The Yankees Are In Full-Fledged Freefall

[Carter08]

Originally Posted by John1941

Take the Pirates. From a USA Today article: "The Pittsburgh Pirates, according to information received by the players union and confirmed by several owners, are one of the most profitable teams in all of baseball, stashing a huge chunk of their revenue sharing monies instead of investing in their team year after year." https://www.usatoday.com/story/sport...s/83556338007/

The Pirates' owner treats the team as a cash cow. Result: the Pirates have a 29-45 record and all of their stars like Skenes and Oneil Cruz will leave when they can because the Pirates will refuse to spend the money necessary to keep them.

How must that feel as a Pirate fan, for your owner to care only about making a profit and not about having a winning team? How is that not unfortunate for baseball?

"Building a team the old fashioned way" implies these cheap teams are trying to build a winning team. They're not.

That’s why a salary floor and a cap would be good. The floor helps ensure teams don’t go too cheap and the cap keeps some competitiveness to the field and makes owners and GMs at least pretend to have to be smart. Football offseason is so interesting because most competitive teams know where they are weak and the trick is finding salary to upgrade there. Teams get penalized when they whiff on an expensive free agent. They have to let that salary die off rather than just keep spending. Football is outrageously more popular than baseball and I think it’s in part because the teams operate from a relatively even playing field, until it’s an important fourth down call when the Chiefs have an unfair advantage.