Ryan Howard, arguably the most feared first baseman in all of baseball, has won his arbitration case against his team, the Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillies were offering $7 Million and Howard wanted $10 million. Howard got the $10 Million he wanted, receiving the highest amount of money that arbitration has ever awarded a player. There is no doubt that Howard is worth that, hitting 105 home runs over the last two seasons combined, and winning the NL MVP in 2006. If he were a free agent, in today’s market, he would probably be getting $20 Million or more per season. This win for Howard is another one of baseball’s losses (one of the many outside of steroids for the moment)...
When Howard eventually makes it to free agency after the 2011 season, he may get another A-Rod sized contract that keeps the majority of baseball’s owners up at night when thinking about such a possibility. That A-Rod sized contract is likely not to come from his current team, the Philadelphia Phillies. There are only a handful of teams that can afford to pay that type of money to one player, and those are the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, and possibly the New York Mets and Los Angeles Dodgers. This in turn has made the game of baseball, more than any other sport, far less competitive amongst the majority of the other teams in the league.
These contracts have greatly effected the competitive balance of Major League Baseball. Anytime there are “big” free agents available, the elite ones sign with the Red Sox or Yankees. Occasionally the Mets, Dodgers, Giants, or Angels get one though. Outside of the these teams, many teams cannot afford to keep their elite players at home, and as a result the progress of the rest of the “not so rich” teams is only temporary. While big payrolls do not always guarantee a world championship, most of the time, the best teams rank in the top 10 in dollars spent on payroll. Occasionally you have teams like the Oakland A’s who somehow find a way to stay competitive due their eye for talent, but most of the time you get teams like the Royals or Pirates that end up near a 100 losses every year. Teams like the A’s, Marlins, and Rays, are teams that have produced a heck of a lot of talent over the last six seasons, but due to the fact that they could not afford to pay many of those players, they were forced to trade them away or lose them to free agency, which has led to any progress those teams have made, ultimately being short-lived.
This makes the game difficult for anyone who is not a fan of the Yankees or Sox to watch. Thus, when at least half the fans of a given team do not feel their team will be able to compete, you ultimately lose viewers when those two teams do not play, which results in a loss of total revenue for Major League Baseball as a whole. This is especially bad for baseball when one of the big two are eliminated before the World Series in the playoffs, it almost always result in an all-time low for their biggest event of the year (probably the second biggest sporting event of the year, behind the Superbowl) the World Series.
Baseball has enough problems right now, the steroids issue is probably seen as number one. Before that baseball was worried about fans thinking that their game was too low scoring and too slow paced to begin with. Also, they have had problems with some of their teams being able to stay in their cities because of the lack of ability to bring fans into them on a regular basis and/or secure new ballpark deals (which can again be at least partly attributed to player salaries).
I’m not saying that the players should not be compensated for their abilities, but look how money is being thrown around, pitchers who have yet to prove themselves or who lack winning records have been getting big money contracts over the last three winters. I have a problem with the fact that A-Rod made more money last year than the whole Tampa Rays’ starting lineup. It is easy to see that a salary cap is a necessity and may ultimately be vital for the struggling sport. The NBA, NFL, and NHL, all have salary caps, as a result, all have at least more than two dominate teams, that have not hampered the overall success of each league. While steroids are certainly the more pressing issue in baseball at the moment, the salary cap should be next on the list of things the owners need to vote on to fix. Now that I think about it, it makes no sense why the owners have not overruled the Steinbrenners and Henrys in terms of a salary cap by now? But nothing makes sense to me about baseball anymore, I realized that baseball probably will not make much sense to me for a while when I heard Commissioner Bud Selig who is the equivalent of the President Bush of Major League Baseball, was recently asked to continue on as commissioner for another few seasons? Unbelievable.
No comments:
Post a Comment