One thing I want very much is to keep comments on point with the article. Sometimes comments on articles through natural discussion venture into other areas. That’s not great but it’s not what really annoys me. What grinds my gears is when someone intentionally posts something completely unrelated to the article or what was previously said in the comments. Stop doing that.

Anyway, Name just put something in a Max Scherzer story that’s an example of the former. It’s an idea worth discussing so let’s have a thread devoted to just that. And if you don’t want to talk about small market woes – please put your comment in the weekly Open Thread.

What follows is Name’s post:

I imagine we’ll be talking about this soon in the next couple of weeks as the lockout starts but here are some ideas for rebalancing.

Since small market teams are effectively priced out of high end FAs, high level teams need to be effectively shut or have reduced odds of another market as compensation.

There are 3 other talent avenues and that’s
1. The draft
2. Established foreign players from Asia or Cuba
3. International amateur youngsters

1. Completely cutting off big market teams from drafting is probably a hard sell to the fans, but maybe they could do something like big market teams can’t draft rounds 2-5 or the highest they can draft is 15 or small market teams get double picks in each of the first 3 rounds.

2. Not allowing big market clubs to bid on posted Asian players would not those leagues happy but maybe Cuban players could be restricted from signing with big market clubs.

3. This one is possibly the easiest to ban big market clubs from signing. Right now, international FA bonus money is tied to draft position and since these players are not as well known as amateur players from the USA, there would be less fan opposition if the big market teams were simply not allowed to sign these players (or limited to a very low $x)

24 comments on “Small-market woes on the cusp of a lockout

  • MikeW

    Small market teams need to figure our their secret sauce to winning. Big market clubs can sign big time free agents, but there is substantial risk involved with that as well. The Tampa Bay Rays are a small market club and they have figured out how to win. They are great at drafting and developing young talent and are very shrewd with trades.

  • BrianJ

    My opinion is that too much is being done already for teams that refuse to be competitive in their spending.

    No one person or group of people/companies has any sort of divine right to be an MLB owner. If you can’t compete with others, sell the team to someone who can. If Steve Cohen’s checkbook intimidates you – go buy a minor league team, instead.

    The flip side of this is that they have to do away with territorial rights. If NYC can support 5 teams – then that’s what they should have, rather than teams who claim they are losing money (ha!) with payrolls less than what Scherzer just signed for.

    *****

    ATL, LAD, WSN, RSX, HOU, CHC, KCR, SFG, RSX, SFG, STL, SFG, YAN, PHI, RSX, STL, WSX, RSX, MRL, LAA — That’s 14 different winners of the World Series in the last 20 years, with eight different winners in the last eight years. For Pete’s sake – how much parity do people need?

    • Name

      From a WS level, yes lots of parity because the postseason structure is basically a great parity equalizer.
      But what about parity at a lower level, say division champs?
      We’ve got 7 teams right now with droughts of 10+ years, including 2 teams who have never won division titles in their 29 year existences. That doesn’t sound like good parity to me.

      Or postseason droughts?
      About 1/3 of the field gets into the playoffs each year so true parity would be not many droughts of >3, good parity let’s say no droughts of >5? Right now we’ve got 6 teams, or 20% of the league, who have droughts of 6+ years of no playoffs.

      If i had to rate the parity of baseball out of 10, i would probably give it a 7, which is higher than nearly all other team sports, but there’s still room for improvement.

      • Brian Joura

        Two thoughts:
        1. That’s a little bit of a chicken/egg thing. When the system is set up so that you make money regardless if you make the playoffs – where’s your incentive to spend to make the playoffs?
        2. Why is parity so great? And if it’s better than any of the other major sports leagues – why worry about making it better than it already is?

        Not directed at you specifically – just the pro-parity group in general. If every team made the playoffs once every three years and won the World Series once every 30 years, would that be good for the game? That’s the ultimate parity but to me that would be a major turnoff. What if the Mets won the World Series in 2022 – they wouldn’t win it again until 2052. Why watch?

