MLB 2022: The Long and Winding Thread

It has nothing to do with small market vs. large market. That manifests itself in payrolls, ability to resign players, get free agents, etc.

Mike Chernoff is constrained as a GM in that he can't spend what a large market team does. But he's still trying to win with what he can put into his payroll. And it's more of a feather in his cap if he actually can defy all odds and win with a $65 million total payroll. For obvious reasons.

He was a game away from the league championship series. His chance to pull off a miracle and get to a world series with that team was NOW. This is why teams sometimes mortgage their futures at the trade deadline. You go for it in the moment, because more likely than not the chance is not going to be there in the future. Especially when you are a small market team that can't spend and relies on lightning in a bottle in any given year.

I would bet with near certainty that if you told Chernoff he had to lose Shane Bieber for nothing after the season is over (and this wasn't his dilemma; they could have pitched Bieber AND still potentially trade him), but the tradeoff would have been a win against the Yankees to get them within one series of the World Series, he would have taken that 100 times out of 100. Sure, take Bieber, but put us 4 games away from the world series. The goal isn't to shave salary. That is the concession that is forced on a team like Cleveland.

The goal is to win, and you are nuts if you think that in a winner-take-all game with a trip to the ALCS on the line they sat a guy for some nonsense that makes no sense anyhow.

 

You need to be a billionaire to own a team because the franchises cost in the billions of dollars to purchase. It's that simple. You ain't getting your hands on a team unless you have an obscene amount of money to pay to someone who is selling one.

The personal wealth of the owners has nothing to do with the operating income of the teams as businesses. The players earn nice salaries, but the teams derive revenue over the course of a season that can cover those salaries. And on a net operating income basis, it leaves a profit for most of the teams.

The franchise values aren't as high as they are because of the actual income the teams earn, though, which is in the tens of millions of dollars a year for the typical team. The teams are worth so much because of scarcity. There are a limited number of teams, one only becomes available for purchase every so often, and there are way more people with money who want to own a team for vanity reasons than there are teams. So team values have gotten bid up into the billions of dollars. One becomes available and there are competing swinging d&^ks eager to wrangle it.