go back and forth with silly jabs as we have been, here's some substance to address McAdam's article and why what he says is only a half truth. The article points out the numerous representatives in the playoffs, it fails on many other accounts. It fails to point out that many of those teams (Arizona, San Diego, Florida) greatly overextended their team's finances and have had to completely rebuild from the ground up after making their run. The same can be said of the AL lists (Baltimore, Cleveland). Take the records since the 1994 strike and I bet the composite records of those playoff teams is *below* .500 when the one successful year is removed. Thus if you are a large market team, you can afford to take shots at winning year after year whereas if you are a small market team, you have one or two shots before having to destroy your team and fan base before attempting to restart the development cycle. And that's where this is going: why the NFL and salary cap hell is not at all the same as building up your team because it's like placing the other 25 teams in a salary cap and letting the remaining five compete outside the rules.
But I view this as an acceptable alternative to the salary cap, because there are so many factors that go into making a successful baseball team, that the amount of resources available to a team only assists them in making a run at the playoffs, it does not automatically determine anything.

I mean, the Dodgers and Mets have "taken shots" at winning year after year, and what has it gotten them? One visit to the WS combined in the past 15 years. Baltimore is a large market, Chicago is a large market, Philadelphia is a large market...I don't see those teams competing year in and year out - if at all - for a playoff spot, let alone the WS.

Putting aside the Yankees, I have no problem with how baseball exists today. I think you'll see teams like the Red Sox ultimately having to show restraint, as soon as after this year. I think Garciaparra, Varitek, Pedro, Lowe, and a few other guys are free agents. They will not sign them all. They will have to rely on Epstein's Genius, at some point, to continue to field a championship-caliber team. And even then, there's absolutely no guaranteee they will win anything.

[rkmsuf]

But I view this as an acceptable alternative to the salary cap, because there are so many factors that go into making a successful baseball team, that the amount of resources available to a team only assists them in making a run at the playoffs, it does not automatically determine anything.

I mean, the Dodgers and Mets have "taken shots" at winning year after year, and what has it gotten them? One visit to the WS combined in the past 15 years. Baltimore is a large market, Chicago is a large market, Philadelphia is a large market...I don't see those teams competing year in and year out - if at all - for a playoff spot, let alone the WS.

Putting aside the Yankees, I have no problem with how baseball exists today. I think you'll see teams like the Red Sox ultimately having to show restraint, as soon as after this year. I think Garciaparra, Varitek, Pedro, Lowe, and a few other guys are free agents. They will not sign them all. They will have to rely on Epstein's Genius, at some point, to continue to field a championship-caliber team. And even then, there's absolutely no guaranteee they will win anything.

Epstein always has his guitar playing for Trouser to fall back on.......which is nice...

[Desnudo]

If a baseball game lasted as long as it did in the 50s, I'd be a lot more inclined to watch a game. As it is right now too much scratching, spitting, and general loitering happens between each pitch taken by a .225 hitter from a 5.75 ERA pitcher. It's a farce to even call it a sport sometimes.

[McSweeny]

IMO, there is plenty of room for our pasttime and our passion.

yep, especially when our pasttime and my passion are one in the same

[rkmsuf]

If a baseball game lasted as long as it did in the 50s, I'd be a lot more inclined to watch a game. As it is right now too much scratching, spitting, and general loitering happens between each pitch taken by a .225 hitter from a 5.75 ERA pitcher. It's a farce to even call it a sport sometimes.

"What's that sign say?"

"No bare feet."

"What's THAT sign say?"

"No scratching."

"What's it mean?"

"No scratching..."

[dawgfan]

If a baseball game lasted as long as it did in the 50s, I'd be a lot more inclined to watch a game. As it is right now too much scratching, spitting, and general loitering happens between each pitch taken by a .225 hitter from a 5.75 ERA pitcher. It's a farce to even call it a sport sometimes.

As pointed out earlier, the average MLB game time has declined in recent years and is shorter than the average NFL game.

[rkmsuf]

As pointed out earlier, the average MLB game time has declined in recent years and is shorter than the average NFL game.

There isn't a three hour NFL game every day...

[dawgfan]

Regarding the issue of parity and payroll equality, let me add this:

There is no question that greater payroll equity makes it easier to produce on-field parity. That said, low payrolls can be overcome by being smarter than the other guy. The only difference between Oakland and Minnesota compared to Milwaukee and Pittsburgh is in the people running the teams - the A's and Twins have adapted to their financial situations, made smart decisions with their money and have done a better job making trades and drafting well.

There's no question that having a large payroll gives you margin for error, as well as flexibility and greater options in terms of player acquisitions. I'm sure Billy Beane would love to see what he could do with a $100M payroll. However, that hasn't prevented small-market teams from reaching the post-season in baseball, and lets not forget that there are fewer post-season spots in MLB than in the NFL.

I do think the revenue inequities in MLB are a problem, if for no other reason than image. While I don't support a salary cap, I do think there is room for improved and more logical revenue sharing. I think teams ought to split both ticket and TV/Radio revenue with their opponents; if the Yankees draw 40,000 for a game with the Twins, the Twins should get half the gate receipts. If the Yankees get a $20M local TV deal, they should get half that and the other half should get thrown into a general pool that every MLB team shares equally from. In this way, good teams and large market teams still have some inherent advantage (the Yankees will still get more TV/Radio money than the Expos) but the differences will be reduced.

Where this idea runs into a big problem is the fact that so many teams are owned by or own themselves media outlets, either TV or Radio or both, and as a result the books are generally cooked with regard to the value of these contracts. I don't know if teams would accept independent arbiters analyzing their situation to determine a fair market value of their TV/Radio deals, but that's one possible solution.

Also, I would disagree a bit with the idea that baseball doesn't translate well to TV; the most compelling thing to me about baseball is the pitcher/batter duel, and there's no substitute for being able to see the trajectory of the pitch and the kind of swing the batter takes. A radio announcer can try to describe it, and the better ones do this well, but often the radio announcer gives little more info than "breaking ball low"; was it a splitter? a curve? how low? how did the batter react?

For those that really follow baseball and understand the nuances of the game, the TV broadcast shows a ton of things that you have a much harder time getting out of the radio broadcast.

[clintl]

A good portion of the increase in game length can be attributed to pitching changes. They loitered and scratched and spit back in the 1950s, too.

[dawgfan]

There isn't a three hour NFL game every day...

I'm not following your point; NFL games last right around 3 hours, to fill the 3-hour slot in the TV schedule. MLB games are down to about 2 hours 45 minutes.

Obviously, since there are MLB games on every day, there will be some games that last much longer than that, just as there are some that will be quicker. The variety in game length is greater in baseball than in football given the fundamental nature of the game, but the average length is shorter in MLB than in the NFL.

[rkmsuf]

A good portion of the increase in game length can be attributed to pitching changes. They loitered and scratched and spit back in the 1950s, too.

Nobody cared then. When you are at the game that stuff isn't such an issue...

[rkmsuf]

I'm not following your point; NFL games last right around 3 hours, to fill the 3-hour slot in the TV schedule. MLB games are down to about 2 hours 45 minutes.

Obviously, since there are MLB games on every day, there will be some games that last much longer than that, just as there are some that will be quicker. The variety in game length is greater in baseball than in football given the fundamental nature of the game, but the average length is shorter in MLB than in the NFL.

The point is I can catch every second of my team in the NFL each week in 3 hours.

To do that in baseball I have to invest what at least 15 hours. Nitpicking about 2.5 or 3 hours is irrelevent...

[Ksyrup]

The point is I can catch every second of my team in the NFL each week in 3 hours.

To do that in baseball I have to invest what at least 15 hours. Nitpicking about 2.5 or 3 hours is irrelevent...
So by that rationale, all baseball games should last 30 minutes each (6 games a week, 3 hours), and basketball and hockey games should average around 45 minutes each, or else there's no comparison to football.

Part of what makes baseball compelling through an entire year is the everyday grind. You and millions of others might not think so, but the fact is, what football resolves in 3 hours of intense, physical play gets stretched out in baseball over a week. And this is nothing new. Basketball and hockey are similar to baseball in that regard, but they only play half as many games.

[rkmsuf]

So by that rationale, all baseball games should last 30 minutes each (6 games a week, 3 hours), and basketball and hockey games should average around 45 minutes each, or else there's no comparison to football.

Part of what makes baseball compelling through an entire year is the everyday grind. You and millions of others might not think so, but the fact is, what football resolves in 3 hours of intense, physical play gets stretched out in baseball over a week. And this is nothing new. Basketball and hockey are similar to baseball in that regard, but they only play half as many games.

That's why my point from several post ago was that comparing them in this sense is not all that useful.

Some people enjoy the grind, some don't. The only thing I draw from football's popularity is that it's easier to find the non-grind people to grow your sport...

[Ksyrup]

And the violence doesn't hurt, either.

[clintl]

That's why my point from several post ago was that comparing them in this sense is not all that useful.

Some people enjoy the grind, some don't. The only thing I draw from football's popularity is that it's easier to find the non-grind people to grow your sport...

Possibly, but the NFL has done a great job marketing itself and its players, and MLB has been horrible at marketing.

[ISiddiqui]

sterlingice & dawgfan: GREAT posts! The problem with baseball is indeed the fact that the big revenue teams have a MUCH greater margin for error. If the big teams screw up (think Raul Mondesi on the Yanks) it is no big deal, but for a smaller revenue team, one mistake and they are horrible for 3-4 years because that salary weighs them down.

The way to fix is by better revenue sharing.

[Crapshoot]

It's a minority I'm proud to be in.

Hear, Hear.

[korme]

Baseball's got history that no league can touch.

BASEBALL WINS AGAIN

[Crapshoot]

I think GB's post was right on. I don't think that people are taking whacks at baseball just because they don't like the sport but because of what baseball does, says and handles the problems it does have (steriods, juiced baseballs, corked bats, teams not making money).

Look, I was a huge fan until the strike of '94. The writing was on the wall then that teams were not going to be competitive because of the CBA, and what was done? Nothing. Business as usual. Sooo, teams like the Pirates have to tread water to survive every year (as do some other teams), but thats O.K. to the big market teams and baseball in general. This is ridiculous. A-Rod gets $25 million a year to be a shortstop? C'mon, this was the entire Pirate payroll a few years ago. Basically baseball brings this on themselves.

As to GB's post about kids playing soccer more, I think that this is two-fold. Soccer as a youth sport must be cheaper to do (I don't know for fact but it would stand to reason) and is a sport that almost all kids can play regardless of height, weight, physical skills, etc.

Just my 2 cents.

If I may- this is the kind of thing I hate when people talk about baseball. Teams like the Pirates tread water because its in their interests to do so, and because its run by people who are trying to make money. Every year since I lived here ( I go to school here), instead of trying to rebuild, the Pirates spend some money on ridiculous over the hill veterans and let the youngs-un's go - in the name of a 70 win season. A-rod contract is the free market- that's life, and he's been worth it to the Rangers ( look at their pre-ARod media revenues, and after). Baseball is not all equal, and I like it that way- I don't way any forced equality in place. Could baseball do more ? certainly- I think more small market teams should take into the account that they should claim a greater share of Tv revenues and the gate as visiting teams- but that's one step.But as a whole, I find it ridiculous that an owner who pays $400 million for a team should then have to subsidize his competitior, and reduce the value of what he paid for.