        We should look to create a system that encourages teams to strive for greatness. The Giants winning the World Series 3 times in 5 years is a thing to be admired – not a thing to be avoided and legislated out of existence.

        All of these proposals – more revenue sharing, more restrictions on where big market teams can acquire players, a salary cap or lowered luxury tax thresholds — all they serve to do is create more money going to the owners, fewer dollars going to the players and ultimately less incentive for teams to improve because they’re already guaranteed a profit.

        At the very least, with all of these schemes that everyone comes up with — at least include caps on ticket price and merchandise. You don’t make the playoffs in 5 years? You can’t charge more than $10 per ticket or jersey. Figure out a way to give teams an incentive to win over an incentive to just rake in money. If there are mechanisms in place to restrict how much players can make – there should be ones to restrict how much owners can take in.

        • Name

          “You don’t make the playoffs in 5 years? You can’t charge more than $10 per ticket or jersey.”

          Wow. I love this!

          “We should look to create a system that encourages teams to strive for greatness”

          This, i don’t love. This kind of thinking is why our current problem exists. And that problem is that it’s World Series or bust. Think our team will only be good/decent this year? Not good enough, tear it down and start over. The only way up is to start at the very bottom. It’s better to be bottom dwellers for 10 years to have a 2 year window to win it all. Playoffs dont matter, it’s all about the World Series.
          All the above are very very bad philosophies for the game because it doesn’t promote competitiveness.

          I don’t think the same teams winning is a problem; we don’t need to create a system where everyone takes turns winning it all; but rather the same teams that keep losing, and suffer long stretches of failure.
          And the problem isn’t solved by caps/floors as you noted, it just changes the level of spend by the owners, which is why i have proposed ideas that simply restrict who can sign with in already capped systems.

    • Metsense

      And six other teams that competed in the WS but lost. That’s 20 different teams have that played in the WS in the past twenty years. Every team have played in the playoffs in the past twenty years.

  • ChrisF

    Raise the spending floor, and have a luxury tax. Small market is a joke. If the Twins went for sale it would command a huge price. What’s not changing are poor ownership groups grandfathered in over time, not small markets. If the upper end salaries and costs go up, so should the floor. If you can’t afford that, then sell the team to someone who can. I don’t believe it’s market size at all.

  • Name

    So the point of my post was to address the issue of talent distribution, which i think is wholly unaffected by salary caps/floors.

    IE. Even if you make a floor of 100m and a cap of 200m, the teams near 100m still can’t afford a 40m player so eventually those talents of players still end up on the 200m clubs. if you make it 150m/300m then what will end up happening is the top players get paid 60m instead of 40m and still the lowest payrolls teams are priced out.

    Unless you have a really narrow range of a cap/floor (say within 20-30% of each other), you’ll still have a system where the upper end talent will always flow from the lower payroll teams to the higher payroll teams.
    And so because we can’t fix that problem, the proposals i had above are to shut off the talent flow to the higher payroll clubs in other areas, so that while lower payroll teams have a handicap in FA, higher payroll teams will have a handicap in the development pipeline.

    • ChrisF

      I would be ok with a cap, but that will never fly in the MLBPA. So I think you address that with a serious luxury tax that redistributes revenue, like TV markets do. It wont address the inherent possibility a guy like Cohen might run an annual 600M$ payroll, but if that takes 300M$ more in taxes, then the idea that would happen is minimal. Billionaires like the taking, but dont like the “giveth away”. So a meaningful lux tax would not prevent extreme spending but it would hurt enough that other teams would get a lot of money to be competitive.

      I dont like the pipeline disruption because then you have two leagues, a rich FA set of teams and young teams paying nothing. Its inherently unsustainable.

  • Footballhead

    Most likely (and easiest to understand & implement), is an absolute spending floor as ChrisF has already mentioned. I’m sure the players would like this, while some of the owners might object. But ChrisF is right again in stating that any owner from the perennial tightwad ranks would make a killing in selling off their teams.

