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sports nut: The stadium scene.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Your New York Devil Rays!Why shouldn't teams move wherever they want?

By Steve Chapman
Posted Thursday, Sept. 5, 2002, at 1:25 PM ET
Memo to Bud Selig: Let the teams come to the fans

In recent weeks, the demands made for the reform of Major League Baseball sounded like they were plagiarized from Huey Long: Soak the rich! Share the wealth! To each according to his need! Baseball was listening. The strike-averting settlement reached by owners and players last week reflects the consensus that what America's sport needs is a big dose of a foreign ideology: socialism.

The game, you see, has lost its competitive balance. Fat-cat teams like the Yankees and Braves amass revenues that dwarf those of Montreal and Kansas City—allowing them to acquire the best players money can buy and lock up playoff spots year after year. Commissioner Bud Selig makes an unassailable point when he says it's too hard for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, spending $43 million a year on player salaries, to go head-to-head with the Yankees, who cheerfully lay out four times that much. Compare that with the NFL, where revenue sharing prevails, and where a squad from the remote village of Green Bay, Wis., (population 102,000) regularly humbles teams from New York and Chicago.

So, baseball owners came up with a cockamamie scheme aimed at reducing inequality: redistributing income from the haves to the have-nots and penalizing lavish expenditures. The agreement that averted a strike will divert nearly a billion dollars from wealthy franchises to poor ones over the next four years. Meanwhile, big spending will be sternly punished with a "luxury tax" on any team's payroll exceeding $117 million. This combination is supposed to shrink the gap among team payrolls and give fans in the provinces a chance of seeing a pennant a bit more often than Halley's comet.

But it's absurd to think that competition has ruined the national pastime. If anything, the imbalance decried by owners and fans stems from a shortage of capitalism, not from an excess. Using some artificial formula to equalize revenues will serve as only a modest hindrance to the big spenders. A more promising remedy is to do for teams what free agency did for players: Stop forcing them to stay in the same place forever, and let them migrate in search of riches.

The disparity between teams in large and small markets may seem like an unalterable law of nature. There is no way around the fact that some cities have far more fans and TV viewers to cash in on. But in conventional businesses, profits don't parallel population. The reason George Steinbrenner pulls in such vast streams of cash is not that he enjoys access to the biggest market in the country. It's that he enjoys nearly exclusive access to that market. In any other industry, a firm earning outsized profits would attract lots of rivals eager to grab some of its business. But in baseball, such undignified wrangling isn't allowed. Residents of the New York metropolitan area can choose from a dozen ballet companies, hundreds of car dealers, and thousands of pizza joints. But they have only two options for Major League Baseball: the Yankees and the Mets.

With more than 20 million potential customers locally available, the region could undoubtedly house additional big league teams. University of Chicago sports economist Allen Sanderson figures that five clubs might feed comfortably off the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut fan base. Chicago, whose suburbs currently support four minor league teams, could absorb another big-league franchise. Southern California might attract a couple more as well. Washington, D.C., has long pined for an expansion franchise, only to be blocked by the Baltimore Orioles, who prefer not to share their patrons. With free movement, the O's would have no more say in the matter than Wal-Mart has over Target's expansion strategy.

But Major League Baseball treats its teams like medieval serfs, tied to the land for life. No franchise has been allowed to relocate since 1971, when the Senators abandoned the nation's capital for Arlington, Texas. The simplest thing baseball could do to eliminate the advantages of wealthy teams is to let franchises go wherever the getting is good. If New York can support more than two teams—as it did when it was much smaller, before the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn—there's no good reason it shouldn't have the chance. Owner Walter O'Malley, after all, left not because he couldn't attract fans but because he couldn't get the new ballpark he wanted in Brooklyn and was able to secure a sweet deal in Los Angeles.

Unrestricted movement would give the sport something resembling a competitive environment. The revenues of wealthy teams like the Yankees would shrink in consequence, leaving them less money to purchase pennants. Selig sees contraction as the way to restore balance, by eliminating the weakest performers. But in a freer market, cash-starved teams could go where they are wanted. If the Royals lack a sufficient following in Kansas City, maybe they could find one in Newark or Bridgeport. True, some cities would lose baseball. But preserving teams in places that can't support them makes no more sense than keeping steel mills open when their costs exceed their rivals'.

