Major League Baseball needs to get its financial house in order.  The current revenue sharing system is not getting the job done. 

         While examples abound in daily life, one still needs to look no further than major league baseball for proof that socialism is an abject failure. Just pick up your morning paper (or look it up on-line) and you'll see Pittsburgh, Washington, Baltimore, Kansas City, Arizona and San Diego among the weakest teams in professional baseball. Sadly for all the fans of those teams, this seems to be an annual event.

         This season, the Pittsburgh Pirates decided to completely strip themselves of any semblance of recognizable veteran talent. In the process, they trimmed their payroll down to $26.1 million – lowest in all of major league baseball. David Jacobsen writes on bnet.com :

         The practice continues, apparently. While exact figures for revenue-sharing are not readily available, the Pirates' purported take this year was in the neighborhood of $48 million. The Pirates are heading for their 17th straight sub-.500 season, but are annually ranked in the top five major league clubs in profitability. In the past two seasons alone, the litany of players dealt away by the Pirates reads like an All-Star team. That assemblage of players has been well-documented elsewhere, so I won't chew up space by repeating old information. Suffice it to say that Pittsburgh has cast off a complete line up, including four outfielders and several members of an already weak bullpen.

         Revenue-sharing was put into place to "restore the competitive balance of the game" – a laughable proposition when teams can disassemble at will without regard to balancing anything, but their bottom line. Make no mistake, I don't think baseball could ever last long as a professional entity without a measure of fiscal prudence. On the other hand, there is no precedent – either in major league sports, or in any other capitalistic, profit-seeking enterprise – for destroying yourself today in hopes of gaining a better future. All the while, such action only serves to strengthen your competition in the here and now. I have heard all the bubbly, pie-in-the-sky enthusiasm for giving rookies a chance to show what they have to offer. Rookies, for the most part, are green and require seasoning to learn their craft and hone their skills. Rushing them into action only serves to magnify all shortcomings and more often than not, unintentionally reinforces poor fundamental habits.

         Baseball wouldn't find itself in this sort of situation if it had a real Commissioner. Allan Huber "Bud" Selig was a 35 year-old owner of a Milwaukee car leasing business in 1969 when he bought the Seattle Pilots in bankruptcy court and the team became the Milwaukee Brewers. He'd previously been the largest public stockholder of the Milwaukee Braves. However, he had no background to suggest that he could serve successfully as baseball's commissioner. He retained ownership of a major league franchise when named to replace Fay Vincent as Commissioner. This is an undeniable conflict of interest. That issue was glossed over by his handing his ownership interest off to his daughter, Wendy Selig-Prieb. Since then, the Selig ownership sold the team to Mark Attanasio. However, questions still linger about Bud's running the team during much of his Commissionership.

         Selig was part of owner's collusion in 19851987, resulting in the owners paying $280 million in damages to the players – a charge he denies to this day. No team in baseball had ever engaged in "salary-dumping" until Selig became Commissioner. Some of Selig's predecessors were those with law degrees such as Fay Vincent, Bowie Kuhn, and Kenesaw Mountain Landis (arguably baseball's most "notorious" Commissioner). To the credit of these men, they ran a far more independent Commissioner's Office than Selig could ever hope to. Once, Charlie Finley, then owner of the Oakland Athletics, tried dumping players to put cash in his pocket. Bowie Kuhn put a stop to the attempt, citing the desecration of baseball's competitive balance.

         Like the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Washington Nationals are a perennial cellar-dwelling team. Charles Bronfman turned the expansion Montreal Expos into a hungry, winning organization before selling the team in 1990. It subsequently moved to Washington, DC in 2004, but the losing practices have followed them to their new location. After the Bronfman sale, the team stripped themselves of much of their homegrown talent, too. But, no team in major league baseball history has ever blown up their roster in mid-season to the degree the Pirates have this season. With no Commissioner to stop this foolish practice, a message is sent to the fans. It tells them that winning isn't important. It tells them the team looks at them as simply rubes with money to spend. It can get away with telling its fan base year upon year "to have patience because the team is re-building." With revenue-sharing, the team really doesn't need to draw all that many fans, either. Isn't that the point of an entertainment industry – to draw fans?

         Revenue-sharing, as has any attempt at socialism, has fallen on its face. Baseball's hierarchy needs to rectify the current situation. The options are many. Perhaps a salary cap would help. It has worked thus far in the NFL. The Pirates' "brother" sports franchise, the Pittsburgh Steelers, are operating just fine under the confines of a team cap. Another idea is more stark and perhaps intensely controversial; re-instituting of baseball's reserve clause. Teams such as the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees are annually spending the equivalent of a Third World country's GDP, pushing the signings of college and high school draftees to ridiculous heights. Revenue-sharing cannot address these sorts of problems, since baseball lacks sufficient power to dictate teams' spending habits.

         When the historic Seitz decision was handed down in 1975, effectively ending the reserve clause and ushering in an era of free agency, many wags predicted that would spell baseball's doom. Perhaps, in the bigger picture, the naysayers were right, after all. It's just taken more time than anyone ever expected for the decision to bite the game in the backside.