More on the Yankees payroll arguments
Khoi Vinh on the Yankees and Payroll
For almost a decade, the Yankees have consistently maintained the highest payroll in Major League Baseball while failing to bring home a World Series title, and during that time the grousing took the form of ridicule. What Yankees fans heard then was: “See? You Yankees can’t buy championships, even with all of your money.†What we hear today is: “See? You Yankees just buy championships with all of your money.â€
This is not a coherent line of argument, but then again it would be naïve to look for any motivation here other than envy, because the logic at work is so suspect. It’s pretty safe to say that a good number of those who hate the Yankees because of their payroll are unabashed capitalists, too; they’d be very unlikely to begrudge the fact that the highest valued, best performing organization in any given market also led that market. That’s not just capitalism, it’s the way capitalism is practiced in America.
I always find this kind of argument sweet. It’s like when people born in to rich families who attend private prep schools and are legacy-admitted into the finest universities in the country wonder why people in abject poverty don’t just, en masse, pull themselves up into prosperity.
Baseball-wise, that was me for a long time. The guy who owns the Twins is worth billions, why doesn’t he just spend a billion instead of bleating about how poor his stadium revenues are?
And that’s actually a valid case — many of the teams in baseball are never-full ticks sucking blood out of the sport, and baseball (and Selig-as-commissioner-with-bajillions-in-his-fund) should be ashamed about it.
But here’s where that whole argument goes wrong: let’s say that the Yankees devote more of their revenue to payroll than any other team. That’s admirable, and they should indeed be lauded for it.
Except… it costs every team, no matter how cheap, about forty million just to keep the lights on and the minor leagues running, and so on, and it’s more like sixty million. Then it’s another thirty million to pay a cheapo major league team.
So let’s say there are three teams:
Team Lamprey plays in a market of 1m people and have a cheap owner, and take in $60m in operating revenue.
Team Modest plays in a market of 1m and tries to compete, and they take in $90m in operating revenue.
Team Rich plays in a good but not New York market and tries to compete. They take in $175m in operating revenue.
Team Yankees… they take in $250m in operating revenue.
You see the problem already. The lights-on-and-field-a-team pays 50% of their revenue to keep the lights on. Team Modest, 30%. Team Rich, 17%. Team Yankees, 10%.
Now that’s an exaggeration to make a point (the Yankees end up paying more to keep the lights on), but that’s how it sorts out. I happened to have Pappas’ numbers from 2002 up (here) and the two teams with the lowest non-player expense:operating revenue ratio were the Yankees and Red Sox (check out the Mariners, by the way, and that massive non-player expenses line. I believe that’s us buying Ichiro).
Beyond which, when teams like the Yankees and Red Sox who are big enough to have their own cable networks they can move revenue off the books do so, they really shouldn’t get credit for that against teams that have to account for their Fox Sportsnets payments normally.
The problem is not that the Yankees spend, or that their fans live in a bubble of privileged and can’t seem to grasp that they’re the beneficiaries of a broken system. It’s that because of the way MLB is set up, the Yankees and the Mets operate like government-sanctioned monopolies. In any equitable world, the New York metro market supports three, maybe four teams. And we can talk about how you manage that, or how you might start one of those teams, but the result of having only two teams is exactly what Posnanski pointed out: both New York teams get to operate as if they’re two franchises. They can, year in and year out, spend vastly more on everything, compete consistently, and when they’re weak, they can add a team’s worth of payroll in one off-season to shore up a few positions and then go on happily.
That’s insane.
And crowing about how the Yankees once sucked doesn’t obviate any of that. They’re like some scion born to a super-wealthy family that gets into Yale, stumbles around life for a while making a jerk of themselves… yayyyy, education can’t overcome everything. And then they decide to go into, I don’t know, golf course ownership, and of course they’ve got a ton of backers from family friends, effectively unlimited capital to work with, even after they blow up the first few tries and they’re mysteriously let off the hook for some bookkeeping shenanigans during that time, and ta da! Fourth time’s a charm, they’re golf course moguls!
