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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Friday, November 06, 2009
But the Yankees are a whole different argument. They are their own argument. The Yankees are not a big-market team. They DWARF big-market teams. They are quantitatively different from every other team in baseball and every other team in American sports. They don’t just spend more money than every other team. They spend A LOT more money than every other team. The Boston Red Sox spend $50 million more than the Kansas City Royals? Who cares? The Yankees spend $80 million more than the Boston Red Sox.
The Yankees have a pat hand.
This is the way baseball is structured, and we have reached a point where people simply don’t want to hear any griping about it. Don’t like it? Don’t watch. Some people have stopped watching, I suppose. But many of us keep on because we love baseball and there’s enough randomness in the game itself and enough volatility in the playoffs to distract us from the lunacy of having the game so ridiculously tilted toward one team.
...And then, if you are a not a Yankees fan, you will want to throw up. If you are not a Yankees fan, you are left hoping that next year the randomness of a short playoff series will get the Yankees and allow some other team to win so we can celebrate the hope of Opening Day. And that’s baseball.
Thanks to The Los.
Repoz
Posted: November 06, 2009 at 04:21 PM | 252 comment(s)
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With the advanatges they have, the Yankees SHOULD win 110 games every year and have the pitching and bench depth to roll through the playoffs every year.
I don't think the author would disagree. The article was a little more than "NY is bigger so they have an unfair advantage".
Imagine how many more Putzes 60m could bring to Citi Field next year.
Part of me reckons that post-jeter and posada the Yankees could end up with holes at key positions that they might struggle to fill with similar talent with less teams letting their stars get to free agency despite the dumptrucks of money ready to go.
But on the other hand with Tex and Arod the core strength of the Yankees might just shift to the corners and the Yankees simply overpay for good to average production from SS and C and keep the championships rolling in.
Good stuff from Joe though.
Hanley Ramirez and Kurt Suzuki?
It wasn't a typical short series this year, what with the rain and extra TV gaps playing to the advantage of teams that were built around a few stars rather than depth and balance. Curiously, this year the Yankees were more of a stars and scrubs team than a clean, deep machine without any obvious gaps.
I like how we can have people saying this, and also people saying "Adding more MLB teams in New York would be pointless and would not break up the hegemony, as those teams would have no fans." Anything to act like there is a level playing free market invisible hand field.
Just the pitching, the lineup was a ridiculously homogenic 120-130 OPS+.
I think the Mets question is rather how they managed to spend so much for so little.
The team where everyone with more than 250 at-bats had an OPS above .850, an OPS+ above 120, and at least 20 home runs? (except Melky Cabrera who was merely above-average for a center fielder)
The pitching obviously was a different story. All the scheduled off days and rain delays in the playoffs helped make the saying that "pitching depth doesn't matter in the playoffs" more true than ever this year.
Sabathia, Burnett, Pettitte, and Rivera pitched 75% of the World Series innings for the Yankees. Lee, Hamels, Blanton, and Madson pitched 70% of the World Series innings for the Phillies. And....those guys on the Yankees are better.
I'd have thought at least one of those would have happened.
Hey, it's not often you get to snark on a Poz piece in SI.
I was hoping that was link to a Yankee Redneck post.
The Yankees have always had inherent advantages, but nothing comparable to what they have at this moment. This is a new world for professional sports. According to Vince Gennero, their revenues increased this year by $100M, so they are actually being kind to the rest of baseball by keeping their payroll in check.
There is a lot of luck in the playoffs, and even in the regular season. Sabathia could blow out his arm next year. Lots of things can happen. But the Yankees really ought to be the number one favorite to win every year.
I root for the Red Sox, and I wrote at the time that their victory in 2007 was quite a bit less satisfying to me because they beat the Indians (barely) and Rockies, two teams over which they had extraordinary advantages. 2004 did not have this problem, but really, 2 championships in 90 years does not make one feel overindulged.
This is not the Yankees fault, and certainly not the Yankees fans' fault. But I'm just not all that impressed. As I very much was, I should add, with their late 70s and late 90s teams.