[Crapshoot]

You know, it's funny, but Bill James and Rob Neyer have quoted fans from the late 1800's, early 1900's, mid 1900's, late 1990's and now we have your quote in February 2004, and they all say the same thing. It's just like owners griping about how much players are making - the same arguments were made over 120 years ago.

You may honestly not enjoy baseball as much as you did before. But you are kidding yourself if you think it's because of "how the players play the game these days." You've simply outgrown the game, or lost interest in it for whatever reason, and you have fond memories of when you used to like the game. If anything, players put more effort into their preparation for games in 2004 then they did 25 years ago, and they give as much effort on the field as they did then. The perceived differences are revisionist BS, even if you aren't aware of it.

Very much so- wonderfully said. Everytime I hear Tim McCarver carping about how, back in his day, such and such played harder- I wonder why he isn't in the nursing home yet.

[Greyroofoo]

Baseball is quite boring to play. Only a couple people are involved in any given play. In football every single person on the field at least get to move around, not just stand i right field.

[Ksyrup]

You forgot about Randy Moss.

[judicial clerk]

I find regular season baseball very boring and post season baseball very compelling. I also enjoyed the recent strike-shortened NBA season more enjoyable than the typical NBA season.

Based on the above, I think, for me at least, part of the appeal of football over other sports is the relatively limited regualr season. I would be in favor of cutting the NBA season by one quarter to one half. Unfortunately, this would be a bad idea for baseball because of the stats. It is cool to compare current season stats with stats from previous years. Changing the season length would screw this up. For example, I remember that George Brett and Tony Gwynn both batted .400 late into the regualr season. Now, if they only played 100 games it would be impossible to compare their great seasons to say, Ted Williams. Same goes for 20 game winners and 70 home run hitters. I care less about stats in football, and i can't even tell you what are important statistical milestones in basketball.

Steroids are in every sport.

Parity is a double-edged sword.

[sterlingice]

"The Lower Quartile Clubs Cannot Compete for Postseason Berths and Success.

From 1995 through 2001, a total of 224 MLB postseason games were played. Five clubs whose payrolls fell in the lower half of the industry qualified for the postseason, winning a total of five games. None advanced past the Division Series. No team outside the top payroll quartile has won a World Series game during this period. The seven-year post-season record is 219-5 (a .978 winning percentage) in favor of the top two payroll quartiles."

Before heading to class, I couldn't dig up this statistic that's the most damning of all. 219-5! That's much too large of a sample to just be a statistical fluke: 219-5! So, even if you don't spend and you make the playoffs, there's no way you can win there because you don't have the depth needed to help tilt the game in your favor. Sure you might happen into 3 really nice starting pitchers who can carry your club into the postseason but you don't have a bench or bullpen because you can't afford them.

Not only that but the "five clubs" statistic points to 5 out of 7 * 8 (56) playoff spots. That means that only 1 out of every 10 playoff teams comes from the lower half of the payroll and 15 teams are in the lower half of the payroll, so you do the math: the chance of your team making the playoffs if you are in the lower half of the payroll is miniscule. If you can afford to always be in the upper half of the payroll, you're odds of making the post season increase dramatically but if you're in a small market, you can only make that list 1 or 2 times in a 10 year period but if you are one of the haves, you can always make that list which increases your chances immensely.

SI

[lynchjm24]

Sterling,

I'd say that 1995 to 2001 is very different from today. You might say it's not, but if you follow the game closely, it's a whole different world.

The Beane and Riccardi type GM's have shown that you don't need a 100 million dollar payroll to compete.

You are also somewhat confusing cause and effect. Do the teams win because they have high payrolls? Or do they have high payrolls because they win?

Your 1995-2001 stats include teams like Cleveland in the top half of salaries. Are they still there? No. Why not? Because they had a 10 year run on the top of their division and now they need to spend a few years rebuilding. Will they never compete again? I'd say that's pretty unlikely as they had easily the #1 farm system going into 2003.

There are a few teams that are doomed. It isn't the fault of the structure, it's the fault of the leadership. Tampa Bay is in a tough spot. Shitty stadium, tough division. Detroit has noone to blame but themselves - they screwed their own franchise up. Cincinnati is lead by an absolute moron. Pittsburgh has pretty much shown they have no clue. When you get raided for as many rule 5 picks as they did, it pretty much proves you are idiotic when you consider they only had 37 players on their 40-man roster at the time.

To be honest, I don't mind the fact that baseball is less popular. I've got a small circle of friends who love it, there are tremendous resources on the web for analysis and stats, and there are some tremendous baseball fans on this website (KSyrup, Oykib, Aadik, for example). Let the X-Games, NBA, NFL, ect take over the world - I'll just spread out of a few seats at the 'ol ballpark.

[ISiddiqui]

Tampa Bay is in a tough spot. Shitty stadium, tough division. Detroit has noone to blame but themselves - they screwed their own franchise up. Cincinnati is lead by an absolute moron. Pittsburgh has pretty much shown they have no clue. When you get raided for as many rule 5 picks as they did, it pretty much proves you are idiotic when you consider they only had 37 players on their 40-man roster at the time.

The thing is that when they make a mistake, they are done for years (they can't get rid of the bad salary). If the Yanks and Red Sox make a mistake, they just get someone new.

[lynchjm24]

The thing is that when they make a mistake, they are done for years (they can't get rid of the bad salary). If the Yanks and Red Sox make a mistake, they just get someone new.

This argument might make sense if they had made A mistake. They have made dozens upon dozens of mistakes. From who to hire as GM, to how they built their park (easily the worst of the new ones I've been to), to how they draft, to how they develop players. They even got lucky that the biggest mistake they almost made walked away from them saving them $140MM.

To try and cry poverty is a freaking joke. The Red Wings have a higher payroll then the Tigers do, is there really anyway in the world that the Red Wings should have higher revenues then the Tigers? The Tigers have noone in the world to blame. Luckily for them, in that division if they get things turned around they could compete in 3 years.

[Ksyrup]

Why is it that people like to harp on the past decade or so when discussing parity. Were things really that much better 50-100 years ago? I don't think the Yankees could come close to equaling what they did from 1938-1961, even with the revenue disparity. Teams went entire decades without leaving last place, let alone reaching .500 or competing for a pennant. This isn't a new phenomenon. And again, I point out that people tend to view the "good ole' days" with a pair of beer goggles, or something.

[sterlingice]

Why is it that people like to harp on the past decade or so when discussing parity. Were things really that much better 50-100 years ago? I don't think the Yankees could come close to equaling what they did from 1938-1961, even with the revenue disparity. Teams went entire decades without leaving last place, let alone reaching .500 or competing for a pennant. This isn't a new phenomenon. And again, I point out that people tend to view the "good ole' days" with a pair of beer goggles, or something.
People harp on the past decade because it is the most representative of how things are now. As for the "good ole days", we can't change them (unless you're hold out on us with your time machine). We just care about it being fair for what we can affect in the future.

SI

[Ksyrup]

I don't think so. There's a reason those stats you cited started right after the strike and ended 3 years ago.

[lynchjm24]

Why is it that people like to harp on the past decade or so when discussing parity. Were things really that much better 50-100 years ago? I don't think the Yankees could come close to equaling what they did from 1938-1961, even with the revenue disparity. Teams went entire decades without leaving last place, let alone reaching .500 or competing for a pennant. This isn't a new phenomenon. And again, I point out that people tend to view the "good ole' days" with a pair of beer goggles, or something.


The funny thing to me and the thing that is being ignored is:

The 96, 98, 99 Yankee teams were build from the farm system and some good trades. Jeter, Bernie, Posada, Pettite, Rivera, ect through the system. Tino, Knoblauch, O'Neill and others came in deals. The Knoblauch deal was a salary dump for Minnesota, but Guzman and Milton were useful enough for them over the years even if Buchanan did next to nothing. The Tino deal wasn't a bad deal for the Mariners at the time, Russ Davis just stunk it up and Hitchcock was.... well Hitchcock.

There were some free agents involved like David Cone, but the majority of the team was built the old fashioned way. Since 2000 when the team has gone back to the Yankee way of the 70's they haven't had nearly the success.

The Yankees were also beneficiaries of some good luck in the playoffs. From Mark Wholers, to Jeffery Maier, to the terrible calls in the ALCS against the Red Sox in 99, to Timo Perez not running in game 1 of the 2000 WS. When all is said and done and this Yankee dynasty has crumbled, I think we'll look back and the run they had will be abnormal and the fact that they were able to pull it off will be more impressive then it is now. If Atlanta had won in 96 and the Mets had won in 2000 would people really harp on the lack of parity in baseball like they do now?

[ISiddiqui]

The 96, 98, 99 Yankee teams were build from the farm system and some good trades.

Do you think that money doesn't affect the scouting budget?

If Atlanta had won in 96 and the Mets had won in 2000 would people really harp on the lack of parity in baseball like they do now?

Probably.. it isn't like they were small revenue teams.

[The_herd]

I don't think Atlanta or the Mets winning would change much. They were both big spenders, only recently has Atlanta really started paying attention to payroll. Either of those teams winning doesn't suddenly make it ok for the small market teams.

I will give the Yankee's credit for their farm system, but they are still one of a handful of teams that could keep that many young players together for as long as they have and still be able to fill holes by raiding the free agent market or taking on other teams contract problems.

I also think that the last decade is used most often because thats when the difference between the "have's" and "have not's" started reaching a ridiculous point. Before then we still had memories of the Pittsburg teams making their run with Bonds, Minnesota's world series teams, the Paul O'neil/Nasty Boy's lead Reds weren't that far off, Atlanta was just starting its run and not all of the Yankee's youngsters were in the big leagues yet. Its not that we are looking at the past unfairly, its just that the economic differences were there, just not to the point that they affected what was going on on the field the extent they are today.

[ISiddiqui]

they are still one of a handful of teams that could keep that many young players together for as long as they have and still be able to fill holes by raiding the free agent market or taking on other teams contract problems.

Good point.

[Ksyrup]

I also think that the last decade is used most often because thats when the difference between the "have's" and "have not's" started reaching a ridiculous point. Before then we still had memories of the Pittsburg teams making their run with Bonds, Minnesota's world series teams, the Paul O'neil/Nasty Boy's lead Reds weren't that far off, Atlanta was just starting its run and not all of the Yankee's youngsters were in the big leagues yet. Its not that we are looking at the past unfairly, its just that the economic differences were there, just not to the point that they affected what was going on on the field the extent they are today.
The point, though, is that you can do the same thing going back 10 years at a time. The Reds and A's both sucked during the early 80's after owning the 70's, then came back again during the late 80's and early 90's. The Indians and Mariners were jokes during the 80's, then built solid fan vbases and clubs during the 90's. Minnesota has recovered from a down period sicne they won in 1991. Pittsburgh is one of those teams run poorly, or they could be Minnesota. The Padres built up to a competitive team and made it to the WS, after a down period.

