The Salary Cap Myth

It is time for a tome. The Sports Maunderer has been preparing this post for a very long time. If it is too long for you... Then it is too long for you. But you can pick and choose what arguments you find worth reading. I am going through all of them, because I am sick of all of them.

At hand: does baseball need a salary cap. The answer is: obviously not. Anyone who thinks baseball needs a salary cap is a whiny Pirates fan or a puling Padres fan. Even Marlins fans, they of the smallest payroll in baseball, don't think the sport needs a cap. Why? Because their team isn't run by halfwits and they actually win.

Now: onto the multitudinous and almost always fallacious arguments purporting the necessity of a cap.

Argument #1: Teams (i.e. The Yankees) can buy championships.

All of the other arguments basically follow from this one. Somehow, the notion that the highest payroll in the league won a World Series proves that high payrolls win World Series'. Actually, it proves that every once in a while, the team with the highest payroll will win a World Series. Which, of course, it should, as every once in a while almost every team wins a World Series (Sorry, Cubs fans).

But more obvious than that: only once in the past nine years has a team with the highest payroll won the World Series. What a crisis. Before that, the late 90's Yankee dynasty did often have the highest payroll. But they didn't always. In fact, in the 1998 season (the season when the Yankees were possibly the best team, you know, ever) the Yankees did not have the highest payroll in the league. The Orioles did. The Orioles who finished 35 (!)games behind the Yankees.

In 1996, 1999 and 2000, the Yankees had the highest payroll but only by a million here or there. They were not spending double of what everyone else was. They were spending what most high revenue teams were spending. The only difference was that the Yankees were winning World Series' and most high revenue teams weren't. You'll find that the Yankees winning has been a trend throughout history.

Since 2000, when the Yankees' payroll began to explode (most teams' payrolls began to explode as the sport reveled in the steroid-infused boom of the early 00's; the Yankees' ascension was simply most obvious), the Yankees had won zero titles until 2009, when, ironically enough, their payroll decreased from the year before. But the Yankees have won 27 times. Why is this time so particularly galling?

Argument #2: There is no parity in baseball.

This notion is absurd. Different teams make the playoffs every year. Different teams have won the World Series each of the past nine years with the exception of the Red Sox. Granted, the Yankees have had a hammerlock on the AL East, but the Yankees have almost always had a hammerlock on the AL East. When someone tells you the Yankees win too often... they could be speaking about almost anytime in past eighty years (Sorry, 1980s).

A corollary to this argument is the notion that the other major sports, which do have salary caps, are more enjoyable thanks to their greater "parity". Of all the arguments for a salary cap in baseball, this is by far the dumbest. First off, the number of differences between MLB, NBA, NFL is so great that to point to this one difference as the reason for greater "parity" is spurious at best. The more important point, however:

There isn't greater parity in the other sports! Baseball easily outdistances the NBA in terms of parity and, at worst, it is the NFL's equal when it comes to parity. In the past 30 years--yes, THIRTY YEARS--six NBA teams have won 28 of the titles. Twenty-freaking-eight! That's "parity"?! 80% of the league won 2 titles in 30 years! In the past ten years alone, baseball has had eight World Series winners. It took MLB ten years to produce eight winners, it has taken basketball 30. And basketball isn't about to change. The favorites for this year's title? The Lakers, the Celtics, the Spurs, and maybe the Cavs.

The Cavs you say?! They are hardly basketball royalty. Why have they a chance? Because they have Lebron James. And herein lies basketball's unfair disadvantage in terms of parity. The teams have about 7 or 8 players who actually play. A superstar like Lebron, Duncan, Kobe, or (case-in-point) Michael Jordan means your team will win for the lifespan of their careers. And there is nothing a salary cap or anything else can do about this. The salary cap has nothing to do with the NBA's (lack of) parity. The league is simply built on stars. It is worth noting that one of the teams which did break into the NBA's championship winning club over the past thirty years was the Miami Heat. Why? Because they traded for Shaq, who had recently been a major reason for the Lakers' three year run to start the century. Another team, the Rockets, were the beneficiary of Michael Jordan dissapearing to play baseball for two years.

This has nothing to do with salaries. It has to do with stars. That is what drives the NBA and that is why they have parity issues that far outweigh baseball's.