I think the Yankees have been trying to address the future loss of Posada through the draft, and they've stockpiled catchers throughout their minor leagues. Obviously Jesus Montero will be given every opportunity to stick at the position because of his bat, but Austin Romine will probably be a major league catcher somewhere even if Montero wins the job in New York.
Shortstop, yeah, they're screwed.
Ellsbury CF
Pedroia 2B
Youkilis 3B
Pujols 1B
Drew RF
Bay LF
Ortiz DH
Molina C
Ryan SS
SP: Carpenter, Wainwright, Lester, Beckett, Piniero
RP: Franklin, Saito, Okajima, Ramirez, Miller
CL: Papelbon
They'd win a few games.
Until they sign or trade for Hanley Ramirez.
Wow, sounds like plenty of players on those teams are being underpaid.
Here's the thing. Sabathia could blow out his arm next year and it wouldn't impact the Yankees in any long term manner because they could and would just go out and buy someone to replace him. That is the crucial element of their unfair competitive advantage, an advantage only extremely biased Yankee fans could possibly deny. The Red Sox had a huge payroll in 2009, one that gives *them* an advantage over all but a handful of teams, yet the Yankees outspent Boston by +/- $80. That's essentially the payroll of a second tier, "mid-market" club (Atlanta, Philly, etc.)
I've been on the side of the MLBPA forever on issues of salary caps and such, but the Yankees are making a mockery of fair competition between teams and something needs to be done to address that. They spend a quarter freakin' BILLION on payroll this year, for Christ's sake.
I don't follow the National League, but I thought there was some question as to whether Ramirez will end up sticking at short - I thought he was a bad defender there as it is.
Throw in the $100 million+ they're forced to give away for the various "revenue stealing" schemes while you're trotting out the numbers there, comrade.
Pirela's got some promise, but he is a LONG way away. Nunez had a bit of a breakout season in Trenton this year, but it was all BA-driven, which usually means that it's unlikely to be repeated.
-- MWE
Disagree. The Yankees had a much bigger advantage in the pre-amateur draft reserve clause days. They had the ability to sign any amateur player they wanted without restriction.
It was the equivalent of being able to sign the top-10 draft picks every year if they wanted to.
I completely agree that there other teams that could spend what the Yankees do and choose not to. I really do believe it.
The point being made, I think, is that when we get to that point we have a league that is getting a little silly. The fans don't have much of a say about who owns their teams and what they spend. We can turn away from baseball if we are pi$$ed-off enough but that is an extreme I hope I never reach.
If the Yankees sell their club to a new owner who cuts payroll to $60MMM it is not the fault of the Yankee faithful. Just like if Rogers sells the Jays to a new owner who decides to outspend the league by 25% we Jays fans can't take any credit.
I don't know what the answer is when one team decides to be an outlier on payroll. I don't know or care about how many other teams could because we fans can't dictate our teams payroll. As fans of the game I throw my hands in the air and think "why are you (collective) idiot owners letting this happen?".
The first thing I would do, if I could, would force any team that uses one dollar of government money to open their books so we could really see where the club money is going. I agree with Ryan has said in the past - I think the Jay's money woes are part of a shell game with the larger company that owns the dome, the cable company, and the channels.
There's zero reason to believe the Yankees are going to be limited to some in-house solution to replace Jeter; even the mere thought of that is laughable.
An argument stands or falls on the basis of its merits, not on the basis of who presents it.
The current-day situation isn't exactly the same as it was 10 or 30 or 50 years ago. As it is, the current-day situation with the Yankees, and what it portends looking forward, is problematic for the sport.
They'd still have a lousy DH though.
Nunez had a bit of a breakout season in Trenton this year, but it was all BA-driven, which usually means that it's unlikely to be repeated.
That's what I thought. No way I want the Yanks counting on him to be a starting SS. Do you think they move him up to AAA this year or leave him in Trenton to start the year?
Any more info. on Pirela, Mike? I liked his performance, but that's really all I know about him.