This is not new. Teams' fortunes rise and fall over the period of decades - both small and large market. Hell, even the Yankees sucked for an entire decade. And we're too early into this decade to know whether they'll sustain their performance, or fall victim to Steinbrenner the way they did in the 80's.

[The_herd]

The point is, the big market teams are the one's having the great runs over the past 10 years, as spending has increased. It's not a coincidence. That's what's being pointed out. It is new because in the '70's and '80's teams were built largely through the farm system, big spenders didn't dominate the standings. That's not the case for most of the larger market teams now, the small market teams are the one's that need to rely mostly on developing their own pitching and position player talent, and hope that a good bargin falls in their lap so they can fill holes and add the depth needed to be a playoff team.

[Chubby]

The problem with the farm systems today too is that even if you have the best farm system in the league, you won't be able to keep them all forever with all the money being thrown around by the Big Market Teams.

Example A: The Expos

If they had the $ how sick would they be? ALL that talent they have traded away or let go from their farm system simply because they don't have the payroll to sustain more than a couple of them at one time. Bring up another stud from the minors who blossoms, then somebody has to go sooner or later because HE will want the $ eventually.

[mauchow]

I'm in the minority in this as well. I could watch all 162 games for the Cubs and not get sick of them. Of course I could watch all 16 games of the Vikings too, if I could. But I only get regional broadcast of the Packers(sometimes the Vikings if they don't play at the same time). Anyhow, I enjoy watching baseball just as much as football.

[The_herd]

If you want to compare era's, then lets take a look at how this era would look without the wild card.

The National League would have 6 different representatives since '95, the American League a whopping 5. 7 appearances for the Braves, 6 for the Yankee's. St. Louis and Seattle would be 2nd with 4 appearances each. Florida and Oakland would be the only small market teams with appearances, 2 apiece (if you want to count Florida's '97 run as small market).

What the wild card has done is just opened the door a little bit wider for the small markets, but still leaves the larger markets with a distinct advantage. If MLB added 2 more teams to the playoffs there would appear to be even more parity amongst its teams, when all it does is change the numbers a bit. Sean McAdam's article didn't look at the entire picture, all he did was take the numbers he wanted to present in order to make his point.

In the end, we can thow numbers out all day, the simple point I'm trying to make is Baseball is dead last among the 4 major sports for giving its teams a level playing field.

[dawgfan]

If you want to compare era's, then lets take a look at how this era would look without the wild card.

The National League would have 6 different representatives since '95, the American League a whopping 5. 7 appearances for the Braves, 6 for the Yankee's. St. Louis and Seattle would be 2nd with 4 appearances each. Florida and Oakland would be the only small market teams with appearances, 2 apiece (if you want to count Florida's '97 run as small market).

I'm having a pretty good laugh at the description of Florida, aka Miami being described as a "small-market" team especially in comparison to Seattle.

Seattle is only now thought of as a "big-market" team because the owners did a good job of mixing a well-built team with the opening of a fantastic new ballpark (largely on the public dime).

[The_herd]

I'm having a pretty good laugh at the description of Florida, aka Miami being described as a "small-market" team especially in comparison to Seattle.

Seattle is only now thought of as a "big-market" team because the owners did a good job of mixing a well-built team with the opening of a fantastic new ballpark (largely on the public dime).

Seattle has the resources to have considerably higher payroll. They are usually in the top 5 in net income each year, at least that's what I've read (teams actual finances are a mystery to anyone outside the organization and Bud Selig right now). That's a good reason why there was so much complaining this season when they chose to stick with their team and not make any changes before the postseason. So calling them big market isn't such a stretch, and I wouldn't consider them small market by any means.

[dawgfan]

My point here is that Seattle isn't a "large market" team just by virtue of their location as is the case with the Yankees, Mets, Dodgers, Cubs, White Sox or any other team in a city of a few million or more people to draw from.

Yes, Seattle's revenue stream is reportedly 2nd only to the Yankees, but that's because the team finally got savvy owners who put the right people in place to build a successful team and at the same time managed to get a fancy new ballpark built. Same could've been the case in Pittsburgh, but while the new ballpark is nice, the team sucks. Same thing in Milwaukee. Wayne Huizenga had plenty of dough to get a new ballpark built, but he was greedy and wanted more public assistance than Miami residents were willing to give him.

Let's not forget that from their inception until the early '90's, the Mariners were one of the biggest jokes in baseball, a team that didn't break .500 until their 15th season of existence.

[Sun Tzu]

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

Did I not make it perfectly clear that I didn't have time for a long post to explain my thoughts? Did I not state that I enjoy going to a baseball game more than anything (thereby insinuating that I enjoy live baseball more than live football)?

It's called reason/grasping concepts/laws of thought. Use it. Dickhead.

[Craptacular]

In baseball, Tiger fans, Brewers fans, they don't have any hope. They have little to look forward to.

There's always the sausage race. Especially when Prince Fielder gets called up ... he might try to eat them.

[dawgfan]

In baseball, Tiger fans, Brewers fans, they don't have any hope. They have little to look forward to.

For this season? Yeah. If they had new owners and/or hired smarter Presidents/GMs to run their teams, they'd have hope. Seattle is definitely NOT a bigger market than Detroit; it's just a better-run franchise.

[Ksyrup]

Considering the division Detroit is in, they may be only a year away from contending.

[ISiddiqui]

For this season? Yeah. If they had new owners and/or hired smarter Presidents/GMs to run their teams, they'd have hope. Seattle is definitely NOT a bigger market than Detroit; it's just a better-run franchise.

Bigger market isn't the size of the city, it's the amount of the revenue they get from local TV and radio deals.

[oykib]

Bigger market isn't the size of the city, it's the amount of the revenue they get from local TV and radio deals.

But Seattle doesn't get that benefit because people from Washington just happen to like pissing away money. They have the advantage that they do because they are brighter than other comparable teams.

Seattle was smart enough to take a flyer on Ichiro. They knew that the money that they were paying him was for more than his production. They came out ahead because they wisely invested in expanding their market. Ichiro's play on the field has more than outpaced his salary and the ancillary benefits are off hte charts.

The guys in Detroit are just comparatively incompetant.

[PittFan]

If I may- this is the kind of thing I hate when people talk about baseball. Teams like the Pirates tread water because its in their interests to do so, and because its run by people who are trying to make money. Every year since I lived here ( I go to school here), instead of trying to rebuild, the Pirates spend some money on ridiculous over the hill veterans and let the youngs-un's go - in the name of a 70 win season. A-rod contract is the free market- that's life, and he's been worth it to the Rangers ( look at their pre-ARod media revenues, and after). Baseball is not all equal, and I like it that way- I don't way any forced equality in place. Could baseball do more ? certainly- I think more small market teams should take into the account that they should claim a greater share of Tv revenues and the gate as visiting teams- but that's one step.But as a whole, I find it ridiculous that an owner who pays $400 million for a team should then have to subsidize his competitior, and reduce the value of what he paid for.

Aadik, where do you go to school? I went to Westminster and then to Pitt, but that was a long time ago.

Anyway, I don't totally disagree with you. The Pirates have made some incredibly stupid moves in the last few years. However, I have heard this type of free market vs. forced equality thing before and I don't quite understand why so many feel that baseball should not/could not be equal akin to the NFL. Why not?? The NFL is head and shoulders above baseball in just about every way (monetary and ratings I mean). Why is Baseball this thing that some people seem to think should work as a free market society, blah, blah, blah and all that cannot compete should just get out? It seems to me that Baseball is losing viewership (this last playoff season not withstanding) and attendence has been down for years. I don't care what people say about parity and the lack of talent on teams or anything like that, because I can tell you this, I would rather watch a sport where my team or any team is given the same resources at the beginning of a season and it is up to the front office and coaching staff to implement a system or obtain talent that will win a championship. I find this much more interesting than knowing the Yankees, Braves, Red Sox, Giants, Avalanche, Red Wings, Rangers, Flyers, what have you, are MOST LIKELY going to be in the post season season after season after season. I don't mind if they are there because they were the most shrewd or made the best decisions, but when you can buy whatever you want that IS NOT competition.

[Samdari]

I accept this but I think baseball has two things going for it that football will never come close to meeting:

1. History. As each baseball season goes by, it adds one more layer of frosting on an extremely rich cake that can take a lifetime to analyze and enjoy.

Hmm, I actually think the opposite is true on this point. Right now, baseball has the history of roughly twice (three times?) as many seasons. That margin gets slimmer and slimmer with each passing season, not more marked. Once we get the the 100 year anniversary of the "modern" NFL, the fact that baseball has history beyond that will be virtually forgotten.

[oykib]

Hmm, I actually think the opposite is true on this point. Right now, baseball has the history of roughly twice (three times?) as many seasons. That margin gets slimmer and slimmer with each passing season, not more marked. Once we get the the 100 year anniversary of the "modern" NFL, the fact that baseball has history beyond that will be virtually forgotten.

The difference is that baseball remains fairly constant. The season is roughly the same length as it was 100 years ago. .300 means about the same as it has for most of baseball's run.

You can compare Ruth to Bonds. You can't as easily compare Otto Graham to Tom Brady. Thats the case even though the gap in time is almost twice as much between the two baseball players to the two football players.

Football lacks the continuity baseball has.

[Samdari]

The difference is that baseball remains fairly constant. The season is roughly the same length as it was 100 years ago. .300 means about the same as it has for most of baseball's run.

You can compare Ruth to Bonds. You can't as easily compare Otto Graham to Tom Brady. Thats the case even though the gap in time is almost twice as much between the two baseball players to the two football players.

Football lacks the continuity baseball has.

The problem with that argument is that stopped being true 10 years ago. Scratch that, it was never true to begin with.

When Babe Ruth began playing, 40-50 years after the NL was formed, the record for HR in a season was something like 12. When he hit 60, it was more than many teams. Offensive numbers today can be in no way compared to those of yesteryear. Just like the NFL has evolved to emphasize the pass over the run, baseball has grown to emphasize the home run above all else, thus taking away the subtlety that was the true beauty of the game.

[oykib]

The problem with that argument is that stopped being true 10 years ago. Scratch that, it was never true to begin with.

When Babe Ruth began playing, 40-50 years after the NL was formed, the record for HR in a season was something like 12. When he hit 60, it was more than many teams. Offensive numbers today can be in no way compared to those of yesteryear. Just like the NFL has evolved to emphasize the pass over the run, baseball has grown to emphasize the home run above all else, thus taking away the subtlety that was the true beauty of the game.

Other than the livening of the ball-- which was seventy-five years ago-- the mot significant change was the lowering of the pitcher's mound. But even considering the difference of the home runs, it's still fairly easy to compare live ball and dead ball hitters. It doesn't take much work to compare hitters inbig eras from small eras. If we all went back and watched a game from 1933, we could easily comprehend all the action.

Football was a totally different animal. Basketball and hockey might as well have been different sports altogether.

And the record for home runs was in the twenties when Babe Ruth hit twenty-nine to break the record. He subsequently got into the fifties. It was another five years before he hit 60.