Is it envy to look at that and wonder if perhaps there were many more people who couldn’t have done better and more important things with the same advantages, as we are to think with the Yankees? Sure. Maybe.
That’s the point. I’m a fan of a relatively wealthy team that spends a lot of money on payroll, having long been a fan of a really poor team that spent nothing, and for all my carping about their constant inflation of how much they’re spending on payroll for PR purposes, this is way better. But my team would have to absorb the A’s (or better yet, our hated interleague rivals the Padres) for us to enjoy the kind of advantages the Yankees and Mets do.
And I don’t see that the presence of bloodsucker teams makes it okay for the Yankees and Mets to enjoy such crazy unbalance. In an ideal world, a good ownership group would sense opportunity and buy one of those teams, move them to New York, and we’d have some competition. That the system is broken and rewards both established geographical monopolies and cheapskates doesn’t mean that either is in the right, or that no action should be taken with regard to both.
And as long as baseball lets those two grow endlessly fat on their geographical advantage, everyone is going to take rightful glee when they fail to make anything of it, and they’re going to rightfully throw rotten fruit when they do.
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It’s the combination of a Yankees win fueled largely by free agent expenses at the same time that the USS Mariner chat is, “Should we trade Felix two years before he becomes a free agent?” that is making my interest pretty darn low. It doesn’t have to be a level playing field but the strategies are so different right now…
What you say, zzyzx, is very much the difference between the MLB model and the NFL model. The Green Bay Packers can have a national fan base from the smallest major league town in America, while MLB ratings drop nearly every year because the richer teams are sucking all the air out of the market.
But they didn’t do it for that reason. They used the Yankee dominance as an excuse to impse the luxury tax, whose real objective was to drive down salaries, thus transferring wealth from the players to management.
I hope the union fights tooth and nail against a salary cap. The imposition of a salary cap is what got me to stop watching hockey.
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Well, I think your hope would come true. I don’t oppose the idea of a cap, but it will never work. Even if the players sat down to talk about it, the first thing they would bring up is the percentage of revenues going to payroll…and use other professional sports as the starting point. But it’s entirely apples and oranges because neither the NBA nor the NFL has to run their own farm systems–America’s colleges do that for them.
I happen to be in New York right now, and was talking to two otherwise apparently intelligent Yankee fans today about their season. These were the first two things they volunteered (i.e., before I could even bring up the payroll thing)–“You still gotta play the games, it doesn’t matter how much money you make”. And then, “look at all the injuries we had to overcome”. I mean, these people live in New York City and somehow must have kept track of what happened to the Mets. How could they even bring that up?
I have now hopped on the “no comments at USSM” bandwagon, Dave.
And you would be a knowledgable fan then? Or would you be an obnoxious “how often does your team win” kind of fan?
I’m not being accusatory when I ask this question. I honestly am curious to know your answer.
If the goal is payroll equality. . .
I don’t think that needs to be the goal, honestly. I also don’t think the game would benefit from a hard salary cap, and it won’t necessarily create parity or get rid of bottom-dwellers. To me, it makes the business of baseball a little less interesting as well.
I just don’t find the Yankees winning the whole thing from time to time any more troubling than New England winning the Superbowl 3 out of 4 years, or the six superbowl victories out of 43 for the Steelers, or the 17 championships by the Celtics, or the 23 Championships by the Canadiens, or the fact that the Red Wings are in the playoffs every year and have won the whole thing 11 times. None of these are destroying /have destroyed their respective sports (and I understand the caps weren’t in place for all of these wins). Frankly, I would be kind of bored with a league without an historically great team against which to measure how good our team is. 1995 was awesome (and still grates on the nerves of Yankees fans) because we we beat the Yankees.
Even if it could be achieved, parity is boring.