What about the NFL, you say? First off, what parity? The Patriots and Colts and Steelers have completely dominated this decade, winning six of the nine titles all by themselves. And even when they aren't winning, the Pats and Colts are coming pretty close to winning. Why? Oh, that's right. They have Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. A salary cap can't change the fact that some teams simply get very, very lucky in the draft, and find a franchise QB who will keep their team in the Super Bowl hunt for a decade or more without fail.

But the most obvious reason that the "NFL+salary-cap=parity" argument fails: This list. The Raiders--yes, the Raiders--are spending 60 million bucks more than the Ravens. The Raiders suck. A lot. The Ravens don't. The NFL salary cap has not completely maintained a balanced payroll structure and the teams that spend the most do not necessarily win. At all. Yet, somehow, the lack of such a cap is a blight upon baseball?! Please.

But, some say, terrible teams come out of nowhere to make the playoffs in the NFL all the time! First off, this doesn't occur all the time. But suppose it occurs slightly more often than it does in baseball (where the Rays, Rockies, Tigers of 2005, etc. all came out of "nowhere"). There are very good reasons for why this happens.

1) There are only 16 games in an NFL season. Sure, the best team wins more often in a football game than a baseball game, but that is still one tenth of the number of games in a baseball season. Random fluctuations are simply more likely in a smaller sample size. For instance, the 2007 Cleveland Browns came out of "nowhere" to win 10 games (though they failed to make the playoffs). The year before, the Browns stunk. The year after, they stunk. This year, they stink. The Browns always stink. The NFL has a salary cap and yet teams like the Browns stink for decades at a time. That solitary ten win season is far more likely due to the random fluctuations that occur when you only play 16 games in a year. If baseball played only 40-45 games this past year, Toronto, Texas, Milwaukee and Detroit would have made the playoffs instead of the Yankees, Angels, Rockies and Twins.

Baseball's season is a marathon. The cream rises to the top. This should be celebrated, not denegrated.

2) Eight teams make the playoffs in baseball, as opposed to 12 in the NFL and 16 (!) in the NBA. It is simply more difficult to make the playoffs in baseball. Period. So it is not hard to understand why fewer teams are in contention every year. Of course fewer teams will be in contention every year!

Argument #3: Small market teams don't have the resources to compete.

"Low-revenue" baseball teams such as the Pirates, due to revenue sharing, benefitting from the luxury tax expenses of others, local TV-radio deals and so forth, make about 80 million dollars a season before they sell a ticket, as Jayson Stark explains. Their payroll? Way less than that. They cry poor because they want to pocket the money. The notion that they can't spend any more is, as most of these arguments crying for a salary cap, stupid. Yes. Stupid. They can't spend as much as the Yankees. Oh. Okay. Shocker. But they can spend way more than they do.

In addition, small-market teams have done just fine for themselves even as they continue their parsimonious woe-is-me monetary policies. The Marlins have won more World Series' in the past fifteen years than the Cubs, the Mets, the Phillies and the Dodgers. Combined. The Rays manage to compete in the most difficult division in baseball (with the two richest teams) despite a payroll that is 1/2 or 1/3 the size of the teams above them. The Athletics owned the AL West for years. The Twins make the playoffs all the time. The Royals stink. The Reds stink. The Pirates stink like rhinoceros egeta mixed with cat vomit. Their management, as any fan can tell you, has been atrocious. They don't lose for lack of money, they lose for lack of intelligence.

As an addendum to this argument and argument 1: the opposite also holds true. Teams with lots of money and bad management still lose. A lot. The Mets suck because Omar Minaya is a moron, they hired Willie Randolph as a manager (sorry Willie, but first base coach was where your talents lied) and Jose Reyes isn't good just because everyone wants him to be. They do not suck for lack of money, clearly. They're just the Mets. (Same goes for the Cubs, obviously.)

Argument #4: Player salaries are out of control!

Well of course they are. But if you put in a salary cap, and the salaries go down, where does all the extra money go... Oh that's right. To the BILLIONAIRE who owns the team. Even though it seems hard to do, a salary cap succeeds in making the system even less equitable. Look at the NFL. Owners make millions upon millions a year, and the vast majority of players worry about getting cut at any moment. Sure, life in the NFL is good if you are Peyton Manning, but stars always get their share. The right guard doesn't. (Of course, this is all relativistic--even the right guard gets paid an amazing amount of money to do basically nothing. But that isn't the point).

Constructive Arguments:

Here are a few arguments salary-cap crusaders never seem able to answer.

1) Teams don't have to compete against the Yankees unless they are the Red Sox, the Rays, the Orioles or the Blue Jays.