UZRs over the last 4 years: -5, -19, -1, 0. Doesn't look like someone who urgently needs to be moved. Anyone have plus/minus on him?
If the Rays win the pennant, it does not mean that Yankees did not have a ridiculous advantage, it just means they didn't exploit it.
So what? Who cares? Whether or not that's true has nothing to do with the substance of the issue at hand.
Yep.
If the Rays win the pennant, it does not mean that Yankees did not have a ridiculous advantage, it just means they didn't exploit it.
Yep.
Crispix makes a good point here. I've long argued that the New York market should be opened up to whatever teams want to play there and I'm shot down by the Yankees fans that it won't work. If you believe the Mets could be as financially successful as the Yankees, why then couldn't a third team?
So which is it? Are the Mets (or anyone else for that matter) free to be as rich as the Yankees, or can additional teams not compete?
The Braves didn't do this by outspending everyone by 75%. In fact, their payroll was often lower than other teams in their division.
If the Yankees won this often with a payroll in line with everyone else, no one would complain. Look at the Angels, they win the AL West pretty much every year, and they usually have the highest payroll in their division. But since they don't blow everyone away with spending, it's not seen as a problem.
I personally would have preferred Guerrero, but Gary Sheffield wasn't exactly Gary Ward for the Yanks. One season of 141 OPS+, one season of 137 OPS+, and then he got injured during the third year of his 3-year deal. Considering Guerrero got a 7 year deal coming off an injury-plagued 2003, signing Sheffield for 3 years isn't a particularly egregious example of a poor Yankee signing.
You weren't shot down by me. Open up New York. Open up EVERY region. I wouldn't support a system where 5 teams come to New York but every other franchise gets to keep their cozy little fiefdom though.
What's the solution to this problem? If there's a "competitive balance" problem in MLB, it's limited to one (1) team - the Yankees. They already pay a ton in "luxury tax" and revenue sharing - it's clear that MLB has focussed a lot of attention to taking money from the Yankees, and the Yankees have paid a lot of money to subsidize the rest of the league. That doesn't stop them from spending top dollar on their team, though. Do we really want to risk killing the goose that's laying golden eggs by taxing them even more?
Sean, the problem is the stadium. The Mets had the fanbase to get a stadium, and could exploit that stadium/fan base to get to Yankee like revenue is well run.
A new team would have no fanbase, thus no municipality is going to pay of a stadium. So, they'd need to fund a $1B plus stadium to even get going. I just don't see a viable return on that large an incremental investment.
Carl Pohlad died this year - what more impetus do Bud Selig and his plutocrat cronies need to grab all the free cash they can get right now?
Choosing Sheffield over Guerrero had as much to do with Guerrero's health as it did the difference in quality between the players. Guerrero had missed a month with back problems the year before, while Sheffield was healthy. They signed for roughly the same salary, except that Guerrero got more years.
This is the same team that had recently signed Giambi and Mussina and would trade for (then re-sign) Rodriguez and sign Damon. They've spent the last decade "signing the best players every year." They made a bad guess on Guerrero, but didn't exactly cheap out on him.
Since they've now made the playoffs for one consecutive year - and now have several key players in their late 30s - I'd advise not panicking over the hegemony of our new Yankee overlords.
I also, although this I'm willing to grant is more of a idiosyncratic taste, do not understand why I as a fan should care about how my team is put together. I suppose if I were a GM, or someone else directly involved in the construction of the team, I might take more pride in building a good team on a lower budget. But I'm not part of the front office; I'm a fan, and I just want my team to win. And I am very happy when they do.
That doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
They already pay a ton in "luxury tax" and revenue sharing - it's clear that MLB has focussed a lot of attention to taking money from the Yankees, and the Yankees have paid a lot of money to subsidize the rest of the league. That doesn't stop them from spending top dollar on their team, though. Do we really want to risk killing the goose that's laying golden eggs by taxing them even more?
