Yes, more teams are getting smarter every year. Some have a lot of money to work with, some have much less. But intelligence is the great equalizer. Yes, more money gives a team a greater margin for error, but so many other factors go into on-field success that I much prefer tweaking the overall system at the margins rather than implement something as huge and constricting as a salary cap. I don’t want to see 30 teams all attempting the same path to success.

And come on – it’s Baltimore DAVE.

There are many ways to resolve the revenue disparity. Woolner and I put out pretty sweet plans @ Prospectus a couple years back that deal with all of that quite equitably.

The Twins don’t have capital to spend. A cap would reduce the amount of money the Yankees can spend.

That doesn’t give the Twins additional capital.

If you want to equalize capital, equalize capital through flat revenue sharing so each team starts with the same amount of money. Caps don’t do that.

Salary caps. Mandated contracts for rookie salaries.

Yes, it is a good thing, from a team-building perspective. That’s the incentive for organizations to spend millions of dollars each year drafting and developing a system full of players.

Free agency is just one of several ways for an organization to import players, and if the trend of signing top young, pre-arb players to long-term deals continues, free agency won’t be nearly as attractive an option as it is now. The $4MM to 5MM/win on the open market could jump 50% as less impact talent becomes available.

Fewer rules, fewer restraints, spend as much or as little as you wish – just build the best team you can with your unique resources and limitations. It’s not a perfect system by a longshot, but with more organizations getting smarter and smarter each year, it is proving to be a reasonably fair one.

It really is a beautiful thing that in baseball, a team with a $40MM payroll can be more competitive, currently and projected over the next few years, than one with a $140MM payroll.

Well, a big reason for that is that enforced pay gap between young and old players. There are around 150 starting pitchers in the league, and Felix is better than all but a handfull of them, and yet is one of the lowest paid. Is that ultimately a good thing?

Also, far fewer teams with $40M payrolls are playoff contenders than teams with $100M+. The disparity in resources between the Yankees and the Royals is not a good thing for baseball, even if the Yankees don’t always make the playoffs.