Revenue Sharing

Apparently because I don’t know any better, and don’t like normal blood pressure, I was listening to sports talk radio this morning, specifically the Mike & Mike In The Morning on ESPN radio. They’re almost the least-infuriating of the ESPN Radio lineup, and would be if it weren’t for Scott VanPelt. But I digress.

This morning they were talking about some public spat between the Brewers and the Yankees on the topic of revenue sharing and payroll and whatnot. According to the guys, the Brewers have a payroll of around $80 million this year, and the Yankees have around $200 million. Supposedly, this catastrophic difference in spending (which is not the worst… some teams have payrolls around $30 million) is alleviated by the MLB’s revenue sharing program, where the Yankees essentially pay a fat tax, to the tune of $170 million, to the MLB because they have such rich cable television deals. That money gets then distributed out to the smaller market teams that don’t have such awesome revenue streams.

Here’s the thing that makes no sense at all. That $170 million that the Yanks contributed? According to the show, that’s 90% of all revenue sharing funds collected by the league. So quick math says, at most, they have $190 million to play with, which breaks out to… um… on average, about $6 million per team, for the other 29 teams in the league.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but $6 million isn’t really going to make much of a dent in that $120 million difference in payroll. That’s not going to convince anyone to come out and play for you if the Yankees can offer ten or twenty times that to a big name player. That’s not actually going to make a lick of difference. Aside from Boston and maybe LA, no one else is ever going to be able to spend that kind of money.

Now, I know that the money doesn’t always make the team–pre-salary cap the New York Rangers of the NHL regularly had the highest payroll, or second-highest to Detroit, and regularly failed to make the playoffs. And the Knicks aren’t doing so hot either, despite a fat bank. But the Yankees are like the Wings were in their pre-cap heyday, picking off essentially whoever they want on the team. (They have yet to hit the Wings excess of signing up bona fide Hall of Famers to anchor their fourth line, but they’re not far off.)

But still. Claiming that the revenue sharing plan is enough to help entice a top-tier player to stay with a team that has an $80 million payroll budget, when the $200 million payroll team can literally pay him twice as much is just damn silly. Long past time for baseball to get a salary cap and move things back to where teams can compete for top players.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.