Payrolls among divisions are not horribly out of whack. In the NL East, the Mets are the financial juggernaut... and the joke of the division. The Braves once dominated that division like no other (fourteen years in a row they won the division). The Phillies aren't shedding any tears. The Marlins win. The Nationals stink, but the Nationals are from Canada, more or less. Any team named the "Nationals" that was born in a different nation is going to have problems.

The NL Central is a mess of six teams, none of whom are particularly good or bad, minus the Pirates. They are historically bad. Want to blame that on a salary cap? The NL West is generally competitive. The AL West is as well. The AL Central is highly competitive, minus the Royals, who enjoy much the same market as St. Louis, and yet maintain far different results.

The AL East is owned by the Yankees and the Red Sox. No, really? The Orioles were once considered a big money team. They stink. The Rays are good. The Blue Jays... well, they're from Canada.

So where is this horrible inequity?

2) If the Yankees did not exist, would this argument be made? Of course not. People are just pissed off that the Yankees always win. Well, here's some news for you... the Yankees won a lot more (I know it is hard to believe, but the Yankees' dominance was actually more pronounced once upon a time) before free agency and big money free agents came along. So, if anything, the free agency/no salary cap era has been a dry time for the Yankees.

3) A salary floor would force teams to spend money--a salary cap wouldn't. The only reason for a salary cap would be to strangle the sport and hand owners even more money. Most fans are just incensed that their owners aren't as willing to spend money as the Yankees', Red Sox, Cubs', Mets' etc. are. So instead of a salary floor which would force the owners of the Pirates to re-invest their money in the team, "fans" would rather keep the Yankees from reinvesting money into the team. This makes as much sense as facism. It is facism more or less. The high cost of games would be born by fans (the public) while the people working (if we want to call playing baseball "working") to produce the product see their compensation dwindle as the owners collude (a salary cap is collusion, plain and simple) to keep them from making fair market value. In other news, the government's recent bailouts were also fascist. It seems to be popular right about now.

4) Baseball needs good teams. Baseball does not have the gambling problem that football does. When your team sucks, you gamble or you stop watching or you find a team you hate and root against them. The NFL enjoys the first situation. Baseball and basketball are not such gambling magnets, so they need good teams that people hate. The Yankees draw massive ratings. Always. The Pirates can't sell 10,000 seats most of the time, until the Yankees show up. Then they sell out. Immediately. Basketball suffered awful ratings when the very talented but completely boring Spurs were winning titles. It was hard to love or hate them. They were completely neutral. Eventually, people started hating them simply because they didn't want them to be around anymore, not because of their historical dominance (like the Celtics) or their hateable persona (like the Lakers).

That wasn't good for basketball. The return of the Celtics was. I hate the Celtics. But I hate the Lakers more. So I can root for Lebron to overcome the evil Boston team, and when he inevitably falls short because his team sucks (due to horrible management!), I can root for Boston to defeat the evil-er Lakers. Or at the very least, I can root for good teams to play exciting basketball, as opposed to a style of hold and squeeze and foul and trip that only really works because no team is good enoguh to make the villains accountable.

What can we do?

So what is there to do to help alleviate the somewhat fanciful parity problem? I have a few suggestions:

1) A salary floor. If an owner doesn't want to spend money on his team, he can sell the team and go back to whatever lame business he earned his money in.

2) Add one more wild card, have the two wild cards play a three game series to get into the first round of the playoffs. This would not only allow more teams in (thus helping more teams to stay in contention for longer) but it would penalize wild card teams (as they should have been long ago) giving an advantage to both division winners (who don't have to waste pitchers in a 3 game play-in series) and the team with the best record (who gets to play a team that just spent a few of their pitchers on the play-in series). To make room for this on the playoff schedule, we can get rid of the 87 off-days.

3) Add another New York team, for crying out loud. If NY is such an unfair market, let's go back to the way it used to be, circa the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. Instead of the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers we could have the Yankees, Mets and Brooklyn something or others. Is this unrealistic, pragmatically? Of course. But so is a salary cap. It is worth mentioning that when there were three New York teams, the Yankees still dominated.

The trend? No matter what baseball has done, the Yankees have dominated. If you don't get that, you don't understand baseball. And if you think that baseball is better off with the Rockies, Mariners and Blue Jays winning every year... I don't know what to do with you*.


*Actually, I know exactly what to do with you, but it would be rude to say it in public.

~The Sports Maunderer~