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Then they need to sell to someone who can. I refuse to equate horrible ownership with a built-in disadvantage.
I cared. I am a Red Sox fan, and I cared. I married into an Indians family, and I told my brother-in-law during the ALCS that it would better for baseball if the Indians won. When the Red Sox won the seventh game, I felt a bit awkward about it. I think the inherent advantage the Red Sox have over the Indians (if magically removed from their skill at developing/exploiting their market) is overstated by their payroll differences. But the advantages are real.
If my daughter were running a mile race, and I was told at the start that she (through no fault of her own) was to start with a one-lap head start, would I root for her to win? Of course I would, she's my daughter. If I threw a parade, I would expect to be mocked.
I find it hard to believe that there are no Yankee fans that are uncomfortable with the state of things.
The rest of the money is divided up based on number of wins.
In addition, MLB buys out all the RSN's, and runs them centrally. All teams without an RSN, MLB will create one and run it. No more hiding money in the other corporate pocket.
You're thinking of Sam M. Sam H. is a Braves fan.
You might want to invest in some neck armor.
The rest of the money is divided up based on number of wins.
In addition, MLB buys out all the RSN's, and runs them centrally. All teams without an RSN, MLB will create one and run it. No more hiding money in the other corporate pocket.
Is the goal to make MLB like the NFL? Because that would suck.
I think I summed it up when I mentioned that the two best ways of stopping the Yankees were also the least likely:
1. Find a bigger Market than NYC. There are none in America, and there are few in the world. To utilize one of the few markets larger (read: Tokyo, the largest Metropolitan Area in the World) than NYC would require basically absorbing the Japanese League. Not gonna happen.
2. Third team in NYC. It is telling that this is even less likely than expansion onto another continent. Sorry, Brooklyn.
I complain about the Patriots, but that's mostly because they have smart people in the front office, and my favorite team is run by a collection of spectacular morons.
Eff the Patriots.
If this is true, you represent less than one hunrdedth of one percent of Red Sox fans. I remember the party in Kenmore Square after Game 7 in 2007. Didn't see too many awkward, hesitant celebrants.
I don't see why any Yankee fan shouldn't be very happy. The flip side is that when the Yankees do anything less than win the World Series they are mocked mercifully from all corners, so they should be happy (and relieved) with the championship. They also beat two $120 million teams in the playoffs, and beat the $130 million Red Sox out for the division...their odds of beating the Angels or the Phillies were no greater than 55 percent, mostly because of Home Field Advantage. It's still exciting and fun, especially after the last two seasons.
This is a system that rewards success on the field.
So they beat two teams in the playoffs where they had an $80,000,000 payroll advantage and beat the Red Sox for the division with a $70,000,000 payroll advantage.
I have seen the light. Congratulations to the plucky gritty underdog Yankees.
So they beat two teams in the playoffs where they had an $80,000,000 payroll advantage and beat the Red Sox for the division with a $70,000,000 payroll advantage.
I have seen the light. Congratulations to the plucky gritty underdog Yankees.
You missed my point.
Despite all the moaning and groaning here, the system isn't going to change signficantly anytime soon.
I have been agitating for just this solution for a decade or so. The Rays should have been placed in Brooklyn. The Expos should have been switched the AL (Tampa flipping to the NL) and relocated in Brooklyn. I'm coming around to a grudging support of a cap and floor with riders to prevent the Jeff Lorias of the world from being Jeff Lorias, but the simplest, most market friendly solution to the problem is to break the Yankees market into another piece. If that had been done with the Rays expansion the new team would be established and siphoning off 50-100 mil of that Yankee payroll by now.
Me, I sit around thinking of Brian Cashman with a $110 million dollar payroll. Think: 1962 Mets.
1st round's on me kid!
Well, the highest the Red Sox payroll has gotten since 2004 is about $160 million by the end of 2007. They could definitely add $30 million to the payroll if they wanted to.
Fella, you have some screwed up priorities.
And I complain about the Patriots because I like to complain.
What about Omar Minaya with a $110 million budget?
ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
Put another team in Brooklyn, it'd be great for NY. But why do you think it would siphon off revenue from the Yankees?
This made me laugh. I guess I understand the Sam M. v Sam H. confusion, but me, a Mets fan? You can't be serious! </McEnroe>
I'm setting the salary cap 60 mil higher than my favorite team has been able to spend in the last decade.
Montreal/San Juan should have gone to New York. Tampa should have gone to Washington.
And there's no way you'd get another team into Brooklyn (which would probably be more damaging to the Mets than the Yankees). Jersey is more promising. Jersey City Expos.