I’m really trying to stop the sports blog commenting, since I rarely have anythign positive to contribute, but…
the links are very interesting, thanks for those. the first quote (and article) makes the interesting point (and correct, in my opinion), that strangely, capitalists in real life suddenly become commies on the ball-field, as people more to the left (or “socialists”), suddenly become major capitalists when it comes to the issue of baseball competition.
the reason of course is because of the general american confusion that we americans have between SOCIALISM/COMMUNISM and MONOPOLY CAPITALISM. MLB is a LEGAL MONOPOLY. That’s still CAPITALIST. So, less competition on teh business side=more equality (presumably) between teams=more capitalism. more competition on the business side (getting rid of antitrust exemption)=disparity on the playing field=still capitalist, but better for the consumer.
the entire market needs to be opened up. teams need to be able to succeed and fail. sure, nyc needs more teams, as does RS nation (4 states) and phillie nation (5 states). but the KC market needs to be liberated too… just like the seattle market. baseball geography is fluid… look at the braves, who because they were on national tv have fans all over the country. seattle has a huge fan base in japan. in panama YES network is on every tv and every day there is extensive coverage of “el cerrador panameno” (tan fanatico como tu). if the kc owners are providing a sub-par product, then consumers deserve an alternative. glass shouldn’t just be granted unconditionally the entire kc market.
the point is, for any team to compete with the yankees on a business side someone is going to have to invest and risk capital. for the kc royals to compete with the yankees on the baseball and business side someone would have to have a lot of capital, a lot of time to wait, and a solid business plan. that’s the way it is in all industries between established companies and startups (and fallen angels).
and those people who want to create a monopoly in baseball are always the ones who argue that, for example, what goldman sachs just did during the economic crisis was fair, just, and good for the economy and the consumer.
Ok. All you have to do to change it is to get the federal goverment to get rid of that nasty little anti-trust exemption that gives MLB the monopoly you seem to be so irked by.
And while you’re fixing things, your shift keys seem to be malfunctioning. You may want to start with them.
Does the existence of superpowers like the Yankees/Mets encourage the existence of lamprey franchises? Let’s face it, $50 million payroll or $75 million payroll, you are still way beneath the Yankees or Mets. Why not at least turn a profit, since you likely will not win either way?
diderot, I agree not every Yankee fan is stupid. There is just such an insane amount of them that the probability of running in to one that has no clue is much higher. Just like we have some idiot M’s fan. Every team has there village idiot.
although if you read the comments after Neyer’s Gold Glove post, you might begin to wonder…
Expansion to Newark, N.J. and Albany N.Y.
Many, many problems solved.
[not cool]
Heyoka, while true that the Mariners area of influence probably comes close in population to the NYC metro area, I can live in Scarsdale and decide on a whim to attend a game that evening. The same can’t be said if I live in Butte or Boise or Roseburg. A LOT can be said for population DENSITY.
Yeah, anyone who lives ~50 miles away can do that. But using distance of 300+ miles as comparatives doesn’t really make sense.
If by “a good team” you mean “the one that has far and away the largest payroll”, yes then it does make sense for them to make the playoffs year after year. Unfortunately.
What sort of playoff streaks would we expect if the playing field was level? How unlikely would the Yankee 14 year streak be?
In the AL, there are 14 teams and 4 make the post season, or 28.6% per year. For each consecutive streak here are the probabilities for a team:
1 28.6%
2 8.2%
3 2.3%
4 0.7%
5 0.2%
…
14 0.0000024%
So a team would have about a 1 in 413,000 chance of running off a 14 year playoff streak.
But in our world, it recently happened. And not because the team was incredibly lucky.
Yeah, I’d forgotten about the Braves.
Well, they aren’t the Yankees, but the Braves did have a national TV network advantage in those years…. Not sure that’s the strongest example in rebuttal you could come up with.
Newark – maybe (as a “New Jersey” team)…
Albany – NOT! We see how well that whole “Hey, just ’cause it’s the Northeast, let’s stick a major-league franchise in every medium-sized city” thing worked out for the Hartford Whalers years ago.
Newark has an independent league baseball team currently. Been there a couple times as I go to college 30 min from Newark. Newark, also isn’t the nicest of places honestly. I don’t think a MLB franchise would do well there at all. Too much Yankeeism up here.
Also, on a side note. Our beloved Carl Everett plays outfield for the Newark Bears currently.
