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Baseball Salary Cap needed? Small payroll teams competing in 2010

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Sports writers and baseball analysts have been beating the drum for years for some sort of payroll system modifications in baseball.   Especially in recent years with the dominance of the Yankees and Red Sox, who have been 1-2 in total salary for a while and have both made the playoffs more often than not in the past decade.  Last year was especially bad, when most of the playoff spots went to big market, big teams.  Great for playoff rankings, bad for most of the teams in the league.   The Yankees spent nearly SEVEN times as much in payroll entering 2010 than Pittsburgh; how can that be equitable?

Well, don’t look now but if the season ended today, as pointed out in this USAToday Article, only two of baseball’s top 10 salaried teams would qualify.  Most of baseball’s current 8 playoff teams are from middle-of-the-road payrolls.  There are two notable outliers: Texas comfortably currently sits atop the AL West with the 27th largest payroll and San Diego, with the 2nd LOWEST payroll in the majors, leads the NL west.  (See this google xls I put together briefly to show teams by record rank, playoff position and salary at the beginning of the season).

Each time a team like Tampa, San Diego or Texas competes well with the big boys, it makes it harder to implement some sort of reform.  Especially since you can look at each of the top tier payroll teams that are NOT in playoff contention right now and excuse their season.

  • #2. Boston: still have the 5thbest record and would be leading most any other division.  Lots of injuries, transition year away from expensive older vets like Ortiz and Lowell, $10M in dead money.  Theo keeps talking about a transition year; he’s biding his time before he can re-do the team in the image of the 04 and 07 teams.
  • #3: Cubs: over paid for Soriano, Zambrano underperforming, Fukodome bad signing.  Just not well constructed team.  Hendry on the GM hot seat.
  • #4: Philadelphia: great team, killed by injuries and inconsistent pitching.  You wonder how badly the Lee trade bungling will hurt them in years to come.  I still think they’ll overtake Atlanta, especially now that Chipper is done for the season.
  • #5: Mets: how does Minaya still have a job?  They seem to spend money because they have it, not because they acquire good players.  Oliver Perez, Jason Bay god awful signings, and just Santana and Beltran cost more than the San Diego Payroll annually.
  • #6: Tigers: you have to hand it to the Tigers owner, who purposely over spent b/c his town was so badly hurt in the economic crash.  But he has some very expensive players tied up (Cabrera, Verlander, Guillen) for a number of years and their role players aren’t good enough.  Dark Days ahead for Detroit.

So, the #1 payroll team has the best record and the #30 payroll team has the worst record.   But the teams in between aren’t acting like we expect.  Is this Moneyball re-incarnated?  Well no.  Billy Beane’s teams success in Oakland was less about his OBP-centric stats drafting and more about the three starting pitchers (ZitoHudson, Mulder) his teams were graced with (as pointed out in this excellent Buzz Bissinger article).  What it does point out is that good GMs (even the wealthy ones in NY and Boston) are starting to value the draft pick and the young player and are becoming better and better at drafting them.  San Diego and Texas both kept payroll low, traded away vets, accumulated draft picks.  Texas easily has the best farm system in the majors and now has a powerhouse team for very little money.  This is exactly the same blueprint practiced for years by Florida and Tampa, though Texas has shown they are not afraid to buy talent at the deadline (something the panhandle state teams never do and thus one of the reasons why neither team really has any appreciable fan following).

So, what should base ball do?

1. Should there be a salary cap?  Well, yes I think so.  I think the Yankees have a totally unfair player advantage over the rest of the league and it shouldn’t be possible to have 4 times the payroll of a team within  your own division.  But i have no idea how to implement it.

2. Should there be a salary floor?  Well, no.  Because teams like Texas, Florida, San Diego, Tampa and (in years past) Oakland have consistently shown that you can build great cheap teams by depending on player development, drafting and having an entire team of pre-arbitration or arbitration-eligible guys.  You can’t force a team to spend money just to achieve an arbitrary salary floor.  Plus you have to allow teams to blow things up and start over (essentially what Toronto is doing now) and try to build for the long run.