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A Great Day For Baseball


By Howard Megdal ~ January 13th, 2010. Filed under: Howard Megdal.

I don’t think the story of MLB, MLBPA and the Marlins reaching an agreement to increase the team’s payroll moving forward has received the attention it deserves, though, as always, Maury Brown is the exception to the rule.

Brown does a terrific job breaking down exactly how the Marlins have been taking unfair advantage of revenue sharing for some time, and mentions that the Pittsburgh Pirates, if anything, are more egregious violators.

But the larger implication here for me is MLB finally acknowledging the biggest impediment to competitive balance-not the ludicrous spending of the Yankees- who are, after all, one team- but the problem of not spending from a large percentage of baseball’s smaller-market franchises.

Taking a look at 2009 payrolls, the Marlins were at the bottom, spending roughly $37 million. While the announcement doesn’t say what MLB and MLBPA will allow for a salary floor, it figures that some kind of bottom line number exists.

More to the point, even if one doesn’t, the acknowledgement of the problem is an important first step toward that salary floor, which is an absolute must from a competitive standpoint.

If the salary floor had been set at $50 million, the Marlins, Pirates and Padres all would have had to increase payroll- in Florida’s case, by about 25 percent. That’s 1/10 of the league- a significant change in competitive balance.

And if the floor had been set at $70 million, suddenly those three teams plus the Nationals, Athletics, Rays, Twins, Orioles and Rangers all would have had to increase spending. That’s 9/30, or nearly a third of the league, bound to improve their clubs beyond current levels.

While this wouldn’t, by itself, guarantee that the Yankees and other top teams wouldn’t be able to buy many players on the market, it would limit the kind of trades that amount to little more than salary relief for known quantity players. Furthermore, higher floors would mean that more players like Josh Johnson of the Marlins would get signed to long-term deals, rather than hitting the free agent market (or getting traded in a walk year).

This is decidedly bad news for the Yankees, and arguably more so the Mets, whose inability to create much recent home-grown talent has left the team unable to add superstar talent in any way beyond simply leveraging its market force.

Of course, if this forces the Mets to spend more on player development- and avoid the embarrassment of spending the least amount of money in the Amateur Draft of any team- this is good news for baseball in New York, too.

Howard Megdal is the Editor-in-Chief of The Perpetual Post. He covers baseball, basketball and soccer for Capital New York, MLBTradeRumors.com, New York Baseball Digest and has written for ESPN.com as well as numerous other publications. He is the Poet Laureate for SBNation New York. His book about Jewish baseball players, “The Baseball Talmud,” is available for purchase on Amazon.com and wherever books are sold. His next book, "Taking The Field", is available for pre-order on Amazon.com and will publish in May 2011.
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5 Responses to A Great Day For Baseball

  1. Ceetar
    January 13th, 2010 at 2:00 pm

    Can we stop harping on the Mets not spending money last year on the draft considering how few picks they had, and how they signed most of them anyway? Let’s see what happens this year, since they have some good picks, but I just don’t seem them letting a good prospect get away because they didn’t want to pay him.

    I’m strongly in favor of a floor/ceiling. Even if it’s something broad like 50/200. Every year there are ‘givaways’ like Halladay, Lee, etc. Guys that outgrow their market, and get trade for financial, not baseball, reasons. On top of this, take the Marlins. They’ve been lauded for some of their scouting techniques and their ability to find prospects, but they spend no money so no one really wants to go there anyway. But say they had to, suddenly they become a more realistic destination for big time free agents, because they know they’ll have to spend money and history suggests they spend it wisely.

  2. KEVIN DAIS
    January 13th, 2010 at 2:46 pm

    .Mr. Megdal, When was the last time you actually examined the Yankee roster? How many players do they have that came out of their minor .league system? Whats the average of all the teams in major league baseball for players that played in the teams minor league system that are curently on 25man rosters? I know I’m asking alot of you to actually do some research and not spout the lazy blogger line, but step up and give it a try!

  3. USMF
    January 13th, 2010 at 2:49 pm

    I hate the Idea of a salary Floor, I’d prefer a salary cap, but you can’t have one without the other. But salary caps won’t guarantee competitive balance. It can be easily argued that MLB has better balance than the NFL and much better than the NBA. (does anyone really care about the NHL anymore?)

    My idea was that a team can only collect from the mysterious revenue pot if they increase their player payroll that year.

    Basically it’ll work by saying…Florida, your payroll last year 37mil, you’re due 10mil in Rev sharing, but your payroll for this year went down to 33mil, you don’t get any Rev-share money, your cut goes to everybody else…or you increased your payroll to 42mil, you get 5mil of you due rev money, or you increased you payroll to 37mil, you get all the 10mil you had coming.

    Obviously there’s a lot of details that would need to be worked out, especially because I’ve never heard anyone who truly understands how the Rev-share program actually works. We all know the Yanks pay a ton, the Mets try to stay under the threshold, I know that the threshold changes every year.

    But who gets the money? Who gets what %o of the money? How do team spend the money, if the just don’t pocket it? How do they set the threshold? How do they figure out a teams payroll in the first place? I know you just can’t add up the 40man roster salary, I thinks is based on the players average yearly salary through out their entire contract. How do they handle differed money, options and performance biased bonuses?

  4. Howard Megdal
    January 13th, 2010 at 10:26 pm

    Ceetar, year after year, other large market teams draft players throughout the draft who have signabilility concerns. This is how Joba, Austin Jackson, etc. became Yankee property.
    Kevin, I don’t know what your point is. I said this affects the Mets more than the Yankees, since the Mets have acquired talent almost exclusively through non-draft means since Wright/Reyes. The Yankees do a good job of developing their own talent to go along with the high-priced imports.

  5. Mike Silva
    January 13th, 2010 at 11:51 pm

    Kevin

    What does that analysis have to do with what Howard is saying? I don’t get the lazy accusation? Sounds like you don’t like hearing the message and chose to attack with a red herring statement

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