And I remember those bad old days of the Braves, too. It seemed like most of the time they were chasing everybody else by at least 25 games in their division, and the only thing that could wake up those hearty 1,500 or so souls who were showing up at Fulton County Stadium back then was when Dale Murphy or Bob Horner blasted a home run. Still, if you lived in an AL city before the dawn of interleague play, it was a chance to watch the NL teams that you didn’t normally get to see otherwise.
Ahh, that old TBS Saturday lineup: Bass fishing…Georgia Championship Wrestling…Atlanta Braves baseball. Good times! 🙂
Interesting how the Braves seem to have fallen back to the pack a bit since TBS started to reduce and then end their presence on the network.
Plenty of places in the Northern N.J., Southern N.Y. areas that are prettier than Newark or closer than Albany/Troy. Hell, put one in Springfield, Ma. to cut into three markets. Any expansion teams would no doubt be the poor step-child of the YankeeMets for a generation, but they will cut into their market share and help provide a bit of equity.
I don’t have the numbers to prove it, but they are out there. Find ’em yourself.
Their streak was 11 years.
re the Yankees, I really feel sorry for fans of the Jays (16 years no postseason), Rays (at least they’ll always have 2008), and Orioles (12 years). They might make it a year or two when they put together a good team, but then it will be a couple of decades before they can get back to the playoffs.
No, it was 14. There were no playoffs in ’94.
This is why (and I know I’ll probably get flamed for it from somebody here) I’m all for expanding the playoff format to those of the other major sports. While I understand the argument that “the season should be worth something,” at the same time, in MLB, each league plays the most amount of regular-season games (162) for the least amount of available playoff spots (4) — compared to the NFL at 16 and NBA/NHL at 82 each. Granted, so-called “dynasty teams” are a given in professional sports…and, as such, their presence will never be entirely eliminated. However, I believe increasing the number of wild card spots might go a lot further toward promoting parity amongst teams than a salary cap would…since certain teams in tough divisions –like the Jays, for example — might have more of an incentive to stay in the race during a decent season knowing they still might have a shot at a WC spot rather than to just throw up the white flag in the middle of July.
BTW, today’s food for thought: Not that it would’ve ultimately helped much against the Yanks this year, but the M’s would’ve gotten into the playoffs as a #7 seed in a “Best-8” format.
Would you shorten the regular season to accommodate the extra round of playoffs? Playing some WS games in November is bad enough without playing them all after Halloween.
Actually, yeah…why not go back to the original 154-game schedule? (Or, maybe even a bit shorter, say, 148.) By shaving at least a week or so off of the current schedule, you’d be able to start the playoffs in late-September…then maybe bunch the post-season rounds closer together like they were when the championship rounds started in the late-60’s/early-70’s. All those unnecessary non-travel “off” days that the networks seemed to have inserted in the post-season schedules these days have gotten completely ridiculous…I mean, if you’re going to take a month or more to play the post-season anyway, you might as well run it out to four rounds and let more teams in to generate some additional revenue.
And as far as the “cold factor” is concerned in the post-season, I think devoted fans that want to see their team win a championship will show up regardless. They certainly did for the Rox in Denver a few weeks ago — and they just about had to plow snow off the field to get those games in.
Um, I think it might be normal around these parts to bring your own proof. We can’t be expected to do your homework for you, can we?
I’m not going to “flame” you, but I do have a question: You have stated that there are 8 teams (4 from the AL and 4 from the NL) in the MLB playoffs. How exactly would you expand this system that would make sense?
Sorry, I got caught up earlier in the thread and forgot to read forward.
While I, personally, love that idea, the owners might not see it quite that way. What with the whole “money out of their pockets” thing and all.
Though the extra playoff round would certainly appeal to the teams that get there, the teams that don’t are still paying their players for 8 games or more than they are getting out of them. (Until all current contracts expire that is)
Fair enough. But what about the cold factor effect on the game itself? Remember, the cold has an effect on how the ball and bat work together too. As does moisture in the air, heavier fall winds, slickness of the field (yes, I know the grounds crew can limit this, but they can’t do so much that they totally negate it) and, of course, snow outs.
