Originally Posted by
JasonEvans
No comments on Harper campaigning for Jersey boy Mike Trout to come home to Philly in a couple years? My first instinct was to think, "how can they afford him if they are already paying Harper?" but then I realized the Phillies are simply willing to take their salary up to the Dodgers/Yankees/Red Sox/Cubs kind of level. Oh well.
Baseball has a real salary problem. This is nothing new, but when we have teams that are willing to spend more than $200 mil competing with teams who are only willing to spend $60 mil, it really hampers the competitive nature of the game. No other sport operates that way. Football teams all spend about the same amount and basketball teams that spend less only do so as they tank for draft picks before picking up spending in a big way as they get to be more competitive. In baseball, there are many franchises that simply have no prayer of being good other than catching lightning in a bottle with young studs for a year or two.
The Phillies are willing to spend $200 mil per season. The Braves are only willing to spend $110 mil per season (and the Braves were only 20th in the sport in terms of spending). How can these situations be competitive?
-Jason "pitching changes, balls/strikes, and all that other stuff is one problem... but the anti-competitive nature of payrolls is a far bigger issue, I think" Evans
Baseball, of course, have always had the "haves and have-nots." It's the oldest professional sport in the US of A and there was no thought to leveling pay scales. And, of course, under the "reserve rule," you could keep a player forever.
What prevents moves in this direction now -- and Jason knows more about TV than I ever will -- is that the home radio-TV contracts are huge and differ enormously from market to market and team to team. The current ownership paid for their franchises based in part on these revenue streams.
Pro football grew up with small revenues, although a few teams had their own TV contracts -- we watched the woeful Redskins in the 1950's in South Carolina. As it turns out, the first national pro football TV contract was the AFL -- and they shared revenues equally. That was da bomb that broke the local TV monopoly. Pete Rozelle, the new NFL commission, worked hard to get TV for all teams and even got a bill passed by Congress in 1961 to help in doing so. Anyway, sharing a huge stream of TV revenue is the perfect lure to set meaningful salary caps.
Back to baseball. The horror stories I remember was the "ownership tango" that went on from the '50s through the early '70s. This was the era of the 70 percent marginal income tax. Owners were using baseball franchises as tax shelters. They would buy a team, capitalize the purchase price (fair) and then define the purchase as player contracts, depreciating the capital value over the fairly short term of the player contracts. After 4-5 years the tax break had disappeared and the franchise got flipped. This is the scenario under which Hubert Humphrey's friend Bob Short and campaign treasurer bought the second-generation Washington Senators and, when revenues slipped, moved them to Texas for the 1972 season, leaving Washington without a ML team for 34 years (who's counting?).
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013