Quote:
Originally Posted by marc
This is America. I can't think of anything more communistic and un-american than a Salary Cap. You don't penalize teams that have good fanbases that actually support the team.
Life isn't fair, the local food mart doesn't have the same chance to succeed as a Wal-Mart franchise. Why in the world should these leagues go out of their way to make bad teams and poorly run franchises more successful?
In the business world, and let's face it that is what pro sports is, those franchises would fold or go out of business.
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Sports relies on reasonably fair competition between teams to keep fan interest up. If one team starts out having a league-granted and government-supported monopoly on a huge population base, and another team starts out having a similar monopoly on a population base 1/5th as big, you've slanted the results before you play a single game.
How is it American to have the government of New York give the Yankees and Mets $billions in tax dollar to subsidize their business? How is it American to pretend that a team with $400M in annual revenues and no limits on how they use those revenues is in equal competition with a team from a rustbelt city with a tiny fraction of New York's population and wealth?
Yes, it's a problem that MLB has made it less risky for small market teams to not try than it is to try. They've incentivized losing, and that's horrible. But that doesn't make it all right that the Yankees and other large market teams have been granted sole domain over massive population centers with incredible wealth.
If the Royals or the Orioles were 100% efficient and had owners who were 100% dedicated to fielding a winning team they still couldn't spend half as much as the Yankees. I think it's wrong to have a sports league where some teams simply cannot develop resources necessary to compete with their peers no matter what they do.
One of America's founding pricipals is that all are created equal. Everyone has the same opportunity to succeed based on their abilities and their hard work. Baseball has decided that all teams are created very unequally, and that's ok, because if you're the Rays or the Orioles and you work really hard and make smart decisions you can reap the rewards of finishing 10 games behind the Sox and Yanks.