You wanting a fucking Salary Cap?!

Warning! This is going to be a rant about baseball. Those not inclined to like sports will probably be very bored by this post....

Major League Baseball's owners are getting together to talk about a salary cap. This is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Here are the percentages for total revenues for the major sports that go to salaries:

NFL-59.5%
NBA-57%
MLB-45%

So compared to their brethren in the NFL and the NBA, baseball players are getting the shaft. Do you really think the players will agree to take less of a share of baseball's revenues? No they will ask for more, since that it is only fair.

Teams like the Pirates and Royals claim that they can't compete with the Yankees for premier players. While that is true, their track record of developing their own players is TERRIBLE. When was the last time that the Yankees signed away the best player from either of these teams?! How much of the revenue sharing money are they spending on their own payroll, or on international scouting/free agents? NOT VERY MUCH. The most profitable teams in baseball have been the ones with the lowest payrolls. The Yankees spend what they spend because of the market they play in and because ownership is committed to taking the teams revenues and reinvesting them back in the team. The Steinbrenners, as crazy and despicable as they often are, NEVER care about making a profit with the team. The fundamental goal is winning. If David Glass in KC or whoever the new ownership group in Pittsburgh modeled themselves after Minnesota, Oakland, or even Tampa Bay, they would see that there is a way to be successful without being in a large-market. When you build a good team, fans attend your games, and you make more money to spend on better players.

If you were to institute a salary cap, there would also have to be a floor. There is no way the Players Union would ever agree to a cap without a guarantee that the Marlins couldn't continue to pay $21 million/year. I've seen numbers thrown out there anywhere from $40 million to $95 million. $40 million is ridiculous, because then players would be receiving only 20% of the revenues of the sport. There isn't a workforce in America that would agree to only receive 20% of their industry's revenues. The most reasonable floor has been $70 million. Would the Twins, Royals, Pirates, Marlins, As, Rays be able to pay the bills at $70 million per without revenue sharing or luxury tax money? Criticize the Yankees all you like, but between them, the Tigers, the Mets and Red Sox, they are subsidizing approximately 1/4 of the teams in baseball.

Idiots often claim there is no competitive balance in baseball because of the lack of a salary cap. Because football and basketball have salary caps, they claim there is parity in those leagues. This is MORONIC! In the last 20 years there have been 12 different Super Bowl Champions, and only 6(!) NBA Finals Champions. During that same time period there have been 14 different World Series champs! That is almost half of the 30 teams in MLB. As for those really dumb people who point to how rarely the Royals or Pittsburgh have been good, I give you the Cincinnati Bengals/Arizona Cardinals in the NFL and the LA Clippers/Memphis Grizzlies in the NBA. People talk about how good the Yankees and Red Sox are every year, but there are teams like that in every sport (Patriots, Colts, Lakers, Spurs). Its not that they spend more money, but that they can spread their money between player development and free agency acquisition. If you want to look at the $209 million that the Yankees spent last year, look at how much was dead or wasted money (Carl Pavano $12 million, Jason Giambi $25 million to be a DH, Andy Pettite $16 million to be league average, Hideki Matsui $12 million to be hurt all year).

If teams are smart like the Rays, and lock in their players during their arbitration eligible years, they can under pay their players during their peak years, and miss out on overpaying for over the hill players (something that the Yankees have been doing since their last World Series victory).

So in summary, a salary cap will not bring about more parity. It will not make it so that the Royals have a chance to win every year. As long as they have incompetent management, they will continue to suck. All it will do is put more money in the pockets of the rich owners, take money away from labor (the players), and possibly bankrupt the poorer teams(Pirates, Royals, As). As a Yankee fan, it is easy to be anti-cap. BUT I have no problem with them paying a luxury tax, so long as the other teams use it to help pay for players on the field. If they are using the Yankees as an ATM, that's where I have an issue (and quite a few of them have done that). The teams complaining about how much money they spent this winter should realize that if the Yankees did not spend, the size of the checks that they would get from the Yankees would go down DRAMATICALLY. Thus reducing their ability to have a healthy bottom line, or spend that on better players themselves.