    What should the floor be, and when should the luxury tax kick in? Well; I guess the millionaires and billionaires have the lock down to figure it out.

    Editor’s Note – Please do not capitalize words in your post, as that is a violation of our Comment Policy.

    • Footballhead

      So where did I capitalize?

      • Brian Joura

        Before I fixed it, you had “any” capitalized.

        • Footballhead

          Sorry Brian.

  • Bob P

    I understand what Brian and Chris are saying about not being an owner if you can’t afford to play with the big boys, but unless you have 30 owners who are in it just to win and have the financial means to not care about whether they make or lose money then the market does matter. Certain markets will generate higher attendance and higher TV revenue and therefore enable those teams to pay higher salaries to players. Some form of revenue sharing and some type of salary cap (luxury tax) and floor seem to be the only way to prevent having a major disparity between the haves and have-nots. I’d love it if we could find 30 owners out there that had the financial resources to all compete with each other regardless of the teams profitability because that would enable some true competition from everyone. Unless that happens there needs to be some check and balance in place, otherwise you will have a group of teams that consistently win more than others.

    • ChrisF

      TV revenue is easy to redistribute across the league and already happens. Stadiums are all about the same size, so those revenues are not that gigantic in difference. There is certainly a huge difference in merch though. So be it. The reality is that ownership groups need to be able to field teams. If a team comes for sale, big money will follow. Even the crappy Marlins sold for a megafortune. Owners need to step up to buy *and* maintain salaries. Cant afford 100M$ payroll? Sell the team, and let someone who can step in.

      • Bob P

        Right, but then you are back to needing people who can afford to lose money on the team and not need to operate a profitable business. Stadiums are the same size but you can’t sell tickets for the same price in NY and KC so there will still be revenue disparity. Unless the people who buy these teams don’t need to make money from them there will always be haves and have-nots.

    • Brian Joura

      The system that existed when these owners bought into the league was to make money most years while you owned the team and then make a killing once you sold. If you want to tinker with the system – my preference would be to get the owners out of the league completely who only want to live on revenue sharing and TV money until they decide to cash out. Clearly, there are more than 30 people with either the means to do this or the ability to create an investment group to do so. The issue is that for the most part, they don’t want to do it in some MLB backwater like CIN or PIT. A-Rod, who no one has ever considered a financial genius, put together a group that bid $2.3 billion for the Mets. It seems like he could put a group together and pay 1/2 that much to buy the Reds (or whoever your favorite revenue sharing receiving team is) and move them to Brooklyn or Manhattan or Northern NJ.

      There’s already been too much given to these teams – the answer in my mind isn’t to make it easier for them to make even more money while doing essentially nothing to improve their team.

      • Bob P

        I don’t disagree with you and I don’t know what the answer is but I would like to see some type of system where there is a better chance for more competitive balance. There are smarter people than me paid a lot of money to figure that stuff out. For years I’ve hated to see the Yankees outspend everyone, make the playoffs every year, and have their fans bitch when another team signed a free agent they wanted. I don’t want to see that from the Mets. As much as I want them to win I’d rather see it through developing players and supplementing through FAs than bringing in 3 or 4 mercenaries every year.

        • Brian Joura

          My belief is that when you look at the league today – competitive balance is fine the way it is and if you do anything to tweak it, it should be to make it more desirable to win than just put out the lowest payroll possible that the fans won’t revolt.

          To me, a bigger issue is to make it so that multi-sport stars pick baseball and that we get the best athletes that we can get. Imagine if instead of playing QB in the NFL that Russell Wilson and Kyler Murray were playing baseball, instead. And one of the ways you’re going to get those players to pick baseball is to make sure they can make the type of money they can in other sports.

          As a Vikings fan, I can tell you that Kirk Cousins signed a 2/$66 million deal and no one considers him one of the elite players in the game. Baseball used to have an advantage with guaranteed contracts but Cousins’ deal is fully guaranteed. He’s the exception right now but football is trending in the direction of guaranteed contracts for the top players.