Also, the technology and rules for playing baseball didn't evolve until about the turn of the century. Babe ruth came along about fifteen years later. What most of us consider when we think of baseball history (from about 1903 or so) hasn't much changed.

[dawgfan]

Bigger market isn't the size of the city, it's the amount of the revenue they get from local TV and radio deals.

Revenue from local TV and radio is greatly influenced by how popular the team in question is, which is largely a function of how good they are. Until the 1995 playoff run, the M's TV and radio deals were right at the bottom of all MLB teams. Unlike the New York teams, the Chicago teams, LA and other large cities/metro areas, Seattle didn't have a built-in large pool of fans; they had to build support by being successful on the field, which was a result of smart management, scouting and trades. There's no doubt that the M's success was partly due to their playoff runs coinciding with a period of great economic growth and thus a lot more disposable income, but that's not the only reason.

The factor that is largely out of a team's control is the sheer size of the community they play in, i.e. the pool of potential fans and customers. If you figure the Yankees probably own the hearts and minds of 60-70% of New Yorkers, that's around 6 million right there; add in surrounding areas like New Jersey, upstate New York, Conneticut, etc and you're talking well over 10 million. Compare that with the metro area of Seattle, which is around 3 million. Seattle may have an advantage over other, similar-sized communities in that it's a pretty attractive TV and radio market re: advertising, and also the fact that Seattle was smart enough to market itself as a regional team by trying to draw fans from Portland, Vancouver B.C. and even Japan. Still, there's no inherent reason why Seattle's revenue should be higher than say Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, etc. Seattle is only "large-market" in your view because they have been a smartly-run franchise over the last decade; as history shows, that probably won't last.

Pittsburgh and Detroit are large enough cities/metro areas to generously support MLB; what they need are better GM's to build good teams.

[Crapshoot]

Aadik, where do you go to school? I went to Westminster and then to Pitt, but that was a long time ago.

Anyway, I don't totally disagree with you. The Pirates have made some incredibly stupid moves in the last few years. However, I have heard this type of free market vs. forced equality thing before and I don't quite understand why so many feel that baseball should not/could not be equal akin to the NFL. Why not?? The NFL is head and shoulders above baseball in just about every way (monetary and ratings I mean). Why is Baseball this thing that some people seem to think should work as a free market society, blah, blah, blah and all that cannot compete should just get out? It seems to me that Baseball is losing viewership (this last playoff season not withstanding) and attendence has been down for years. I don't care what people say about parity and the lack of talent on teams or anything like that, because I can tell you this, I would rather watch a sport where my team or any team is given the same resources at the beginning of a season and it is up to the front office and coaching staff to implement a system or obtain talent that will win a championship. I find this much more interesting than knowing the Yankees, Braves, Red Sox, Giants, Avalanche, Red Wings, Rangers, Flyers, what have you, are MOST LIKELY going to be in the post season season after season after season. I don't mind if they are there because they were the most shrewd or made the best decisions, but when you can buy whatever you want that IS NOT competition.

Im a senior at CMU actually - wish I went to Pitt, or at least wish the women from Pitt went here.. :D. As for the football is above baseball point, Survivor ranks well above the Six Feet Under in ratings- does it make it a better show- Brittany Spears outsells Norah Jones- does it make her a better musician ? Im hardly a cultural luddite, but I feel certain that popularity does not always equate with taste or value. Look- I agree that the disparity is stunning at times, and I think small market teams should attempt to bargain better- they fail to realize their leverage. On the other hand, I don't think bitching and moaning about it makes anyone happy. Its similar to the real world- sure, Im not a millionaire, but should I stop competing because there are people better of than me ? Also, look at the teams you cited. The Braves were perennial losers - when Ted Turner bought them, the first million he paid for them was borrowed from the previous owners- that's how desperate they were to dump the team. He built the teams fanbase up, using his cable network. As recently as 92, the Giants were going to move to frigging Tampa Bay- but investments in players (see Bonds, Barry) and a solid model have helped them be succesful, even while privately financing their ballpark- that team will be amongs the most valuable in baseball. You cannot just buy what you want- it is easier for some than others, but that's reality.

[lynchjm24]

Offensive numbers today can be in no way compared to those of yesteryear.

Anyone with Excel can compare today's great players against the players of yesteryear. Simple calculations against the average of the players in a certain environment makes for easy comparison.

[Buccaneer]

Anyone with Excel can compare today's great players against the players of yesteryear. Simple calculations against the average of the players in a certain environment makes for easy comparison.
hence, Win Shares.

[lynchjm24]

hence, Win Shares.

I don't know if you are being sarcastic or not, but that isn't what I was talking about. OPS+, ERA+ are pretty simple and give you a pretty darn good idea about how good someone was when moving across eras.

[SteelerFan448]

Nothing insightful at all...

I accept this but I think baseball has two things going for it that football will never come close to meeting:

1. History. As each baseball season goes by, it adds one more layer of frosting on an extremely rich cake that can take a lifetime to analyze and enjoy.

2. Arguably, baseball's greatest moments are far better and more memorable than football's greatest moments. Part of it is baseball's focus on individual achievements and throughout our history, we have celebrated heroic or extraordinary achievements of the individual.

Well baseball is older, so it would have more history.

Football greatest moments are more defined and memorable than baseballs. The Catch, The Drive, The Music City Miracle, The Band is on the Field, The Immaculate Reception. All unique in their own way. Add to that the Saints touchdown against the Jags only to miss the XP. Baseballs greatest moments are virtually all homeruns.

Baseball screwed up in not totally fixing the sport when they had the chance. Now that the NHL is in their situation, I hope they don't do the same.

BTW, I like both, but football is MUCH better.

[ISiddiqui]

Football greatest moments are more defined and memorable than baseballs.

Totally disagree on the 'memorable' part. The Catch, the Drive, etc, etc may be memorable but they don't hold a candle to "The Shot Heard Round the World", "Bucky F'ing Dent", "Larson's Perfect Game", "Slaughter's Dash", even "The Grand Single"

[lynchjm24]

Add to that the Saints touchdown against the Jags only to miss the XP.

Sure, 40 years from now noone will remember Bill Buckner, but they will still be talking about that Saints/Jags game.

[AgPete]

I respect Baseball, I love football. Both have a place in American sports.
But the switch is obvious to me as to which one is the most popular. And it's #1 on the list Buc posted.

Baseball is the newspaper era's creation.

Heavy stats. If you can read baseball stats, you can read players abilities. If you can read a box score, you can nearly recreate the game batter by batter. People didn't even need TV's to know the Yankees were awesome and that Mickey Mantle was the man (or Mays or whomever)

Football is the Television era's creation.

The game lends itself to being viewed on TV so much better than baseball. (as was pointed out). A guy can score an 18 yd TD run in the newpaper, but he can make 4 tacklers miss, keep his balance, and run over a DB for the score on TV. All Baseball HR's are basically the same, without trying to sound disrespectful.

Totally agree with ya bud. Baseball has hurt itself by not instituting a salary cap and other modern-day innovations but I believe the main reason football has surpassed it as "America's National Pastime" is that the nature of media and the news has changed. Baseball strategy just doesn't make for good TV. :(

[dawgfan]

Baseball strategy just doesn't make for good TV. :(

I'm not sure this is strictly true - with advances in TV production, replays and graphics, this area has improved greatly in the last few years. Think of way that the better broadcasts now track pitch sequences, showing strategy of pitch selection and location in dealing with a batter, or the ability to see how a good batter will wait on a pitch and show hitting fundamentals. I think even more can be done in this area - for example, with a static camera looking from up behind home plate out on to the field, you could compare the defensive positioning of the fielders from batter to batter, even pitch to pitch based on the situation and count.

[Buccaneer]

Totally disagree on the 'memorable' part. The Catch, the Drive, etc, etc may be memorable but they don't hold a candle to "The Shot Heard Round the World", "Bucky F'ing Dent", "Larson's Perfect Game", "Slaughter's Dash", even "The Grand Single"
Yep.

[SteelerFan448]

Totally disagree on the 'memorable' part. The Catch, the Drive, etc, etc may be memorable but they don't hold a candle to "The Shot Heard Round the World", "Bucky F'ing Dent", "Larson's Perfect Game", "Slaughter's Dash", even "The Grand Single"

I've never heard of the last three. And this years Saints play will be remembered if they keep showing it like the Stanford-Cal game.

[Desnudo]

As pointed out earlier, the average MLB game time has declined in recent years and is shorter than the average NFL game.

It's still way too long and is much longer than it used to be. The average game should and needs to be in the 2-2 1/2 hour range. If it legimately took 3+ hours to play a baseball game, then fine, but it doesn't. All you have to do is watch any of the fast working pitchers to see that. Using the Red Sox as an example, if you watch a game with Tim Wakefield or Pedro starting you'll be leaving the park 30-60 minutes earlier than other pitchers on the staff. You could argue that Wakefield only throws one pitch, so no sign needed, accelerating the game. But Pedro has a no BS approach and throws a variety of pitches. Thus his games go by quickly.

I don't think comparing the game times of different sports is really relevent. The NFL, as has been often noted, is made for TV since the action is condensed whereas baseball is wait and wait some more. I do have problems with the amount of commercials in an NFL game as I think it disrupts the flow, but that's a seperate issue.

[VPI97]

I've never heard of the last three. And this years Saints play will be remembered if they keep showing it like the Stanford-Cal game.I don't know..."The play" gave Cal the win. Meanwhile, the Saints lost.

Just doesn't have the same "oomph"

[albionmoonlight]

When I am at a baseball game, I do not notice the delays--they seem more incorporated into the game itself.

When I am at a televised football game, I really notice the commercial breaks. They do disrupt the flow of the game. 22 grown men standing around looking bored while some PA announcer tries to lead 70,000 people in the Chicken Dance Sponsored by Popeyes. Ugh.

It's funny, but I don't notice commercial breaks as much when I am actually watching the football game and the commercials on TV.

[Desnudo]

When I am at a baseball game, I do not notice the delays--they seem more incorporated into the game itself.

Beer, the answer to all of life's questions.

[clintl]

It seems to me that the way to evaluate market potential for a franchise is to look at the metropolitan area's economic base. I did that, multiplying population by per capita GDP for each of the 26 metropolitan areas with MLB franchise (*the Canadian franchises are probably substantially underestimated, because all I could find in provincial GDP - I'm sure that the metropolitan Toronto and Montreal GDP is substantially higher than that of the provinces as a whole).


Metropolitan Area Population (Millions) Economic Base (Billions)
1-New York 21.200 928.7
2-Los Angeles 16.374 548.3
3-Chicago 9.158 360.7
4-San Francisco 7.039 326.7
5-Baltimore 7.608 314.3
6-Boston 5.819 234.5
7-Philadelphia 6.188 229.9
8-Dallas 5.222 210.5
9-Houston 4.670 185.9
10-Detroit 5.456 183.8
11-Atlanta 4.112 168.8
12-Seattle 3.555 138.4
13-Toronto 4.683 130.7*
14-Minnesota 2.969 123.6
15-Miami 3.876 107.5
16-Phoenix 3.251 106.4
17-Denver 2.582 105.3
18-Cleveland 2.946 103.4
19-San Diego 2.814 97.1
20-St. Louis 2.604 93.3
21-Montreal 3.426 78.0*
22-Pittsburgh 2.359 74.3
23-Tampa Bay 2.396 69.3
24-Cincinnati 1.979 68.6
25-Milwaukee 1.690 60.8
26-Kansas City 1.776 60.1


A few things strike me as I look at this:

1) Minnesota really should be a mid-market team, not a small-market team.
2) If teams really want to look at how to be a successful small market team, they should be studying St. Louis. The Cardinals are in one of the smallest markets of all, but how found a way to generate the revenues to be competitive year after year.
3) Detroit has no excuse for its situation.

