Thursday, November 5, 2009

Does Baseball need a CAP ?

Does baseball need a salary cap? Would a salary cap as we currently know it work in MLB considering how the farm systems are intertwined into the mix ? Is the Luxury Tax the way to go, but simply not stiff enough ? Along with a hard top, should there also be a firm bottom that teams must remain above ?

Per the CBA
The Tax Threshold shall be $148 Million in the 2007 Contract Year, $155 Million in the 2008 Contract Year, $162 Million in the 2009 Contract Year, $170m in the 2010 Contract Year and $178m in the 2011 Contract Year

Top 10 team Payrolls in 2009 From CBS

2009 Team Payrolls
No.TeamPayrollAverage
1.New York Yankees$201,449,289$7,748,050
2.New York Mets $135,773,988$4,849,071
3.Chicago Cubs$135,050,000$5,402,000
4.Boston Red Sox$122,696,000$4,089,867
5.Detroit Tigers$115,085,145$4,110,184
6.Los Angeles Angels$113,709,000$4,061,036
7.Philadelphia Phillies$113,004,048$4,185,335
8.Houston Astros $102,996,415$3,814,682
9.Los Angeles Dodgers$100,458,101$4,018,324
10.Seattle Mariners$98,904,167$3,532,292

Only one team has eclipsed the Luxury Tax, and they blew past it. Is there any shock that it's also the team that just won the World Series? It may sound like sour grapes, but how can small-mid market teams hope to compete with this kind of spending ? Is greater revenue sharing the answer? Should there be stiffer penalties such as loss of draft picks, or forfeiting your right to mid-season trades to go with it ?

One thing is certain, and that is that MLB is broken when ONE team can spend almost as much as the bottom 5 teams combined, and that needs to be fixed !

Play Ball !!!


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, the bottom 5 teams need to be contracted or forced to spend more money.