          I don’t know how you get players to pick baseball but I’m certain that anything done in the name of competitive balance that restricts salaries is not going to help.

  • Wobbit

    How about placing a collar on a team’s spending based on their payroll.
    If a team has a payroll above the league average, they are limited by that proportion to what they can spend for FAs. Free agents would then get equally competitive or better offers from smaller payroll teams, and these better players would wind up in smaller markets more often. A little less rich perhaps, but still very rich.

  • Metsense

    How many teams are losing money? The MLBPA requested the owners to opened their books. They refused and that this right to refuse. They probably have a good reason not to, probably because all of them are making money. Parody is not an issue of the current labor negotiations. The owners don’t want it and the MLBPA don’t want it. It isn’t an issue. The owners want to make more money and want to restrict the salary of the players so they can make even more money. Small market woes, rebalancing of talent or rebalancing of financing aren’t a primary concerns of the owners.

  • T.J.

    Excellent comments above. Very interesting dialogue. A few additional thoughts –

    Equity gains are not profitability until a sale occurs. Yes, some owners (Uncle Stevie) may decide that they want to “win at all costs”, but that is not generally sustainable, even for the super wealthy. Overall, at the end of the day, the payrolls will be a function of revenues and other costs. Smaller market teams have less revenues based on markets, not owner wealth.

    That being said, while larger payrolls make it easier to procure talent, they don’t make it easier to procure performance. I’d love to see a 10 year study of individual team WARs vs individual team payrolls. With the current free agent system requiring 6 years in the bigs, and with player performances peaking earlier, much of the “big payrolls” are sunken money.

    MLB will never function like the NFL, but it doesn’t have to. The big market “rich” teams will have the bigger payrolls. There will always be poorer teams, and there will always be lousy teams. The problem to me is when teams are clearly being non-competitive, and still remaining “profitable” based on revenue distribution. If a team like the Marlins purges every legit player, the fields a bunch of younger players without much potential, going with a bear bones payroll, an is turning a profit anyhow, that needs to be discouraged greatly. Whether the deterrent is a salary floor, a draft lottery, etc, fine. And, the luxury tax does help as well to discourage the uber-wealthy team somewhat. I think they just need some tweaking to the floor payroll and tax threshold, along with some draft lottery options. I think there are bigger issues to negotiate, such as how to better compensate younger players who put up major WAR, when players can reach free agency, DH, speed of games, playoffs, fan experience, etc.

  • JamesTOB

    It seems to me that the first thing to do is to evaluate the impact of the various things being done to produce parity. Do they work? If so, which ones work? If we tweaked them, would they work better?

    You can’t ‘fix’ owners who don’t want to spend unless you set a fixed amount of money that each team must spend and no team can exceed. While that would remove money from the equation it would still leave the teams that do the best job scouting and developing winning more frequently.

    There is ample proof that socialism doesn’t work. For all its flaws, the free market and capitalism do work. Competition will always produce winners and losers. If an owner doesn’t want to compete, it is not up to the system to fix the problem. It’s up to the fans and the local media to make their voices heard. A concerted effort between the media and fans who organize can put a lot of pressure on owners to “poop or get off the pot.” (I wasn’t sure if the rules allowed me to state the expression properly!) Get rid of revenue sharing so that local pressure can impact the bottom line. Have coordinated efforts to shame the owner in the media and to reduce profitability by marshaling fans to boycott games, stop watching on TV, and stop buying merchandise. Painful for fans? Of course, but if they are not willing to pressure their team’s owner, they deserve what they get. That’s how capitalism works.

    The obvious conundrum is when a team that doesn’t spend a lot and yet wins consistently still doesn’t draw fans. The Tampa Bay Rays ought to be allowed to move to a city where the fan base will value them. As good as they were, they only drew 631,000 fans this past year. After all, fans should compete too.

    • Brian Joura

      Isn’t revenue sharing socialism?

      Edit: I see where you said to get rid of it.

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