The more I think about, the more I think this might be the ultimate solution - have MLB take over the local media contracts, and pool and split that money evenly. Small market can, and have, been competitive with respect to attendance.

[oykib]

It seems to me that the way to evaluate market potential for a franchise is to look at the metropolitan area's economic base. I did that, multiplying population by per capita GDP for each of the 26 metropolitan areas with MLB franchise (*the Canadian franchises are probably substantially underestimated, because all I could find in provincial GDP - I'm sure that the metropolitan Toronto and Montreal GDP is substantially higher than that of the provinces as a whole).


Metropolitan Area Population (Millions) Economic Base (Billions)
1-New York 21.200 928.7
2-Los Angeles 16.374 548.3
3-Chicago 9.158 360.7
4-San Francisco 7.039 326.7
5-Baltimore 7.608 314.3
6-Boston 5.819 234.5
7-Philadelphia 6.188 229.9
8-Dallas 5.222 210.5
9-Houston 4.670 185.9
10-Detroit 5.456 183.8
11-Atlanta 4.112 168.8
12-Seattle 3.555 138.4
13-Toronto 4.683 130.7*
14-Minnesota 2.969 123.6
15-Miami 3.876 107.5
16-Phoenix 3.251 106.4
17-Denver 2.582 105.3
18-Cleveland 2.946 103.4
19-San Diego 2.814 97.1
20-St. Louis 2.604 93.3
21-Montreal 3.426 78.0*
22-Pittsburgh 2.359 74.3
23-Tampa Bay 2.396 69.3
24-Cincinnati 1.979 68.6
25-Milwaukee 1.690 60.8
26-Kansas City 1.776 60.1


A few things strike me as I look at this:

1) Minnesota really should be a mid-market team, not a small-market team.
2) If teams really want to look at how to be a successful small market team, they should be studying St. Louis. The Cardinals are in one of the smallest markets of all, but how found a way to generate the revenues to be competitive year after year.
3) Detroit has no excuse for its situation.

The more I think about, the more I think this might be the ultimate solution - have MLB take over the local media contracts, and pool and split that money evenly. Small market can, and have, been competitive with respect to attendance.

I believe that your ultimate solution has been referred to in history as "stealing" and "communism". Neither word being particularly good in our society, I think there are better ways.

[clintl]

I believe that your ultimate solution has been referred to in history as "stealing" and "communism". Neither word being particularly good in our society, I think there are better ways.

One, I am not suggesting that it could be accomplished without the small market teams having to pony up some up front cash to buy out the rights. And two, MLB is not a government, so "communism" is not a word that can possibly apply. The correct term would be "business partnership" among the franchises, something that is quite common in capitalistic societies.

[oykib]

One, I am not suggesting that it could be accomplished without the small market teams having to pony up some up front cash to buy out the rights. And two, MLB is not a government, so "communism" is not a word that can possibly apply. The correct term would be "business partnership" among the franchises, something that is quite common in capitalistic societies.

I've heard many people say that there is a partnership between the teams in a sports league. That's somewhat rue. But it's more true that they are competitors.

It doesn't hurt the Yankees very much that Kansas City has local media revenue that is one 30th of their own. However, if you took 2/3 of their local revenue away to create a more fair 'partnership', I think Steinbrenner and co. would take you to court.

Pooling all local revenue is totally out of the question. Pooling some part (up to half) of local revenue might fly under the right circumstances.

[clintl]

I've heard many people say that there is a partnership between the teams in a sports league. That's somewhat rue. But it's more true that they are competitors.

It doesn't hurt the Yankees very much that Kansas City has local media revenue that is one 30th of their own. However, if you took 2/3 of their local revenue away to create a more fair 'partnership', I think Steinbrenner and co. would take you to court.

Pooling all local revenue is totally out of the question. Pooling some part (up to half) of local revenue might fly under the right circumstances.

Of course. That's why there would have to be a buyout. I don't think it will ever happen, but if people want economic parity in baseball, it's the only way I can see getting it done. Salary caps (which are what some people seem to want) are just band-aids. And not very good ones, either, as they create a whole bunch of other problems.

[oykib]

Of course. That's why there would have to be a buyout. I don't think it will ever happen, but if people want economic parity in baseball, it's the only way I can see getting it done. Salary caps (which are what some people seem to want) are just band-aids. And not very good ones, either, as they create a whole bunch of other problems.

I essentially made the same proposal as that. It's the last post on the first page. So I doubt that anyone saw it.

[sterlingice]

I've heard many people say that there is a partnership between the teams in a sports league. That's somewhat rue. But it's more true that they are competitors.

It doesn't hurt the Yankees very much that Kansas City has local media revenue that is one 30th of their own. However, if you took 2/3 of their local revenue away to create a more fair 'partnership', I think Steinbrenner and co. would take you to court.

Pooling all local revenue is totally out of the question. Pooling some part (up to half) of local revenue might fly under the right circumstances.
Yeah, but what happens to the credibility of baseball as a whole when the league goes to 16 teams because no everyone else has to fold. That's good for no one. Then again, I'm tired of arguing with the large market guys. You love having an inherent advantage and don't care that it takes away the essence of sports, that is competing to see who is better and not just because you have a bigger city and more money.

In short, you're basically a bunch of glorified bullys: "I like doing this because I always win". No one likes a bully and even the most tempermental eventually pick up their ball and go home. So enjoy your fucking advantage and don't be suprised when it's your excess that chokes away any interest in the sport.

I never thought I'd say this, but I'd rather argue with the football people: even they're more sane.

It's still way too long and is much longer than it used to be. The average game should and needs to be in the 2-2 1/2 hour range. If it legimately took 3+ hours to play a baseball game, then fine, but it doesn't. All you have to do is watch any of the fast working pitchers to see that. Using the Red Sox as an example, if you watch a game with Tim Wakefield or Pedro starting you'll be leaving the park 30-60 minutes earlier than other pitchers on the staff. You could argue that Wakefield only throws one pitch, so no sign needed, accelerating the game. But Pedro has a no BS approach and throws a variety of pitches. Thus his games go by quickly.

I don't think comparing the game times of different sports is really relevent. The NFL, as has been often noted, is made for TV since the action is condensed whereas baseball is wait and wait some more. I do have problems with the amount of commercials in an NFL game as I think it disrupts the flow, but that's a seperate issue.
I'm going to take some issue with this, thinking this was another "well, football is quicker despite the fact that it takes as long as a baseball game for something on a 60 minute clock" but thankfully not. There are some problems with various pitchers and hitters. The bigger the paycheck and the more guys love to make you wait (tho, $4M middle relievers seem to be the worst at it). Not universally true, but the guys with the bigger egos seem to love making you watch them dust off their shoes, do crazy motions to get into their stance, take their cap off and wipe sweat- not once as that would be acceptable on a hot day but four times between pitches, or walk around the mound long enough that he's worn a moat in the infield. It's why I've always been a fan of Greg Maddux (as well as the fact that he started with the Cubs)- he can throw a game in under 2 hours. Throws the ball, catcher throws it back, he sets, fires again. It's beautiful. Unfortunately, very few players are like that and I do with that a few of them would get taken down a peg. Still, it's tough to institute some sort of clock. Do you really want to see Fox with a 15 second count in the corner for time from pitch to pitch. Blech.

SI

[yabanci]

I think baseball is a dying sport and will continue to be so until they fix the economic system. I don't know how you fix it, but it's been broken for a long time. I'm not saying that baseball will actually die, because it is a great game and many people love it, but calling it "America's favorite pastime" these days is pure propaganda

[oykib]

SI, it' not as simple as who has an advantage and who doesn't.

First of all, Baseball is as or more competetive than it ever has been. So I don't know what imaginary league people are comparing todays majors with. The index of competetive balance has improved every decade almost without fail since pro baseball started.

Secondly, how do you justify stealing hundereds of millions of dollars from the owners of the teams with the top payrolls. That's essentailly what most people are proposing-- that or stealling hundreds of millions from the players. I have a proposal that doesn't really take much money from the wealthier teams and fixes the perception of competetive balance.

What exactly would you do that doesn't fly in the face of everythng I wuld assume you believe in every other area of the private sector? I mean, kids in the ghetto have much less of a chance to get the brass ring as compared to kids in affluent suburbs than the Kansas City Royals do of making the playoffs. And the result of the ghetto kid missing that slim opportunity is often death or prison. I'd think that were much more serious. But most Americans'd be up in arms if we 'pooled' property taxes-- the single biggest determinant of school funding and, by the way, local government revenue-- at the state level and diproportionately gave it away to the poorer school districts.

Yet, what's more important: that baseball teams have the perception of competetive balance or that blameless American children actually have a chance to compete in the marketplace?

[sterlingice]

SI, it' not as simple as who has an advantage and who doesn't.

First of all, Baseball is as or more competetive than it ever has been. So I don't know what imaginary league people are comparing todays majors with. The index of competetive balance has improved every decade almost without fail since pro baseball started.

Secondly, how do you justify stealing hundereds of millions of dollars from the owners of the teams with the top payrolls. That's essentailly what most people are proposing-- that or stealling hundreds of millions from the players. I have a proposal that doesn't really take much money from the wealthier teams and fixes the perception of competetive balance.

What exactly would you do that doesn't fly in the face of everythng I wuld assume you believe in every other area of the private sector? I mean, kids in the ghetto have much less of a chance to get the brass ring as compared to kids in affluent suburbs than the Kansas City Royals do of making the playoffs. And the result of the ghetto kid missing that slim opportunity is often death or prison. I'd think that were much more serious. But most Americans'd be up in arms if we 'pooled' property taxes-- the single biggest determinant of school funding and, by the way, local government revenue-- at the state level and diproportionately gave it away to the poorer school districts.

Yet, what's more important: that baseball teams have the perception of competetive balance or that blameless American children actually have a chance to compete in the marketplace?
Speaking of retarded things, I'm through with this thread after this post.