If the purpose of the luxury tax is to have the Yankees pay a lot of money to the rest of the league, it's working fine. But if the purpose of the luxury tax is to prevent the Yankees from having the ability to egregiously outspend everyone else in the league, it isn't working at all.
But nobody is talking about how old the players are, or even how well they produce. It's how much they get paid that makes them unfairly good.
Presumably, part of the reason those players got good in the first place - which resulted in the Yankees wanting them - was their hard work, dedication, belief in themselves, etc.
the NHL?
#28 The Yankees in the pre-draft period seldom paid big money for amateur players. George Weiss felt he could get more value paying five players $10,000 bonuses each than paying one player $50,00. Most of the great Yankee players: Berra, Rizzuto, Mantle were signed for peanuts after other teams rejected them. They won because Weiss was a hard-ass hard worker who hated to lose. The Yankees in the early 1930s did follow the Cardinals lead in setting up an extensive farm system that other teams like the Giants refused to follow, to their detriment.
It would be unlikely that teams would want to go to many other areas. Maybe LA or Boston.
Then what is the solution? And don't say a salary cap.
So you'd have no problem with MLB giving it a try?
Hard cap at 175 mil, indexed to the CPI, hard floor at 75 indexed as well.
Either other teams should spend more or the Yankees should spend less.
Hard cap at 40, hard floor at 10. In the good old days pro ballplayers didn't live like kings, let's go back to the times when you could have a major leaguer living right down the block of your middle-class neighborhood.
Of course, there are problems with this solution. The union will surely have to be bought, for one, and the younger players who might be the most affected by this measure may punch below their weight in the MLBPA's internal politics.
Indexed to revenue.
How exactly does this logic work? The Braves won for a long, long time, but they never had any structural competitive advantage over their peers. Are you suggesting that the Braves won for 14 years because the Phillies and Mets just couldn't match their market/payroll?
Where they going to get the land? Who's going to pay for the stadium?
That's actually the ideal goal of the entire Budshovik scheme. The more the Yankees spend, the more money he gets to dole out to his chums. As long as the Yankees aren't getting one of those coveted playoff slots, everyone is happy.
Maybe what baseball really needs isn't a salary cap, it's a talent cap. Allow open bidding on the top 3 players from every division leader every year and perhaps we'll see some real fairness and an end to the dominance of the wicked Braves and Yankees of the sport.
The 2008 Yankees having a $200M payroll yet giving 35 starts to Darrell Rasner and Sidney Ponson is Bill Bavasi level ignorance. I half wonder if they just deliberately threw the season just to make their 2009 team look like a product of front office genius and on-field grittiness.
First thing would be to get rid of the current disastrous revenue sharing scheme. It didn't take cheapskate owners long to figure out how to exploit that system. From 1988-1996, the gap between the top and bottom payrolls was growing by almost $3M/yr. From 1996-2002, it grew at about $9M/yr as MLB stratified into owners trying to win and owners content to run barebones payrolls and cash their welfare checks. Since 2002, the gap is growing at about $13-15M/yr constrained by only how much more the Yankees decide to spend than everyone else.
I'd like to see more sharing of cable TV and luxury box revenue as well as the amounts over face value that clubs realize by scalping their own tickets through club-owned "ticket broker services." Is a percentage of face value ticket price still the only revenue the home team shares with visitors?
I also like the idea here yesterday (?) of a central MLB fund to help subsidize teams signing their homegrown players.
That's easy. Everyone but Yankee fans. I realize it's hard to understand how the serfs want to be treated as equals when you're living the pampered life of a prince, but that really doesn't make you any less of a pampered prince.
I think it's a lot more likely that they would have just gone out and bought some capable starter with an unpleasant contract off some other team. After all, over the last couple years, that's how they've addressed any in-season offensive issues.
No, that was 2005 when they were running Al Leiter and Aaron Small out there.
If you want to come up with a fair revenue sharing system that doesn't punish teams for being good and reward teams for being bad, go for it. I'll support it 100%. But whining about the Yankees' payroll is... whining.
