"Break Up The Yankees" ESPN Mock Trial

I probably won't watch the show but I think about the meta issue constantly.

As a baseball fan, I'm a communist, so you have to set a salary cap and a salary minimum. The disparity between the bottom and top grows every year, the middle gets thinner, and this is bad for competition. Bidding wars between big market teams for top shelf talent drives salaries through the roof and prices small market clubs out of the possibility of signing any A-list free agents. Look how Montreal drafts and develops top level talent only to watch these guys walk because they can't pay market value. The Yankees pick up the best free agents every year and vulture the top talent from mid level teams mid season after they fall out of the race. Then they just go and resign the talent they trade away when those guys come up for major league contracts. Stop the madness before this:

http://www.theonion.com/onion3904/yankees.html

becomes reality!

But as a Yankee fan, all you whiners are communists bitches. The Yanks have built this empire over the course of 100 years by making the right decisions at the right times. Maybe if some of these small market teams spent more money they'd fill more seats immediately, get better TV deals the next time around and get more money from licensing in the long run. Play to win.

Free agency is the number one problem, so player salary caps will be way more effective than team caps. We've got league minimums for players and we need caps for them too. Some kind of structure based on statistics and tenure for all free agents so the best veteran players in the game can make maybe $7 million/year ($7 million of REAL salary, no signing bonuses, no personal chartered airplanes, etc) and set a team minimum salary so all teams are forced to compete. I'm sorry, but any team that refuses to spend at least $50 million (I know there are exceptions, but they are rare) can't compete and shouldn't be in the league. Let the players strike if it's unacceptable. Blitz fans with a PR effort portraying players as the greedy fucks they are for crying about how a multi million dollar yearly salary isn't enough to PLAY A FUCKING GAME all summer. After the initial sting, and when major league baseball players realize they are among the luckiest people on the face of the earth for having the opportunity to make a living playing baseball, individual salary caps will encourage players to play where they want to play, because the money will be the same in every city. This will encourage teams to stay together, so a team with a solid nucleus and great chemistry will have a chance of becoming a dynasty as opposed to a patchwork of big ego free agents.
It'll move us back toward the golden days.

from the 2004 baseball prospectus:
"at least 2 teams, the brewers and devil rays, are projected to have payrolls that come to less than the total amount of money they'll receive just from the central fund - revenue-sharing money plus national-tv money."

the disparity in payroll between top and bottom will shrink a great deal when the bottom-dwellers decide to at PRETEND to try to compete, and the yankees start shedding their dead weight (over the next five years). boston could go higher but supposedly are about as high as ownership is willing to take them, and i don't know if they're willing to sustain such a payroll. if not, i'd look for the yankees to be leading the league with about a 130M (modern-day money) payroll in 2010, and (hopefully) the floor will be about 40M. that might seem vast, but the yankees at 183M are hardly a lock - for anything, imo - as it stands now. with luck and a smart ownership willing to take risks, anyone can compete. i don't think we need to import the NFL's communist system, which, again imo, leads to TOO MUCH parity. and i don't think we need a cap, either - too much turmoil in the player's union and the game for something that really isn't necessary.

Much as I hate Steinbrenner/the Yankees, they aren't baseball's problem. Baseball is too slow, too boring and too geared toward offense.

deaden the balls
put the fear of permanent banishment into the roid abusers
don't allow batters to step out of the box

problem solved.