I don’t even hate them anymore. I just think they’re boring.
Yup.
I really feel sorry for fans of the Jays (16 years no postseason), Rays (at least they’ll always have 2008), and Orioles (12 years)
The Orioles have sucked for a decade because their owner hired one terrible GM after another and their farm system was essentially barren for an insanely long time. The Blue Jays seem to shift philosophy from year to year. Before Friedman, it was almost like the Rays’ GM was trying to field the worst team possible.
I have no doubt that the Yankees have a significant advantage, but I think it’s also true that the arbitration clock acts as a something of an equalizer, or at least it allows good teams who can manage their talent well to compete in certain windows. Sure the Yankees will compete year and year out, and that makes the game less interesting, but I have a hard time believing they are killing baseball.
Tranquil –
Just a shout back on this…I know there are some fans that get turned off at the prospect of 16 out of 30 teams in the league being eligible for the post-season (i.e. the whole perception that “everybody makes the playoffs”)…but that being said, you still have to win the games or you won’t get in. (Being a hockey fan as well, i’m thinking of the Canucks a couple of years back in ’07-’08 when they went 39-33-10 on the season yet failed to make the playoffs because they still finished 10th in the Western Conference.) While there’d definitely be both pros and cons in moving to such a playoff format, it seems to be working out fairly well in all the other sports — and you do see at least see more of the “cusp” teams from tough divisions as well as “small market” teams getting to the post-season (case in point, the Indy Colts).
Funny you should mention that, too (and a fair argument against), since just the opposite effect has come into play in a few instances during the Stanley Cup Finals. When the LA Kings (’93), Florida Panthers (’96) and Dallas Stars (’99-’00) made the Finals in their respective years, they found themselves playing home games in late-May/early-June in cities where the outside temperature was 80 degrees or hotter. Thus, in each of these series, there were complaints among some players of the ice being too soft or “slushy” as compared to conditions earlier in the season — and this despite a “climate-controlled” environment of air-conditioned arenas and a refrigerated surface!
And, of course, we haven’t even discussed some of the Packers’ epic “Frozen Tundra” post-season games at Lambeau Field now, have we? 😉
Scott19,
I understand what you are talking about from the fan perspective. And, not being a hockey fan, I’m not sure that I can disagree. However my point was more looking at the ownership side.
Again, Baseball and Hockey are very different games. The idea that one facility may not have managed their facility well enough to maintain the proper temp, while probably affecting the hockey game/series, has nothing to do with how Mother Nature happens to affect outdoor arenas of whatever sort.
The difference between outdoor parks and indoor stadia cannot be simplified with air conditioning and/or refrigeration.
Tranquil –
Granted, I’ll admit my bias in this case favors the fans over the owners…probably since I am (as well as probably the rest of us here) in the majority of those who are paying between $20-60 a pop to attend games…so, I know they have reasons not to change the current status quo as well. In all honesty, while I might deep down believe that a change toward more parity in the game is inevitable, I’m not sure when it might eventually happen — or what form it will take.
As far as post-season sports are concerned, I guess I was just trying to point out the issues which all these different games have in regard to weather conditions and such (whether hot or cold). I think it’s then fair to assume that, whether it’s either heat, cold, precipitation, or even relative humidity…baseball, football, hockey, or soccer all have their own sets of variables to deal with in regard to playing late in the season. The only major sport that seems to have avoided most of this is basketball — since it’s both played out of the elements and on a solid surface. (And yet, not to be at all snarky, but the rumor which used to go around about Ray Allen wearing a extra thermal layer while with the Sonics was that he felt the floor at the Key was always “cold” — which is probably because the wooden surface for the Sonics’ home games back then was laid over the ice for the T-Birds home games!)
In any event, I’m glad we’ve at least been able to enjoy an intelligent discourse about this. As a bunch of us mentioned in Derek’s thread re some of the new users, it’s the level of the discussion here that I think we all appreciate — and which keeps USSM a cut above the rest.