Offseason baseball Thread

Giggles.
They couldn't even get this right.

 

Googles "NYC Apartments within 3 miles of Yankee Stadium"

 

So here's the thing, OOP, the baked-in advantage that high-payroll teams may have really isn't much of an advantage. The results show MLB is competitively balanced. Since 2011, the only teams not to make the playoffs are the Marlins, Padres, White Sox and Mariners (and hell, two of those teams have won a World Series in the past 15 years). Half the league - 15 teams - has advanced to the league championship series.

By comparison, the NFL, with its salary cap, has had 24 of its 32 teams make the playoffs (despite having more slots available) and 12 teams have made the conference championships.

If you go back to 1995 (the start of the Wild Card Era in MLB), the NFL and MLB have had the same number of teams win the championship.

 

You are making the same mistake others do in defense of MLB's system, you are mixing up parity with a level playing field. They are related, but not the same thing.

I looked back 20 years and couldn't find a single example of a team in the bottom 10 in payroll in MLB winning a World Series. It has happened multiple times in the NFL. The Giants were second from the bottom in payroll for one of their Super Bowl victories over the Patriots.

Also, the gap from top to bottom in payroll in the NFL is much smaller than the gap in MLB even though NFL teams are spreading that payroll out among more players.

When NFL teams contend consistently or dominate the way the Patriots have, they aren't buying their way to victory. They are earning it. That isn't always the case in MLB.

 

Don't forget, the NFL team salaries are more or less fictional, since team payrolls do not include much of the guaranteed money that players earn. The Patriots were fourth-to-last in salary last season. Tom Brady earned more than $28 million last season but counted only $13M against the cap.

 

I would suspect this is because of how effective the union is in the MLB, vs. the NFL, and the development curves for players in both sports. In the NFL, a team of the best rookies and/or second-year players at each position would probably be a high-quality playoff contender. I don't think that's the case for baseball.

Also, baseball players have longer careers. A guy can be as productive at 30 as 21, although the cost of the 30-year-old will be higher because of service time and free agency. Football has way more churn. In baseball, it's unlikely that you're going to have a roster that's 1) young at every position and 2) also cheap at every position. You'd basically have to hit on almost every draft pick for a year or two, but more practically, most teams get between 1 and 5 regulars per draft class, so you're always going to have a variety of ages and you need to supplement with free agency.

 

This is an important point. Baseball payrolls are in real money. The NFL has about three sets of payroll books.

 

Teams still have to fit players under the cap, regardless of how the money is actually spent. They also have to meet the salary floor, something important that baseball does not have.

 

There are also factors that create parity in baseball that are built into the game, such as the unpredictability of pitching. Maybe a team doesn't have the best overall roster, but it has a couple of aces and a mediocre pitcher who gets hot at the right time.

The point is, there are always other variables at play. But that doesn't change the fact that MLB allows payroll to be a built-in advantage for some teams and disadvantage for others in a way that the NFL does not.

 

He can rent Jeter’s place at TrumpTower

 

I might have felt more empathy for smaller markets X years ago, but admittedly, that's faded now that pretty much every team is owned by billionaires, and the value of an owner's asset (the team) means it's almost impossible for him to not recoup his initial investment, even if he ran up years and years of operating losses on payroll. Fuck, the Marlins apparently sold for $1.2 billion, and they were run into the ground by Loria.

 

But the cap money is all funny money. It’s silly to pretend the Patriots were fourth from the bottom in payroll and use that as an example of how even low payroll teams can win a Super Bowl.

The Pats are better at accounting than other teams (and more willing to guarantee money to gain cap relief).