The deal that settled the strike creates a system resembling welfare before it was reformed—penalizing the most ambitious clients while creating a permanent class of underperforming dependents. Better to insist that they all do more to fend for themselves. For players, Major League Baseball is a ruthless meritocracy, with only the best surviving. It's time for owners to try that system too.

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Steve Chapman is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
Photograph of Bud Selig by Sue Ogrocki/Reuters/Corbis.
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Remarks From The Fray:

… [T]his is a national pastime, right? Bunching all the teams around a few major hubs isn't exactly an ideal solution. Sure, remove it from pathetic locations like Montreal; leaving town isn't necessarily a horrible back stabbing act. Nonetheless, Kansas City doesn't stink because of its location ... other small market teams are at least moderately respectable. Location also doesn't help the Cubs get .500 records these days either.

There is something to be said with having teams somewhat evenly sprinked around the country, and having some system that allows even smaller markets to have some hope of winning. How fun is a game in which a few locations always win and don't have challenging opponents? The current solution, though flawed (money is after all not guaranteed to be spent on players, etc.), helps ... teams like the Yanks are encouraged not to be greedy and smaller market teams get that little bit of money that some need to get over the hump.

Five teams in NYC doesn't seem to be a great alternative in my eyes.

-- joe

(To reply, click here.)

The obvious, yet for some reason unstated, problem with this piece is Major League Baseball's anti-trust exemption. In order for franchise movement to be a reality, this exemption would have to be repealed by Congress. At various times during baseball's labor disputes, certain labor-friendly senators have held the repeal of the exemption over the owners heads like a sword of Damocles. As soon as the dispute is settled, however, the threat recedes. There is not likely to be any momentum in Congress to repeal the exemption now that the strike has been averted, at least not until 2006.

The reason the repeal of the anti-trust exemption is a credible threat to the owners is that it would cause the very thing this piece describes to occur. The owners of the big market teams, who usually have the most clout among the owners and with Congress, do not want other teams crowding into their space and stealing market share, and therefore have worked hard to maintain the exemption.

This article, as with many I have read on this subject, completely ignores the economic and political realities that have turned Major League Baseball into the colossal mess it has become. Many of these realities involve the individual owners, who have managed at every turn, through unmitigated greed and stupidity, to put their own narrow self-interests ahead of the greater good of the sport and the league. Until these captains of idiocy sell their stakes, die, or retire, and are not replaced by even stupider gentlemen and ladies, the game will never find the long-term success it is looking for.

-- Tim Lowell

(To reply, click here.)

Absolutely spot on regarding stadiums. This article is a cry for the bad old future where teams blackmail communities for stadium welfare. "Build us a stadium with a retractable roof, short-term lease and control of all revenue streams or we will move to Newark. No one can stop us!".

It also fails to note that it isn't only certain powerful owners with carved out hot markets that are not interested in "true capitalism"; it is the players too. They cry crocodile tears about prefering expansions into these markets over mild revenue sharing but that is the last thing they REALLY want.

If there is any truism to human nature it is that everyone believes they are better than they really are, and professional athletes are by nature even more susceptible to this. So the last thing they want is an even playing field of teams, with none willing or able to outbid the other. The players know that without the Yankees and Braves to boost the salaries of the most talented 5% those atmospheric numbers will never be reached.

In a way this article buys into the whole charade that there really is a "crisis" in baseball financing. The fact is that the system is working the way the powers that be on both sides want it to. It may be hysterical, but it ain't broke.

-- Herb Garcia

(To reply, click here.)


I also like his idea of unrestricted access to markets. You'll notice that the guys with the big markets are the ones who aren't feeling quite so open-minded about this kind of competitive opportunity.

But Chapman has fallen victim to the same mistake so many of his peers have. Namely, that Major League Baseball is dominated by only a handful of teams. And those teams are rich, in large markets (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles) and cannot be overcome because they have an unfair advantage.

This is simply not true. Yes, yes, yes, the Yankees are tough, but Arizona was tougher last year. Didja know that in the last twenty years, Florida, Minnesota (2 times), Cincinnati, Oakland, KANSAS CITY, Detroit, Baltimore and St. Louis have all won The World Series? How 'bout Toronto (twice) and yes, Atlanta and The New York Yankees. Throw in Los Angeles and you find that THE LAST TWENTY WORLD SERIES HAVE GONE TO THIRTEEN DIFFERENT TEAMS!

-- Loran

(To reply, click here.)

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