Baseball doesn't need a salary cap to stop Yankees
Hidden beneath the Hot Stove League, an integral part of baseball's charm, is the Hot Air Society. You've heard from them lately, lamenting the Yankees' absurd financial outlay and calling for a salary cap. Sometimes you wonder if becoming a multi-millionaire makes a person totally blind.
If you have any faith in A's owner Lew Wolff - that is, if you figure he'll eventually come to his senses and drop the Fremont pipe dream - you had to be disappointed in his recent remarks. "I think there's a lot of owners who would like to have a salary cap right now," he said. "Parity is what we're looking for. I think it's pretty good now, but it could be better."
Two things: Pretty good? And no, it could not be better.
Here comes another Hot Air fellow, Brewers owner Mark Attanasio: "At the rate the Yankees are going, I'm not sure anyone can compete with them."
Reminder: The Yankees' 2009 payroll might wind up being less than last year's $222 million, a figure that brought nothing but derisive laughter in Tampa. The Rays not only competed with the Yankees on $43 million, they went to the World Series.
That's just one example, though. This decade has given us the very essence of baseball parity. Recalling the seven World Series matchups prior to Rays-Phillies, we find Boston over Colorado, St. Louis over Detroit, White Sox over Houston, Boston over St. Louis, Florida over the Yankees, Anaheim over the Giants and Arizona over the Yankees.
In other words, seven different winners in eight years, and only three teams even appearing twice over that span. Do we see the Yankees winning any of those World Series? And who says they win it all this year because they added CC Sabathia, an all-around great guy who might eventually succumb to arm stress, and Mark Teixeira, a fine hitter who has never earned any serious MVP consideration?
Listen, it's fun to complain about the Yankees if you take the proper tone. Take Detroit manager Jim Leyland, master of dry humor: "Hey, it stands to reason that if you go into a store with $500 and I go in with $100, you're gonna come out with cashmere while I get one of those itchy tweed things."
But let's not hear owners - people who, ostensibly, built a fortune through smarts and good sense - crying, "Oh, somebody save me from my mistakes." Teams fail because of their own stupidity and ill-advised transactions, not because they're short on cash. What the Rays pulled off was no miracle, nor was it an aberration. That was just a flat-out superior team, built on dimes, nickels and guile.
Admit this about the Yankees: If you don't admire or respect them, you hate them. No sitting on the fence with these guys. That's a terrific thing, too. The Yankees are great for baseball, just as the Red Sox and Cubs enrich the landscape. They generate passion across the country, they provide compelling theater, and thanks to baseball's revenue-sharing plan, they put money in everyone's pockets.
If the NBA's salary cap is so wonderful, why do only five or six teams stand a chance of winning the title each year? Over the past 10 years in baseball, 15 teams - half, in other words - have played in the World Series. And aside from salary caps being contrary to every basic tenet of competitive American business, the NBA version collapses sadly under its own complexity.
For one thing, nobody can figure it out. I've heard extremely knowledgeable NBA writers say they hesitate to make an on-deadline call about salary-cap issues, for fear they didn't do enough research and screwed it up. The common fan doesn't have a prayer of understanding it, nor would he care to, after some of the nonsense that takes place.
To make the Jason Kidd-to-Dallas deal work last year, the Mavericks had to re-sign Keith Van Horn, who was living in retirement with no intention on coming back, and send his contract to New Jersey (I think only his hat made the trip). Just the other day, a column on the Sports Illustrated Web site noted that "the Cavaliers possess two enormously attractive (trade) assets in swingman Wally Szczerbiak and forward Ben Wallace." You're thinking, what? Then you realize it's not about their talent, but their soon-to-be-expiring contracts.
NBA trades are all about expiring contracts. You're not trading for help, you're getting people you can't wait to unload. "Hey, did you see the guys we acquired to put in next summer's trash can?" The chemistry-tortured Detroit Pistons would probably do well to unload Rasheed Wallace before the February 19 deadline, but wait - if they keep him until summer, they clear some cap space. Come to think of it, the NBA is just barely being played in real time. In our minds, we're already well into 2010, when LeBron James, Chris Bosh, Steve Nash, Dwyane Wade and several more top free agents have chosen new teams.
(And by the way, over the past 30 years, while 20 major-league teams have won it all, only nine have prevailed in the NBA. Another interesting stat: In 62 years of NBA championships, only 28 coaches have won.)
These whining baseball owners should realize what a salary cap really means: that you have to spend a certain amount of money. Considering the game's runaway success - a trend that just might survive the economic crisis - it would hardly be a paltry figure. If you find it an oppressive burden, you wind up signing pricey veterans just to stay around the minimum.
While Wolff and the boys stop to realize how baseball has prospered, we can all be thankful for the players' union. This will be a hot issue when the next collective bargaining agreement is hammered out after the 2011 season, and the union will have a choice: Take the NBA route or continue matching parity with golden-age growth. Easy call.
