I've never liked revenue sharing in baseball from its inception. I like the idea of a salary cap or luxury tax even less. Sports doesn't lend itself to socialism. The whole objective of sports franchises is to win championships, divisions, pennants, games — just win, baby. Propping up ailing teams is the baseball equivalent of the Marshall Plan, with Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Florida playing the part of ruined European countries.
The NFL does salary cap well but the shortcomings in the system are papered over. Too many players change teams and too many rich men become even richer. Meanwhile, the fan gets stiffed with $100 tickets and expensive cable TV packages. And the Arizona Cardinals still suck.
If you enjoy mediocre play, hidden by slick marketing and shouting announcers hyping the well-known stars, then good luck to you. I prefer the days when football players were cut because they were no good, rather than seeing a team wave goodbye to a well-liked and productive player because the capologist says the square root of the hypotenuse divided by his inside leg measurement will send the team 47 cents over the cap.
The first problem with handing out great chunks of money collected from Boston and New York is that there's absolutely no incentive on the part of the recipients to either spend it or spend it wisely. You wouldn't give an unemployed bum off the street $10 million and be shocked when he or she spent it on crack cocaine, booze, cigarettes, and brightly-colored track suits, would you? MLB gave the Royals $10 million and they spent it on Reggie Sanders and Mark Grudzielanek.
The second problem is that the definition of a small market team is hazy, at best. Kansas City is small market, right? Not in 1994, it wasn't. The Royals had the fourth-highest payroll in baseball at $40.5 million, a mere $4 million behind the Yankees. Only Toronto and Atlanta came between Kansas City and New York. The Mets, Cardinals, Angels, and Mariners were in the bottom half of the payroll league.
Now, through mismanagement and years of losing, the Royals are cast as baseball bums in need of a socialist support system to keep them off the streets.
Baloney. The Royals don't need a handout to compete. They need a handout because they refuse to compete, settling instead for insulting a loyal fan base and pocketing a tidy few million a year from teams like Boston, the Angels, the White Sox, and New York who are busting their humps trying to win.
If baseball wants to make revenue sharing work, it needs to introduce some checks and balances to the system. The problem is that whether the money has been spent wisely or not is too subjective. Simply insisting that teams spend at least what they receive in revenue sharing on players would be a disaster, sending salaries for mediocre players through the roof.
Poor teams are poor, in part, because they sign average players to poor contracts. The Pirates spent over $8 million a year on Sean Casey. The Royals are paying Mark Redman (career stats 53-68, 4.58) $4.5 million a year and Mike (DL) Sweeney $11 million a year. Every team, even the good ones, has a bad contract or two. The Yankees have a dozen. The bad teams stay bad because they repeat their mistakes and have no margin for error. A handout from Bud Selig doesn't give a bad GM any better judgment.
What the revenue sharing and luxury tax pot does allow teams to do is spend money on the farm system. The Milwaukee Brewers have done exactly that. Rather than pocket the cash and abuse the fans, as is the way in Florida and Kansas City, the Brewers have got competitive through shrewd trading and investing in youth. Richie Weeks wouldn't have been signed by the Royals because his bonus would be judged too high.
The Brewers still have bad contracts (Corey Koskie, Brady Clark, and Tomo Okha), but the players involved are at least productive. And they have the ability, in the future, to lock up players like Prince Fielder, Chris Capuano, Bill Hall, and JJ Hardy to serviceable contracts, as Cleveland has done this offseason.
Revenue sharing isn't about reigning in the New York Yankees, which is an impossible task. Only George Steinbrenner has that capability. The Yankees waste money like no other sports team in history, but they can afford to. Revenue sharing is actually stopping teams like the Angels, Cardinals, Dodgers, Braves, White Sox, and Cubs taking the next step up and challenging the Yankees for the big acquisitions. A punitive tax on salary is a bigger deal in these cities than it is in the Bronx or Fenway.
In the case of the dismal Royals, it's not a shortage of money that is crippling this franchise. The team has a strong fan base, a history of achievement, and a sports-orientated location. There is no reason why the Royals couldn't compete with the Cardinals on an equal footing, but for poor management.
The Royals have lurched from one flawed plan to another under the disastrous regime of GM Allan Baird. In 2000, Baird talked of keeping his young hitters, even when they became expensive. By 2003, the prized outfield of Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye, and Carlos Beltran was gone. Not one everyday player of even average ability was gained in return.
The draft could have replenished the roster, but the Royals draft with the long-term vision of Mister Magoo. The past decade or so of first-round draft picks include such luminaries as Jeff Granger, Matt Smith, Juan LeBron, Jeff Austin, Matt Burch, Kyle Snyder, Mike Stodolka, Colt Griffin, and Roscoe Crosby.
The blame for this lamentable situation lies squarely with Baird and, vicariously, with Glass, who should have fired his GM years ago, but likes the fact that Baird's presence takes away the heat from his ownership. Glass has curtailed Baird's budget, possibly because he doesn't trust his judgment in the free agent market. That alone is enough to send a red flag up against the GM. Instead, Glass left Baird out to dry, watching him put together possibly the worst major league roster ever seen, including Florida's AAA 2006 model.
Last Monday night's lineup for the Royals' game with Cleveland was comical. The age of hitters two through seven was 36, 32, 32, 38, 34, and 34. Reggie Sanders didn't play. He's 39.
That wouldn't be so bad if the players were good. Clean-up hitter Emil Brown is hitting .220 with 2 home runs. DH Matt Stairs is hitting .200 with 1 homer. Catcher John Buck, part of the Carlos Beltran trade, hit his first homer of the season Monday, boosting his average to .217. The pitching is even worse than the hitting. Zach Greinke is not with the team, allegedly because he's depressed. He should try being a Royals fan — at least he's being paid for his depression.
Giving money on the pretext of being "small" to such a lame excuse for a team is an insult to the fans, where the money originates from. The solution to spending revenue sharing dollars lies in the good old capitalist win-loss column.
If you're receiving millions through revenue sharing and you want to spend it on Cristian Guzman or Mike DeJean, fine. But if the win column stays put or goes down, you lose your dollars until it goes back up.
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