First, you start off with a small non sequitor that I've been arguing against the whole time. You say "what imaginary baseball world was ever balanced, blah, blah, blah". And for the 18th time, I wasn't around in the 1950s, I couldn't tell you. But what's wrong with having it fair NOW. I'm not comparing it to the days of yore or anything like that, I'm saying, "I'm a fan, and I want it fair now"

And, I really hate to do this (the caps, I mean), but YOU'RE COMPARING POOR KIDS WITH FUCKING MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES. Never mind you deserve to live in the slums for a day or two, just for using the journalistic slop of "ooh... I'm bringing up the weepy image of poor kids, feel sorry for George Steinbrenner". But, the heart of your argument is flawed- one, baseball has an anti-trust exemption because it literally isn't 30 competing businesses. Wal Mart doesnt need Target or K-Mart to succeed for the discount business to work. In fact, they get stronger. But if 10 small and mid market baseball teams fold, the Yankees are fucked. Baseball goes down the crapper as it loses a ton of credibility and the Yankees are left playing intersquad games. So I would think it would be in the Yankees (or any large market team's) best interests to actually help those other teams and make it a level playing field or at least close.

SI

[The_herd]

SI, it' not as simple as who has an advantage and who doesn't.

First of all, Baseball is as or more competetive than it ever has been. So I don't know what imaginary league people are comparing todays majors with. The index of competetive balance has improved every decade almost without fail since pro baseball started.

Secondly, how do you justify stealing hundereds of millions of dollars from the owners of the teams with the top payrolls. That's essentailly what most people are proposing-- that or stealling hundreds of millions from the players. I have a proposal that doesn't really take much money from the wealthier teams and fixes the perception of competetive balance.

What exactly would you do that doesn't fly in the face of everythng I wuld assume you believe in every other area of the private sector? I mean, kids in the ghetto have much less of a chance to get the brass ring as compared to kids in affluent suburbs than the Kansas City Royals do of making the playoffs. And the result of the ghetto kid missing that slim opportunity is often death or prison. I'd think that were much more serious. But most Americans'd be up in arms if we 'pooled' property taxes-- the single biggest determinant of school funding and, by the way, local government revenue-- at the state level and diproportionately gave it away to the poorer school districts.

Yet, what's more important: that baseball teams have the perception of competetive balance or that blameless American children actually have a chance to compete in the marketplace?


Most of your posts are at least somewhat intelligent. This however, is mindless ramble and makes zero sense.

As SI said, there are many reasons why "pooling" television profits isn't stealing from owners and players, and that argument doesn't hold any ground. Baseball team's recieve money for the product they put on the field, which is heavily dependant on having an opponent to face. The New York Yankee's themselves aren't a business, they are a baseball team, one of 30 in MLB. Comparing any sport to real world econimics doesn't make much sense, there are way too many variables and differences, its its own world, thus the anti-trust exemption

But according to you, we all must be communists for wanting to see competitve balance in baseball.

[ISiddiqui]

Compare that with the metro area of Seattle, which is around 3 million. Seattle may have an advantage over other, similar-sized communities in that it's a pretty attractive TV and radio market re: advertising, and also the fact that Seattle was smart enough to market itself as a regional team by trying to draw fans from Portland, Vancouver B.C. and even Japan. Still, there's no inherent reason why Seattle's revenue should be higher than say Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, etc. Seattle is only "large-market" in your view because they have been a smartly-run franchise over the last decade; as history shows, that probably won't last.

Seattle (and most West Coast teams) do have an advantage with Asian players. Seattle has a good Asian population and is one of the most Western baseball franchises. LA has that advantage as well as do the other California teams. The only other teams that really can compete with that is New York teams, because, well they are in New York. When Asian players started coming over, it was only natural they'd pick West Coast teams, so you have to account for that too, IMO.

It doesn't hurt the Yankees very much that Kansas City has local media revenue that is one 30th of their own. However, if you took 2/3 of their local revenue away to create a more fair 'partnership', I think Steinbrenner and co. would take you to court.

Why would they win when Football does basically the same thing? All gate reciepts and merchandise (local revenues) are poolled

And it ain't stealing at all. Baseball teams are franchises of Major League Baseball. You don't see a McDonald's franchise bitching about 'stealing' money from them.

[clintl]

Seattle (and most West Coast teams) do have an advantage with Asian players. Seattle has a good Asian population and is one of the most Western baseball franchises. LA has that advantage as well as do the other California teams. The only other teams that really can compete with that is New York teams, because, well they are in New York. When Asian players started coming over, it was only natural they'd pick West Coast teams, so you have to account for that too, IMO.



Actually, other than the Mariners, the Dodgers are the only West Coast team that has had much success signing Asian players, and the advantage the Mariners have in that respect is the fact that they have a Japanese owner. The Asian players have not been beating down the doors to join the Giants, A's, Angels, or Padres.

[ISiddiqui]

The Giants and Padres have been spoken of quite often when a Japanese player wants to come over.

[clintl]

I am a Giants fan, and I can tell you that there hasn't been a single case recently the Giants being seriously considered by any of the major Japanese players coming over. There may be speculation elsewhere, but they have never really been in the running to actually sign any of them.

[ISiddiqui]

That may be because of the Giants' salary problems but IIRC Kaz Matsui was talking about the Giants... of course he wasn't seriously courted by them though (having Aurilla).

[oykib]

I actually grew up excesively poor in NEw York. I spent plenty of time hungry when I was in the projects growing up. So know where some one is coming from before you start making judgeents and absurd statements. I can recall the disgust my brother had as he related this story:

"So I'm in Social Studies and there's an article in the paper about the holocaust museum opening up. So the teacher asks the class what the Holocaust was. And everyone sits there with a dumb look on their face. Since I'm the "smart kid" the teacher eventually looks at me halplessly to explain, when finally some girl pipes up that she thought it was some kind of Jewish holiday."

That's a story that happened when he was asenior or Junior in high school at the high school across the street from my house. Can you tell me that any of those kids has a real shot of competing in the real world? How do you get through high school without knowing what the holocaust is? Those are the kind of schools that the kid, even today, are in. They have no chance to compete. Pittsburgh could put together a winner if they were smart.

And it's stealing because if George Steinbrenner sold his team today he'd get somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 million to $1 billion dollars for it. If MLB pooled all local revenue he'd lose hundres of millions off of that selling price. The overwhelming majority of a team's value comes from the equity that they build up after an owner purchases them. It's not much different than the house that many of you live in. If your house is worth half a million today and someone does something to make it worth $300,000 tomorrow, then he's dameged you to the tune of $200,000.

I made the example of the public schools because it has an exact parallel in that the biggest determinant is local property taxes. That's local revenue that everyone in that area would be up in arms if yu tried to move out. But they wouldn't argue that it gives their kids an advantage in what is supposed to be an 'equal' system.

By the way, this was the post I referrred to:

On revenue sharing...
I have an idea. Let's raise the tax rate to 50% for everyone. I'm sure the gov't could provide the services that it needs to with 65% of the money collected. Then, we just redistribute the remaining amount evenly to every tax payer. I'm sure we'll all sign up for that.
If you're rich, then you'll still be richer than the people who started off poorer than you. How much more money do you need, anyway?
It's just as ridiculous in baseball as it is in real life. The guy who just spent hundreds of millions for the Dodgers, was paying four to six times what he'd have had to pay for the Brewers. The Red Sox group spent over half a billion dollars. They expect that kind of return on their investment.
It's just that same as you guys who spent $200,000 on law school-- not to mention opportunity costs. You don't want to be payed like a high school droput.
Football has an easy revenue sharing system based on the shared revenue of a national TV contract. When they set it up, there was not nearly as much money in TV as now. Setting up revenue sharing as it's been fancifully proposed stands to lose the top owners hundreds of millions of dollars.
Realistically, any real revenue sharing would first have to be seperated from payroll and total revenue and tied instead to market opportunity. You can't punish the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mariners for running their businesses well. Secondly, you would have to indemnify the 'rich' owners for the loss of franchise value. If the bottom twenty teams took out loans to compensate the top ten teams, it might fly.
That would solve the problem going forward, because the 'poor' teams stand to gain while the 'rich' teams lose. The 'rich' teams are not likely to see the rising tide benefit their owners-- owners don't stay that long. But they'd get the windfall now to compensate them for what they lose when they sell their teams.
The new 'rich' owners would be getting their teams at a discount as compared to what they would have payed for them before revenue sharing went into effect. So theyreally couldn't complain about the system. If the vast majority of the fans who wine about this aren't full of shit-- which, of course, they are-- baseball would have a rising tide of popularity that would raise all the franchise's boats, but particularly the ne'er-do-well franchises.
This would compensate them for the chunk of change that the doled out at the beginning of our exercise. That's the only "fair" way to do it that I've come up with.

I didn't say that competition couldn't be improved in baseball. I said that everyone's 'solutions' are more unfair. John Henry's group spent well over $600 million dollars on the Red Sox a couple of years ago. How can you tell him that you are now going to change the rules and make his investment worth two-thirds of what he paid for it? It's effectively taking $200 million out of his pocket. Two hundred million dollars is more than any of these 'small-market' team's owners paid for their teams. Hell, what Henry paid for the Sox is more than three times what Moreno paid for the Angels.

These transactions were made under a set of agreements. You can not now breach those covenants to the tune of 20-70% off the tems value and revenue without it being theft.

And speaking of fair, how do we judge competetiveness. DO we judge it at the beginning of the season or at the season's end? Because baseball is effectively as fari to it's teams as football. It has nearly as diverse representation as footbal i it's postseason tournament despite the fact that only eight teams get in as compared to twelve.

Sean McAdamcourtesy of Ksyrup
If only baseball did a better job trumpeting up its parity. Because, believe it or not, the playing field is more even in baseball than you've been led to believe.
Consider:
Since 1998, covering the last six World Series, the National League has had six different representatives (pennant winners).
Over the last 10 World Series, the National League has been represented by seven different teams. Put another way, almost half of NL teams have visited the World Series in the last 10 Fall Classics.
Back up a step and focus on the LCS, the baseball equivalent of the NFL's conference championship games:
In the NLCS, seven different teams have occupied the eight slots in the last four meetings for the pennant: Arizona, Florida Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, Atlanta and New York. Only St. Louis has made multiple appearances.

In the American League, the picture is admittedly different, with the New York Yankees serving as the AL standard-bearer in six of the last eight seasons.
But go back to, say, 1991 -- hardly a lifetime ago in the bigger scheme of things -- and the AL has had six different champions, or again, nearly half of its membership.
Indeed, while the Yankees have clearly dominated the American League over the last eight seasons -- though they haven't won a World Series since 2000 -- there's been widespread representation in the ALCS.
Since 1997, a total of seven teams have reached the ALCS: Baltimore, Cleveland, New York, Boston, Anaheim, Minnesota and Seattle.
Translation: In the last seven seasons, exactly half of the AL's teams have played for the pennant.
Baseball's spread-the-wealth nature is even more evident in playoff appearances.
Again, using 1998 as the cutoff point, 10 American League teams have made at least one trip to the postseason in the last six Octobers: Baltimore, Boston, New York, Minnesota, Chicago, Cleveland, Anaheim, Texas, Oakland and Seattle. Only Tampa Bay (an expansion franchise), Toronto, Detroit and Kansas City have finished out of the running. Toronto, though, has finished with a winning record in four of the six seasons and Kansas City was in first place in the AL Central as late as last September.
Detroit (10 consecutive losing seasons and counting) and Tampa Bay look truly hapless. But is that so much different than such perennial NFL losers as Arizona, Detroit, and, until this past season, Cincinnati?
It's much the same picture in the National League, where since 1998, nine teams (or 56 percent) have been to the playoffs at least once: Atlanta, Florida, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, San Francisco, San Diego and Arizona. Of those nine, every one but San Diego has made multiple appearances.
Go back just three more seasons to 1995, and add three more participants: Cincinnati, Colorado and Los Angeles. That means in the last nine seasons, only four NL teams have failed to qualify for at least a Division Series appearance: Montreal, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh.
Nineteen of baseball's teams, then -- or one team shy of two-thirds -- have made it to the postseason since 1998.
How does this compare to the on-any-given-Sunday NFL? Very favorably.
Over that same time span, just three teams have failed to qualify for the NFL postseason tournament, and one is an expansion franchise (Houston).
But it's important to remember several important distinctions:

The NFL has six playoffs spots per conference, while baseball has just four (per league). Comparing the NL and the NFC -- each conference or league has 16 teams -- there are one-third again as many playoff berths to be had.
It should follow -- and does -- that more spots means more appearances for more teams.
While only three NFL teams have failed to make the playoffs since 1998, another four -- Cleveland, Washington, Detroit and New Orleans -- have made just one appearance each in that six-year span.