I don't know how much revenue the Pirates and A's have, but no owner should be expected to operate their team consistently at a loss. Contribute a few million as sort of a capital investment from time to time, sure, but the solution isn't to have every team bought by a billionaire who is willing to spend $40 million of his own money over team revenues every year.
Everyone knows that. It doesn't make the observations illegitimate that the Yankees have an enormous structural advantage over every other franchise in the sport, and that fact undermines the inherent competitive worthiness of the sport. Neither does the fact that the Yankees haven't always successfully leveraged their advantage render the advantage less real.
/vomits
But it does make it funnier that the Mets lost 90 games playing on a similarly non-level playing field.
The Yankees have earned part of that advantage.
It would have to be done right. Smallish stadium, low prices (relatively), lots of promotions...sort of minor leaguish. Make it a fun, easy day for the parents and kids on weekends, for kids birthday parties, etc. This team would EASILY average 30,000 fans because North Jerseyans love baseball. In years where the team is any good, it would be huge.
The Yankees have earned part of that advantage.
Yes, they have. That's another irrelevance to the issue. The advantage now exists, stronger than ever, and short of a sudden onset of spectacular incompetence on the part of the Yankees, will continue to exist for the forseeable future.
Yankee Stadium is right by the Cross Bronx and the Deegan. Traffic doesn't get much worse. Is there any place in North Jersey where the public transit is sufficiently robust to make trains or buses a significant contributor to the flow of people into the stadium? Jersey City or Newark, maybe?
I just hate Tom Brady as much as I hate Andy Pettitte. The fact that Brady is pretty just makes it worse. And even though it looks like my NFL team is set up to benefit from the "no touchy the quarterback rules" for the next decade or so, I'm actually with Ray Lewis on the "can't we at least pretend they're football players anymore" thing.
And I'm *never* with Ray Lewis, for fear of being shot.
I agree with this. The ideal solution would involve some ability to identify a team's inherent market advantage, rather than just assume that payroll is the correct proxy. If the Yankees are brilliantly run, they deserve to have more revenue than teams that are not.
But while I suspect that a brilliantly-run Pirates team could have a $120M payroll and still make a little profit for the shareholders, I also believe that the Yankees could support a payroll of $300M or more.
Your affinity for neck stabbing would seem to make you a good fit as a friend of Ray Lewis.
They could divide the players either by draft or some new form of Thunderdome.
At some point I'm going to need to take a poll of the BTFerati to see who can identify snark and who can't.
The only place in northern NJ with adequate access by both highways and public transit is Newark. The problem with that is that it's Newark...
Are the cameras "built in"?
They built a stadium in Detroit, didn't they?
The A's were at $79M in 2007.
Milwaukee is the smallest MLB market both by population and TV households, and is hemmed in by Chi, Det and Minn, so they have no "hinterland" like the Cardinals. Yet they managed to have an $80M payroll this year.
Every team could be at $80-100M if they wanted to.
Teams compete across the regular season constructed as they are.
In the playoffs, the team with the less payroll may pick any player from a non-playoff team in their division and add them to their roster until such time as the payrolls are equal. This adjustment continues through every round of the playoffs, such that the Phillies could have taken Albert Pujols as 26th man and let him hit against LHP and/or DH against the Yankees.
This would also eliminate the AL's "DH advantage" in Series play.
Likely, but it's a good idea. New York has a huge population which probably supports baseball more fiercely than any other sport.
(The rest of the) Terrible ex-Braves and ex-Mariners eagerly await the day the Royals want to invest in a nine-figure payroll.
Every team could be at $80-100M if they wanted to.
Right. Just because Lew Wolff and the Nuttings don't care if their teamS are successful, that doesn't mean that those teams can't be successful.
MLB revenues are up everywhere, not just New York. You look at the bottom of the list in terms of annual payrolls, and they're all teams with deeply dysfunctional ownership. What MLB needs to do first and foremost is stop subsidizing bad owners.
This is not new, by the way. MLB had as many hopeless franchises in the 50s as they do today.
Edit: Coke to Treder in #144.
I have no clue if increasing the penalties to exceeding the soft cap will slow the Yankees down on their spending spree. Heck prior to last season I didn't know there was a cap on the type of free agents you are allowed to sign, maybe an expansion on this rule to list the number of type of free agents over the past 3-5 years might be inline(say you are allowed no more than 4 type A free agent signings over the past 4 seasons, with exceptions being players you have had control over for at least two seasons prior)
Tenafly. The Tenafly Balls.
All this wealth has created more corporations able to afford Yankees luxury boxes and wealthy individuals able to afford Yankee Stadium's pricey seats, not to mention pay up for access to the Yankees' YES Network and also provide the most attractive market for advertisers in the US -- with an attraction in wallet size that goes beyond the magnitude of New York's population.
