A look from the outside:
<i>Crying poverty, some MLB owners are laughing all the way to the bank
Bill Madden/ New York Daily News
With the September stretch looming, five of the seven teams with $100 million or more payrolls - the Yankees ($201M), Dodgers ($100M), Phillies ($113M), Angels ($114M) and Tigers ($115M) - are leading their divisions and looking more like odds-on favorites to make the postseason. One other, the Red Sox ($122M), cannot be discounted for a wild-card berth despite their recent struggles.
Of the two $100 million-plus teams looking like October "outs," the $149M Mets can attribute their demise to injuries and a bad farm system while the $134M Cubs can blame injuries and bad judgment on player signings.
Meanwhile, on the flip side of the equation, we have witnessed the middle-market Cleveland Indians and Pittsburgh Pirates trading away their best players and, in effect, rendering themselves non-competitive for the foreseeable future, all in the name of financial duress.
This is exactly what former commissioner Bowie Kuhn warned would happen back in December of 1975, when baseball arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the reserve clause did not bind players to their teams for life, thus opening the floodgates of free agency. The rich teams will buy up all the good players, Kuhn complained, and the middle- and small-market teams will be hard-pressed to compete.
As it turned out, Kuhn's fears proved unfounded as free agency actually reaped more competitive balance than ever through the '80s and into the '90s, despite the absence of revenue sharing. That's why it's so disingenuous to hear all this poor-mouthing from some owners today amid renewed calls for a salary cap.
Cleveland president Paul Dolan, in attempting to justify the jettisoning of '08 AL Cy Young winner Cliff Lee and the Tribe's top slugger, Victor Martinez, maintained that the team will lose $16 million this year because the projected 2.2 million attendance will fall far short of that, to about 1.7.
"After we traded Cliff, we made a commitment toward a new direction for the franchise," Dolan doublespoke. "We needed to make moves that put us in the best position to compete as soon as possible."
How dumb does he think Cleveland fans are? How are the Indians putting themselves in the best position to compete as soon as possible by trading two of their best players - who both were signed for next year for a total of less than $15 million? I guess it all depends on which set of books Dolan is looking at. Here are the facts:
Last year, Major League Baseball transferred approximately $400 million in revenue sharing and luxury tax - a little more than 25% of that coming from the Yankees alone. The Indians received slightly more than $20 million and the Pirates - despite their beautiful, eight-year-old, taxpaper-funded stadium - received over $40 million. This is how MLB rewards incompetent ownership.
In addition to that, all major league teams received stipends of $35 million from the MLB central fund, which includes revenue from licensing, properties, national TV and advanced media. So going in, the Indians had approximately $55 million in the bank offset by their $81 million payroll - a deficit of about $25 million before they sold one ticket.
The Pirates had about $75 million in the bank, offset by their $48 million payroll, which means they had a profit of $35 million before they sold one ticket. And this doesn't even include what these teams additionally reap from their local TV and radio rights packages and in-house concessions, advertising, signage, parking, etc.
Even in this recession, baseball remains awash in money, and teams that are winning are all drawing as well as or better than their preseason projections. If you win, they will come. It's that simple.
Unfortunately for Pirates fans and now Indians fans, ownership is not willing to spend what it takes to be competitive. Instead, they pocket all that revenue-sharing and central fund dough and claim they're losing money, meaning they must trade away their best players to "secure the future." What future?
Hard as this might be to believe, baseball has managed to turn back the clock 60 years, resurrecting the spirit of the St. Louis Browns and Philadelphia A's, teams that routinely sold off their best players to the Yankees and Red Sox to stay in business. The only difference is that those teams really were broke. The disgraceful Dolans in Cleveland and Bob Nutting and Frank Coonelly in Pittsburgh are crying poverty and cheating their fans all the way to the bank.
</i> Link:
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/2009/08/15/2009-08-15_crying_poverty_some_mlb_owners.html