That's particularly unimpressive, especially considering ...

Unlike MLB, until recently, the NFL did a bit of social engineering with its schedule, where teams finishing with poor records were rewarded with easier schedules the following year. Conversely, successful teams were punished with more demanding schedules.
The NFL purposely set its lesser clubs on an easier road to the postseason. By virtue of its schedule, MLB provided no such help, yet yielded parity anyway. To the contrary, in some divisions, the unbalanced schedule is a hindrance to poor teams trying to improve. The lowly Devil Rays must play nearly one-quarter of their games each season against the Red Sox and Yankees.
None of which is meant to detract from the NFL's week of self-congratulatory hoo-hah.
But the next time some football apologist begins spouting about the NFL's parity, remind him or her that baseball, all things considered, isn't very far behind.
Sean McAdam of the Providence (R.I.) Journal covers baseball for ESPN.com

[ISiddiqui]

And it's stealing because if George Steinbrenner sold his team today he'd get somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 million to $1 billion dollars for it. If MLB pooled all local revenue he'd lose hundres of millions off of that selling price. The overwhelming majority of a team's value comes from the equity that they build up after an owner purchases them. It's not much different than the house that many of you live in. If your house is worth half a million today and someone does something to make it worth $300,000 tomorrow, then he's dameged you to the tune of $200,000.

Big deal, it ain't stealing. Professional leagues make decisions all the time that reduce the franchise value, such as increasing the number of teams (taking portions of other teams' markets). Do you think baseball 'stole' from the Yankees when they moved the Mets in? Do you think football 'stole' from the Cowboys when they moved the Texans in?

You are part of league, if they decide to reduce the value of your franchise, then tough. It ain't stealing because you agreed to let them have that power when you joined.

[oykib]

Big deal, it ain't stealing. Professional leagues make decisions all the time that reduce the franchise value, such as increasing the number of teams (taking portions of other teams' markets). Do you think baseball 'stole' from the Yankees when they moved the Mets in? Do you think football 'stole' from the Cowboys when they moved the Texans in?

You are part of league, if they decide to reduce the value of your franchise, then tough. It ain't stealing because you agreed to let them have that power when you joined.

In the case of expansion teams there is a fee that is paid to every existing team to make up for the value that they will lose. The owners of the D-Backs, Rockies, Marlins, and D-rays all paid more than the going rate for franchises of their size. That money was divvied up amongst the existing owners.

It is stealing because that would be a decision that would take money from some franchises and divide it up among others-- enriching the poorer franchises. If I take money from you and enrich myself: what is that the vey defenition of?

Teams have established territorial rights in the by-laws of the league also. Houston is outside the Dallas territorial area by the NFL by-laws.

According to some reports, the Yanks were about a breath away from taking MLB to court over the last CBA. And they had more than a few teams that would have been on theri side had the revenue sharing been any more severe than it turned out to be. They'd win the battle in the courts too.

As for the Mets, I believe baseball had reserved the right to have an NL team in New York when the Giants and Dodgers moved out. They put the Mets in within ten years.

None of you have answered me about whether you'd allow the same things that you are proposing in baseball to happen in our own lives. I'll take the sillence for answers in the negative.

[ISiddiqui]

It is stealing because that would be a decision that would take money from some franchises and divide it up among others-- enriching the poorer franchises.

:rolleyes: That ain't stealing when you've agreed to let the league have the power to decide the value of your franchise when you entered.

If I take money from you and enrich myself: what is that the vey defenition of?

If I entered into an agreement with you where you would have power to change how much rent I owe you or something, then IT AIN'T STEALING!

Yanks were about a breath away from taking MLB to court over the last CBA

They'd lose, handily. Unlike a CBA affecting players, like in the Clarett case, it would where a group of franchise owners (they ain't seperate businesses) decided to pool their revenues... kinda like McDonald's does.

Revenue sharing ain't illegal by any streach of the imagination.


Seriously, this 'revenue sharing = stealing" argument is the WORST argument I've ever heard. It's up there with "profit = theft" and falls into the same pitfals (voluntary conduct v. stealing).

[oykib]

The league by-laws say nothing about changing the values of the teams. There are rules governing team movement and profit sharing. My point is that you would be arbitrarily changing those rules. The Yankees are currently operating under that system. They haven't tried to circumvent the rules as some teams have. They pay and have consistently paid their luxury tax and revenue sharing money. We're not talking about how the Cubs and Braves or some other teams have hidden money from revenue sharing.

They follow the rules. The rules were put in a long time ago. But they are an operating contract. They clearly state how much money must be shared with the league and the visiting teams.

There are also rules governing how those rules should be changed. The reason that your scheme hasn't happened is that they don't have the votes to do it. They'll never get the votes to do it. Because it's unfair-- and not just to the Yankees.

The proposal I put forth actually would have some prayer of being put into effect because it compensates the richer teams for the money that htey'd be losing. The fanciful ideas I've seen in other places in this thread are just free lunches for men who've invested less than a tenth of what George has put into the Yankees, or similar fractions of the money put into the Mets, Braves, Mariners or other teams.

If these teams really wanted to be more competetive they would take that chance and actually invest in theri franchises.

[ISiddiqui]

So you think the NFL is 'unfair'. What a joke, oykib. The Yankees couldnt make a cent without having other teams to play against. It is only fair for the other teams to get a cut of that. It is totally UNFAIR that the Yankees get to keep all the money from their little monopoly on the backs of every other team in baseball.

[oykib]

So you think the NFL is 'unfair'. What a joke, oykib. The Yankees couldnt make a cent without having other teams to play against. It is only fair for the other teams to get a cut of that. It is totally UNFAIR that the Yankees get to keep all the money from their little monopoly on the backs of every other team in baseball.

Where did I say the NFL is unfair?

I said that MLB operates under a set of rules. The NFL operates under diffrent rules. Baseball is even more 'fair' than the NFL in how it distributes shared revenues. The national TV contract and internet revenues are divided unevenly, giving priority to the porer teams.

But the majority of baseball revenue is locally generated. At some point in the dim past teams decided to make that revenue he sole possession of the local team. They could have changed that rule at any point in the past where the discrepancy wasn't so great. That they didn't have the foresight to do so is their on problem.

Now it's too late to change the rule without compensating the teams that stand to lose. So if you want to change the rule then the poorer teams have to put their money where their mouths are and invest in making a more competetive league.

I am totally consistent in this regard. I don't support salary caps in any sport. I don't support any commie revenue sharing schemes, either. People should not have to give up their hard-(or even easily) earned money because someone with less says that it's unfair. That's a disincentive to competition in addition to being unfair to the people who've been robbed.

By the way, what exactly is wrong with my proposal?

[AgPete]

I'm not sure this is strictly true - with advances in TV production, replays and graphics, this area has improved greatly in the last few years. Think of way that the better broadcasts now track pitch sequences, showing strategy of pitch selection and location in dealing with a batter, or the ability to see how a good batter will wait on a pitch and show hitting fundamentals. I think even more can be done in this area - for example, with a static camera looking from up behind home plate out on to the field, you could compare the defensive positioning of the fielders from batter to batter, even pitch to pitch based on the situation and count.

I wasn't disagreeing with the technology used in today's coverage but like the previous person stated, baseball was more of a newspaper sport. If you're a baseball fan, sure all of that is fantastic but if you're just a casual sports fan, which would you rather watch: A) a pitcher with great selection and location which results in one of his four strikeouts or a lazy pop fly, or B) a quarterback that misreads the defense and puts himself at the mercy of a blitz and punishing sack or even a savvy defensive back that returns the ball for a 50 yard TD. Football just makes for better TV.

[BishopMVP]

By the way, what exactly is wrong with my proposal?
1. You assume that baseball should respect the system used in the past when others are merely decrying the fairness of the current system.

2. You apply normal economic principles when in fact baseball is an abnormal practice where cooperation is necessary. Centralized control led to greater profits.

3. You appear to care too much for the Yankees and free trade practices to consider the general welfare of baseball and the MLB. The NFL has marketed itself much better in the recent years. How much is due to the salary-cap and the "socialist" exercise of Pete Rozelle and Paul Tagliabue is debatable, but the everybody has a chance system does help attract more fans country-wide than the few teams actually have a chance approach the MLB seems to be taking.

4. You appear to be a Yankees fan.

[ISiddiqui]

Bingo Bishop. I really, really, really hate these people who insist that baseball is like any other business and have 30 different 'businesses'. They don't. Sports leagues require cooperation between the franchises. It is an industry where if half of the franchises went out of business it would hurt the rest (I don't think if half of the pen market went under Bic would cry too much if it was left).

THAT by itself changes the entire viewpoint. It isn't every team for itself, but all have to join together to be for the sport. Or else none survive. I don't have any objections to a 'socialist' revenue sharing scheme. It will only help the game as it has the NFL.

It's a absolutely horrible proposal which doesn't understand anything about economic models of baseball compared to other industries.

[oykib]

This isn't an attack on you, Bishop. It's just that you are the first to respond. I'd venture to guess that eveyone here believes in the free market and, moreover, that people are entitled to reap the fruits of their labor.

1. You assume that baseball should respect the system used in the past when others are merely decrying the fairness of the current system.

But what's the problem with that? I believe that people should be consistent in what they profess to believe.
The basic tenet of civilization is that contracts are inviolate. Nothing in society would work if that were not the case. Baseball's by-laws are a contract. They say how the league is to operate. You're never gonna get the twenty teams that you need to pass the fantasy version of revenue sharing that I've been reading. If you could, it would've happened by now.
Even if you did, you 'd be taken to and lose in court because it violates the principle of good faith that contracts operate under.

I said that the system could stand some change and offered what seems to be the only relistic way to do it.

2. You apply normal economic principles when in fact baseball is an abnormal practice where cooperation is necessary. Centralized control led to greater profits.