I'm not defending this phenomenon, merely stating that it exists. And I know that the global financial crisis caused a drop in wealth in the NY area, but it appears more and more that this is a blip of two or three years within a longer-term trend. Whether one agrees or not, Washington is committed to helping the money center banks and the investment banks in order to help stabilize the global credit markets that these firms influence so greatly. So by 2011 or 2012, we should see a return of the financial economy growing at a faster pace than the overall US economy, even if there are new regulations on the financial services industry. And with that, New York will once again draw more capital and become an even more attractive market.
I don't know what MLB can do to counteract this macroeconomic trend, except maybe put a third team in the NY area. The more I think about it, the more I support the idea, however unlikely its adoption. A third team wouldn't convert me, a Yankees fan for 33 years, but I'd go see some of that team's games. And who knows, maybe my daughter, already firmly independent-minded at the age of two, would grow up a fan of that third team.
MLB buys the Dodgers from the McCourts and sells them to Mark Cuban with no markup, on the condition that he moves them to Brooklyn and builds an MLB stadium for them in conjunction with the Atlantic Yards development. Tampa Bay moves to LA and into Chavez Ravine, and joins the AL West. Dodgers go to the NL East, Braves to the central. Houston to the west.
That would address all your complaints about the Yankees market monopoly. AL East goes to 4 teams, which make things a little easier on Bal/Tor.
It would be phenomenal for NY. The Dodgers would do incredibly well. I don't think the Yankee revenues would go down $1. I think they'd probably go up.
Unfortunately the Mets would probably collapse, and move to the vacated Tampa market within three years.
This makes no sense to me. The Yankees organization build a tremendously successful brand that they have been able to market very effectively. This business acumen should (and does) entitle them to make gobs of money.
But why does this entitle them to an enormous and persistent talent advantage over the rest of baseball? Shouldn't the talent advantage be determined by the quality of the front office and scouting personel to encourage competition and innovation in that area?
Step back for a minute and it just seems silly that the Yankees get to make the playoffs every year because they own a trademark on a two letter logo.
(Yes I know that merchandise revenue is heavily shared, I'm exaggerating for effect)
Did I miss something?
This is brilliant. You could also use the fund to bid on free agents and then draft those signees out to teams below the luxury tax threshold, in reverse order of last year's standings.
We should so totally rule baseball.
no you didn't, but my point was that the New York market success is important to the well beings of other teams. Their media market/influence is too huge to ignore.
This satisfies all the folks who cry that the Bay area can't support two teams, keeps tradition alive and cuts into the Yanks market advantage.
Snappers idea re Cuban and stadium funding sounds fair-Why not treat it like any other business? The decision to move into direct competition usually involves substantial up front costs unless one aims at niche marketing. Find someone bold enough to fund a new stadium, keep prices low and family friendly, be wide open and irreverent like the Mets in their early years and aim for a hefty cable contract.
The Yankees spend $200 because the Red Sox spend $120-160, depending on how bad John Henry wants it. And I'm pretty sure that if the Orioles had a team worth a damn, Angelos would be up in the low 100's. Meanwhile, the Blue Jays were running a median/above median payroll, and the Rays might well have the best management in baseball (a bunch of New Yorkers, Goldman refugees).
In comparison, take the Cubs. They dick around in the NL Central with Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, all of which are both dysfunctional and max out around $80m...if that much. The only decent competition for Chicago is Houston, and they're a ####### mess.
[EDIT: As rLr notes, the Cardinals too. But they can't go too high either, and to the extent they can, it's purely because of the way they built the Cardinal brand in the midwest/plains because StL is a #### market.]
So if the Yankees have some sort of unfair hegemony over their division, shouldn't we make the Cubs spend at the level of their division too? The Wild Card mitigates this to some extent, but not completely.
(See also: Anaheim in the AL West, LA in the NL West, White Sox in the AL Central)
And the Cardinals, who win most of the time.
This satisfies all the folks who cry that the Bay area can't support two teams, keeps tradition alive and cuts into the Yanks market advantage.
You can't play major league baseball in a public housing project courtyard.
This satisfies all the folks who cry that the Bay area can't support two teams, keeps tradition alive and cuts into the Yanks market advantage.
I will support this if they build a replica of the Polo Grounds with the crazy dimension. Likewise, I want Yankee Stadium remodeled to make RF, 296', CF 490' and LCF 460'.
I disagree. I think that teams that do the right things even outside the baseball operations department should be rewarded in the field for doing so.
