I am a diehard Yankees fan

[AHF]

Certainly if the large market teams do things the right way they will have an advantage. Another issue is that when a team like Red Sox or Yankees pay 20-30 or however million in luxury tax and that's distributed back to the small market teams those teams need to use that money to sign players and not pocket it. The Marlins are notoriously cheap whereas the Rays have been willing to spend money on their stadium and players even though they're in a much smaller market than the Marlins. The Rays also make educated gambles on players like what they did with locking up Evan Longoria 6 games into his rookie season on a long term deal that will save them millions over what he's probably worth while a team like the Marlins rides their rookie contracts and then lets them go when they can't afford them in FA.

I don't know what you can do to fix the system either. It's certainly not fair in the NBA either when you can have a team like the Knicks that could easily afford a 100 million dollar payroll and pay the luxury tax as well. I also don't know how you go about setting a hard cap in MLB with so many enormous contracts since the players union would never allow that.

The NBA is a good example as to how I think they should do it. You don't have absolute parity but the penalty for exceeding the luxury tax is set much lower and is much more painful in the NBA and you have minimum salary thresholds that require spending by the bottom teams.

In the NBA, the difference in total salary between the 7th highest payroll and the 28th is $20 million.

In MLB, the difference in total salary between the 7th highest payroll and the 28th highest is $75 million.

That means most of the teams are bunched pretty closely in the NBA and there is much wider spread in MLB.

In baseball, the lowest payroll is 1/2 of the second lowest payroll and 1/4 of the median payroll.

In the NBA, the lowest payroll is roughly equal to the second lowest payroll and 2/3 of the median payroll.

MLB's top payroll is 10.0x the lowest payroll and roughly 2.5x the median payroll.

NBA's top payroll is roughly 2.2x the lowest payroll and less than 1.5x the payroll of the median team.

In baseball, the fifth highest payroll is 1.5x the median payroll.

In the NBA, there is not a single team whose payroll is 1.5x times the payroll of the median team.

There are only 2 teams that earn 1.5x the payroll of the 26th highest payroll in the NBA.

In short, a move to an NBA structure would be a very healthy change for MLB, IMO. I don't think it is realistic for baseball to move to a hard cap, but an NBA style soft cap with salary floors and significant luxury penalties would be a real improvement.

Edited November 17, 2008 by AHF

[CBAreject]

I just read something that the Yankees are preparing a 6 year 150 million dollar offer to Sabathia that may not even be the highest they're willing to go. Granted the team cleared 91 million off the payroll this offseason but damn that is a ridiculous amount of money to pay for an overweight pitcher who has thrown a lot of innings. I really hope that this is just speculation and not reality!

I think this signing would be fairly reasonable in the light of recent absurd Yankee payouts. Nobody was more tickled than me that the Yankees pathetically missed the playoffs in spite of having the most bloated payroll in baseball, but I have to say that signing CC would actually be a good move for them. Think about how much they paid for Pavano, Wright, and Vasquez, none of whom amounted to even an adequate pitcher. Just lump that into the big mound that is CC, and you'll get something for your money. You guys know you're going to spew so much money this offseason after missing the playoffs. You might as well get something quality. You know CC's going to win 20 games with the offense you'll spend at least 100 million on.

What I'd worry about is if the Yanks tried to throw 18 million or so at AJ Burnett or 15 million at Randy Wolf.