I don't see how abnormal it is. It's a business that is different from but still very like any other. They want to make money. Kansas City making money doesn't help L.A. one whit.
The Yankees have never made more money than now, despite the (mostly wrong) perception that half the teams in the league have no chance. If there were more competition, I agree the whole league would make more money. But it would take a whole lot of improvement for the top temas to make back what they'd be giving up in a totally socialist revenue sharing system.

3. You appear to care too much for the Yankees and free trade practices to consider the general welfare of baseball and the MLB. The NFL has marketed itself much better in the recent years. How much is due to the salary-cap and the "socialist" exercise of Pete Rozelle and Paul Tagliabue is debatable, but the everybody has a chance system does help attract more fans country-wide than the few teams actually have a chance approach the MLB seems to be taking.

Baseball does perfectly well. They don't make the TV money that the NFL does because it's not as much a TV sport. But baseball outstrips all the other sports in gate reciepts and merchandising.
I care about free trade practices because I always care about free trade practices. I rooted for the Yanks when they sucked and will continue to if they suck again in the future. I actually like the team less than I did four years ago. I was against the Giambi signing, the Sheffield signing, and a slew of other recent moves. I prefer seeing home grown talent-- and I was really upset to see Nick Johnson traded away.

4. You appear to be a Yankees fan.

You can't base an argument on the background of your adversary. The fact that I'm a Yankee fan has nothing to do with my arguments. My arguments are logically consistent and honest-- which is more than I can say about many people's on this board.
If you can't find fault with an argument in a vacuum, then you are on the wrong side of the issue.

[oykib]

Bingo Bishop. I really, really, really hate these people who insist that baseball is like any other business and have 30 different 'businesses'. They don't. Sports leagues require cooperation between the franchises. It is an industry where if half of the franchises went out of business it would hurt the rest (I don't think if half of the pen market went under Bic would cry too much if it was left).

THAT by itself changes the entire viewpoint. It isn't every team for itself, but all have to join together to be for the sport. Or else none survive. I don't have any objections to a 'socialist' revenue sharing scheme. It will only help the game as it has the NFL.

It's a absolutely horrible proposal which doesn't understand anything about economic models of baseball compared to other industries.

As I've said before. If there are problems with my model, then point them out clearly.

The problem with the one you endorse is clear:

It lowers the value of certain franchises by hundreds of million of dollars.

You didn't deny this-- likely, because you can't.

You countered that the rules of Major League Baseball allowthem to do it.

However, there are no such rules in baseball. They don't say that now. they have never said that in the past. There is a method for changing MLB's operating constitution. But they don't have the votes to do it for something that drastic.
Even if they did, there is precedent that the federal courts will throw out any league decision that willfully inflicts significant financial injury on one or more of the member teams (Al Davis v. NFL; many times).

I seem to understand the business of baseball better than you. I also get the reality of the situation that you have to give something to get something. There is no magic wand to fix the situation of the poorer teams.
To achieve the success of the larger teams, they're going to have to pony up something in terms of an investment and some carrot to get the big-market teams to approve something that is to their own detriment.

If your idea was doable, it would already have been done. It's not like it hasn't been proposed before.

[clintl]

What oykib says is the key - the problem is with the owners not being able to agree on a revenue sharing plan that could make things more even. Everyone blames the players, but it's really the owners who won't do what really needs to be done, and it's very obvious why that is when you look closely enough. The individual interests of the various owners are not coinciding. Steinbrenner and other big market owners (Angelos among them, I believe) have been pretty open with their position that they would rather see small market teams fail than to provide them with extra revenue if all they're going to do is pocket it (which is pretty much what Selig and Pohlad have done with their share).

The big market owners are being myopic, in my opinion, but I also think there are certain small market owners who have not really been trying, and that gives the big market owners some credibility they really don't deserve.

[Desnudo]

I'm going to take some issue with this, thinking this was another "well, football is quicker despite the fact that it takes as long as a baseball game for something on a 60 minute clock" but thankfully not. There are some problems with various pitchers and hitters. The bigger the paycheck and the more guys love to make you wait (tho, $4M middle relievers seem to be the worst at it). Not universally true, but the guys with the bigger egos seem to love making you watch them dust off their shoes, do crazy motions to get into their stance, take their cap off and wipe sweat- not once as that would be acceptable on a hot day but four times between pitches, or walk around the mound long enough that he's worn a moat in the infield. It's why I've always been a fan of Greg Maddux (as well as the fact that he started with the Cubs)- he can throw a game in under 2 hours. Throws the ball, catcher throws it back, he sets, fires again. It's beautiful. Unfortunately, very few players are like that and I do with that a few of them would get taken down a peg. Still, it's tough to institute some sort of clock. Do you really want to see Fox with a 15 second count in the corner for time from pitch to pitch. Blech.

SI

Yes. Although it shouldn't be 15 seconds, it should be 10, max. Fastball, slider, curverball, go. Batter must stay in the box unless he's hurt or breaks his bat. Nomar can no longer touch himself 100 times between each at-bat. I think Ted Williams would have beat him silly if he tried to pull sh*t like that back in the 40s.

Greg Maddux is old fashioned. Most pitchers used to pitch like that. The primary cause of the increased length of baseball games is due to the amount of time inbetween pitches.

[BishopMVP]

This isn't an attack on you, Bishop. It's just that you are the first to respond. I'd venture to guess that eveyone here believes in the free market and, moreover, that people are entitled to reap the fruits of their labor. But what's the problem with that? I believe that people should be consistent in what they profess to believe.Normally I agree with free-market principles, but this a different situation. The game is a public good - my watching it doesn't exclude anyone else from doing so - and sports teams need to cooperate with each other. Perhaps more importantly, I'll relate it to something like the NFL, where I oppose letting in Clarett, because it will hurt quality of play. Maybe I'm a hypocrite, but when it comes to sports I care more about the quality of play than the free-market principles.
The basic tenet of civilization is that contracts are inviolate. Nothing in society would work if that were not the case. Baseball's by-laws are a contract. They say how the league is to operate. You're never gonna get the twenty teams that you need to pass the fantasy version of revenue sharing that I've been reading. If you could, it would've happened by now.
Even if you did, you'd be taken to and lose in court because it violates the principle of good faith that contracts operate under. I said that the system could stand some change and offered what seems to be the only relistic way to do it.Maybe you are right here and they will never agree to implement the revenue-sharing models proposed here. But for all the short-term gain, it will hurt the owners in the long-term. Look at the NFL. Every owner is arguably better off today despite a lack of free trade practices than they would be otherwise.
It's a business that is different from but still very like any other. They want to make money. Kansas City making money doesn't help L.A. one whit.
The Yankees have never made more money than now, despite the (mostly wrong) perception that half the teams in the league have no chance. If there were more competition, I agree the whole league would make more money. But it would take a whole lot of improvement for the top temas to make back what they'd be giving up in a totally socialist revenue sharing system.You're wrong. If KC loses money and has to fold, that does hurt LA. Once again, in the short-term it would hurt the big owners, but long-term the game of baseball and MLB would benefit.
Baseball does perfectly well. They don't make the TV money that the NFL does because it's not as much a TV sport. But baseball outstrips all the other sports in gate reciepts and merchandising.Baseball has 10 times as many games as the NFL, so comparing gate receipts is a specious argument. And NASCAR has more fans attend events than baseball. As for TV, there are many things which could be improved. Speed, starting times, more competition. Baseball is losing its future fan base.
You can't base an argument on the background of your adversary. The fact that I'm a Yankee fan has nothing to do with my arguments. My arguments are logically consistent and honest-- which is more than I can say about many people's on this board.
If you can't find fault with an argument in a vacuum, then you are on the wrong side of the issue.:rolleyes: It was a joke added on after I pointed out 3 other problems.

[ISiddiqui]

There is a method for changing MLB's operating constitution. But they don't have the votes to do it for something that drastic.
Even if they did, there is precedent that the federal courts will throw out any league decision that willfully inflicts significant financial injury on one or more of the member teams

IF they did have the votes is what we are discussing! Duh!

The Al Davis case was moving a franchise. Much different than revenue sharing. And besides, the MLB has an anti-trust exemption. The courts wouldn't touch revenue sharing by the MLB. Hell, they haven't with the NFL and they don't have the exception!

[Desnudo]

"The basic tenet of civilization is that contracts are inviolate. Nothing in society would work if that were not the case. Baseball's by-laws are a contract. They say how the league is to operate. You're never gonna get the twenty teams that you need to pass the fantasy version of revenue sharing that I've been reading. If you could, it would've happened by now.
Even if you did, you'd be taken to and lose in court because it violates the principle of good faith that contracts operate under. I said that the system could stand some change and offered what seems to be the only relistic way to do it."

I always thought the basic tenet of a democratic civilization was property rights. Or was that the right to keep a whiskey still in your backyard?

[oykib]

"The basic tenet of civilization is that contracts are inviolate. Nothing in society would work if that were not the case. Baseball's by-laws are a contract. They say how the league is to operate. You're never gonna get the twenty teams that you need to pass the fantasy version of revenue sharing that I've been reading. If you could, it would've happened by now.
Even if you did, you'd be taken to and lose in court because it violates the principle of good faith that contracts operate under. I said that the system could stand some change and offered what seems to be the only relistic way to do it."

I always thought the basic tenet of a democratic civilization was property rights. Or was that the right to keep a whiskey still in your backyard?

No. Property rights are just one of the contracts that we have a agreed on. We also agree to certain limitations on said rights.

Of course, we all know how well prohibiton turned out...

BTW, Bishop, like I posted before, that post wasn't directed toward you. But there are guys on this board that seem to have a problem with what any Yankee fan says (particularly non-apologist Yankee fans like myself or lynchjim have to say).

[lynchjm24]

BTW, Bishop, like I posted before, that post wasn't directed toward you. But there are guys on this board that seem to have a problem with what any Yankee fan says (particularly non-apologist Yankee fans like myself or lynchjim have to say).

Actually I'm pretty turned off by this Yankee team. I am a fan of A-Rod, but to bring him in to play third when you've got an awful defensive shortstop in Jeter is awful.

I'm a fan of building a team through your farm system. The Yankees have gotten so far away from that, I've become much more interested in following the Blue Jays/Indians/Twins. I became almost immediately interested in the Dodgers with the hiring of DePodesta.

The only thing that makes it 100% difficult to root against the Yankees is that the other fans I'm surrounded by are actually worse (your run of the mill Affleck like Red Sox fan).

[AgPete]

I think George Carlin figured this whole thing out a long time ago. :D

-------------------------------------------------------------


Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park.The baseball park!
Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.

In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap.

Football is concerned with downs - what down is it?
Baseball is concerned with ups - who's up?

In football you receive a penalty.
In baseball you make an error.

In football the specialist comes in to kick.
In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.

Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting, and unnecessary roughness.
Baseball has the sacrifice.

Football is played in any kind of weather: rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog...
In baseball, if it rains, we don't go out to play.

Baseball has the seventh inning stretch.
Football has the two minute warning.

Baseball has no time limit: we don't know when it's gonna end - might have extra innings.
Football is rigidly timed, and it will end even if we've got to go to sudden death.

In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness.
In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least twenty-seven times you're capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.

And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different:

In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.

In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! - I hope I'll be safe at home!