Of course, at some point things get problematic. To what extent do the Yankees still enjoy the advantages they made by signing Babe Ruth and telling him to focus on hitting?
My toy idea that will never happen: Reshuffle the divisions every year.
Thats about the dimensions at Yankee Stadium now.
Zing!
I meant the lack of amenities. Why else would the Twins be abandoning the Metrodome, which has all the charm of a Marzahn apartment slab?
My toy idea that will never happen: Reshuffle the divisions every year.
I see two ideas:
(1) Sort teams in divisions by revenue.
(2) A better idea is to go back to the old format: No divisions, just AL and NL. Top 4 teams get in, playoffs are seeded with homefield to highest seed. Higher seed gets homefield in each round.
This eliminates the Boston/NY arms race, which would probably drive down NYY payroll.
Seconded. Love the crazy-shaped parks.
Of course, I think all parks should have the fences moved back like thirty feet, because I want to see more running and stuff. But, really, I'm good with most wacky-dimensioned parks.
They're cannon-fodder, which doesn't make them any less despicable.
This also undermines the spurious claim that the Yankees have earned their advantage unless someone wants to suggest that they are responsible for the long term historical trends that have transfered the wealth of a nation to a few urban centers. New York is a parasite upon the rest of the country because the banks in the same way that Northern Virginia is a parasite because of the location of government.
If its owner built, it can be as crazy as one man dreams. Hell, it could even have a ridiculous video screen hanging over the field of play.
Didn't they do this and call it CitiField?
Bring back the 1908 field. That would be fun.
Left field: 350 ft.; left center: 440 ft.; center field: 530 ft. (1901), 635 ft. (1908); right field: 280 ft. (1901), 320 ft. (1908); backstop: 60 ft.
Look at that 1908 short porch combined with a Death Valley to shame OYS.
The last sentence here reminds me of an important point in the discussion. It seems even unearned advantages have to be seized by smart operations.
So, put a team in Charlotte?
This would be a bad thing for baseball. It would reduce the number of races in each league from four to one, with that one being a race for fourth place. It would be like the NBA regular season - pretty much pointless for all but couple of teams.
Yes, that's probably still too many. Yes, they've made the playoffs 14 out of 15 years. (But so did the Braves, and they did that with two opponents with significantly larger markets.) Yes, some of the difference comes from the "cr*pshoot" of the post-season, and some comes from the fact that the Yankees were "incompetent" in the 80s--though the Yankees had the best WPCT of anyone in the 80s, and were third best from 1982-1995 (the years they did not make it to the World Series).
The fact is that the problem has been with us ever since Ruth went to the Yankees, and there are only three realistic ways to mitigate it:
--Expand or move team(s) into the NY metro area to compete.
--Create a truly egregrious luxury tax that forces them to think twice about going over 150% above the average.
--Refashion the leagues based on population and revenue so that the teams with the most resources have to play each other head-to-head and are "handicapped" in terms of making it to the post-season.
Changing divisional alignments based on revenue and performance, and rewarding lower-tier teams with big chunks of the luxury tax money is probably the only way to deal with the even more pressing problem of sandbagging teams. Chris Dial's argument (in an earlier thread) that two-thirds of the teams can spend more money than they are is worth re-investigating here [and I see that this is happening as I type this].
The Yankees were in more World Series in five other decades (20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s) than has been the csse during the past ten years. They haven't won the Series in nine years, but to read Pos and to listen to the rest of you, you'd think it was 1959, not 2009.
It's a choice between socialism or sour grapes. Both seem to be equally hard to swallow.
To eliminate the crapshoot nature of the playoffs, you could just compare the 2000s to the number of times they've posted the league's best record. At 5, it matches the 30s, 40s and 60s. And considering for all but one of those decades, the Yankees were playing in a league almost twice as small the one they're in now, I do think you're underselling their level of dominance this decade.
Wrong. Neither the Dodgers nor Giants were ever anything close to broke. Both were performing quite well financially; they left NY not because they were struggling there, but because the virgin California market represented an even better opportunity. There's no plausible scenario that concludes that if the Dodgers and Giants had stayed in NY they wouldn't have continued to do well financially.
The Red Sox are really in the Yankees head now. They've got 'em scared.
I've long thought that MLB would be much better off now if they had vetoed the move by the Dodgers and Giants and instead gone to the PCL with some sort of consolidation/merger plan. But the National League at the time was set up so that what Walter O'Malley wanted, Walter O'Malley got.
Stupid Robert Moses. Ruined baseball, ruined America.
It therefore deserves the greatest baseball team.
The fates have conspired to make it so, because of the control of local broadcasting by the local teams.
This is clearly God's plan. Live with it.
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