<<Baseball still needs to do something to make it fairer for the small market teams>>
you're going to kill me for this, but i actually like it the way it is. in football, you have a salary cap, revenue sharing, and an unbalanced schedule (i.e. good teams play good teams; crappy teams play crappy teams) and what you are left with is a bunch of mediocre teams, crappy teams that make the playoffs (think the Bears two years ago, who got in on the strength of not playing anybody with a better than .500 record), and no real sense of continuity in terms of who the quality teams are.
in baseball, you get periods of continuity, but a long-wave ebb and flow that gets just about everybody involved eventually. plus you get the occassional surprise (like say the Angels last year). it was not that long ago that the Red Sox and Yankees pretty much sucked, and the Blue Jays were winning two consecutive World Series. the Indians sucked, then were very good for a long time (including two Series appearances), now suck again, but are on course to be very good again in 2005 or so. ditto the Twins (two World Series wins, a long period in the wilderness, now one of the top 3 teams in the AL).
the teams that are very bad right now owe most of their very badness to poor management and terrible contract signings, not to the supposed inequities of baseball. look at some of the players that the Royals, Tigers, Pirates and Orioles have signed over the years, and for how much (need i say, "Derek Bell"??). sure, maybe its not fair that the Yankees can sign Rondell White AND Raul Mondesi, decide that the BOTH suck, and then go out and spend another $7mm on Hideki Matsui. but the Yankees are a special case, and the only way that is going to get fixed is to do the right thing and put a third team in NYC. all the money in the world has not done shit for the Dodgers, Rangers or the Orioles, hasn't gotten Seattle past Game 6 of the LCS, and hasn't won the Red Sox a world title in something like 150 years. meanwhile the A's keep winning 100 games, Toronto is one arm away from seriously challenging in the east, KC will deal Beltran for a passel of good players from the Yankees far system that will be the core of their great 2006 team, the lovable loser Cubs will ride the arms of Wood, Prior, and Zambrano to 2 or 3 World Series, the Red Sox will fall 'cause they can't pay all of Nomar, Pedro, Manny, Lowe and Varitek after next year, and the Yankees will collapse under the worst signing in baseball in the last 100 years, the $17mm a year they gave Derek Jeter. the beauty of baseball is what goes around comes around, if you can just have some patience.
Cheers |