No. The sixties/ early seventies drought was based far more on Weiss's unwillingness to sign black players because he feared it would alienate his fan base. The Yankees had cracks at Mays and Aaron and who knows how many others. Had they chosen to fully exploit their financial and competitive advantages and pillaged the south, they could have dominated and not suffered the trough.
Doesn't LA already have two teams?
I'd be all for a NL team based in New England, but I don't know what John Henry would say.
Nobody cared when the $150 million Red Sox beat the $50 million Rockies.
Nobody cares that the Mets have the highest payroll in the National League and lost 90 games.
The Yankees benefited from a perfect confluence of events with nearly $80 million in payroll coming off the books in e ayear where the Free Agent class was filled with legitimate superstars rather than your usual highly paid mediocities. Next season the Yankees payroll will be reduced significantly.
Tough luck for y'all. #27!!!!!!! WOOT!!!!
Not really. I'd like a salary cap a decent amount above what my team currently spends, which will be an even bigger amount above what they're likely to spend next year.
Kinda rings forced/fake to me. As rLr said, "its gratifying." Don't pretend you're over the moon. Unless you are.
The fact that you weren't listening doesn't mean people weren't complaining. With that said, $150 mil seems like a reasonable cap, with a $70 mil floor.
If every team was able to push their payroll to $100 million or thereabouts for a couple of years at a time, there would be no major problems.
Red Sox apologist.
But yes, when the Sox were winning in 04 and 07, they were lumped in as Big Spender 1B among the two behemoths (to Darren's neverending chagrin).
The Braves were allowed to reap the revenues that came from broadcasting their games into virtually all their competitors' home markets. That's a pretty good deal.
There's no such thing as a team that can't spend much more than $60 million. There are teams that don't want to spend more than $60 million, but that's totally different.
So the Red Sox retain their position of advantage perfectly intact and the only team that is affected is the Yankees. As I said in #84.
And where are these articles from 2007? Surely you can point to one major news story about the 2007 World Series , with two teams with an even bigger payroll difference than the 2009 World Series, that complained about payroll. I'm not saying you're wrong, I just truly don't remember a single one.
I mean, the Yankees beat two $120 million payroll teams in the playoffs. The Red Sox that year beat two small payroll teams.
Nobody. Cared.
This is about people hating the Yankees. That's fine.
Sam's right about this---that is the big Yankee advantage. No other team could afford to swallow as many nonproductive big contract years as the Yankees have, and still keep on re-loading on similar levels.
We've had similar threads going back for at least 10 years, and nothing changes. If the Yankees win the World Series, people see the end of the world. And yet if they get knocked out early for a few years in a row, the same people will mock them for "failing," and start making predictions about how Seattle (2001) or Tampa Bay (2008) is the Team of the Future. There will always be some one shot wonder team to feed illusions like this, until it has to commit the dough to re-sign their key young players to long term contracts. And then they bail.
And then whenever a serious solution to the problem of Yankee advantage is proposed---like splitting local media revenues a la NFL---then some of the very same Yankee haters will start bellowing about "socialism," and babbling about cheap owners who don't subsidize their teams with their private money, as if that addresses the underlying structural issue.
To me it's a case of piss or get off the pot. Either make the Yankees split their local media revenue so that their market size is neutralized, and then put in a hard salary floor so that we're not just subsidizing a bunch of cheap-assed small market owners---or just STFU.
Well, there's always one consolation for our "free market" Yankee haters: They can always mock Sterling and Waldman and speculate about A-Rod's gayness. It's about all they've got left at this point.
Because the basic elements will never change: If you've got the money, the will to spend it, and the brains, all your opponents have going for them is luck.
OK--I'm in. Let's do it. Larry, you're in MLB now--get it done? Thanks.
The comparison to the Braves isn't a good one. It's not the result that's unfair, it's that the Yankees can spend double any other team that is unfair. Nobody complains about the Patriots because they don't have a built in advantage against other teams.
How does one who comes here regularly not know the team Sam H. roots for? That's not his team where he's setting the cap.
Tom Hicks can't, unless MLB is signing the checks for him. :)
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.
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