I’m Ashamed To Be A Baseball Fan
I am ashamed to be a baseball fan. Freaking ashamed. Bud Selig needs to be fired right now for letting this madness go on. I don’t care who you are or what you think, this whole league is a joke. A freaking joke.
The reason so many people hate baseball is because so many teams suck. They suck because teams like the Yankees spend money like mad and sign all the best players every year. This year the Yankees have signed the top 3 free agents on the market, C.C. Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, and now Mark Teixeira. This is in no way fair to the rest of the league. The Yankees also have the top 4 highest paid players in all of baseball now.
I am sick to my stomach right now, I am that angry. I have to sit and watch my favorite team sit and do nothing because they are out spent every single year. I sit and watch one team, just one, out spend the rest of the league while the commissioner sits and watches. I honestly think that Bud Selig is a Yankees fan. He has to be. He obviously doesn’t care that the rest of the league has to get New York’s scraps every year.
The NFL is full of really good teams every year. Every year the NFL has 8-10 teams in each conference fighting for a playoff spot. This is because there is a salary cap. It is really that simple. Teams have to draft smart and can’t just sign or trade for the best players because they can take on their giant contract. The best players are all over the league on different teams, not stacked on one team. You can find any team in the NFL and name at least one superstar. You can’t do that in baseball.
I am so mad right now I may give up on baseball all together. My dream was to be a baseball writer for ESPN one day. That is damn near gone. I don’t want to write about the Yankees signing every free agent every year. I don’t want to write about the Yankees winning the World Series every damn year. I loved baseball by far more than any other sport. I have defended baseball as a sport in arguments with soccer players for years now. I am just about finished. Baseball is a joke.
Screw baseball,
~Ben
Hardball 
I have to disagree. The Yankees make the money and put the money back into the team. Also the Yankees do not win every year. In fact it has been 9 years since they won. From 1979-1995 the Yankees did nothing. Teams like the Twins and Reds are the problem in baseball on many fronts. They have rich owners, make money through revenue sharing and do not put it back into the team. The Braves lost out on Burnett by a few million just like the Red Sox lost out on Teixeira by a few million, it was their choice not to go the extra mile and close the deal. I do not think anybody can complain about payrolls anymore with the success of teams like the Twins, Rays, and Marlins.
http://the1constant.mlblogs.com/
See, I disagree. I strongly support a salary cap. Not just in baseball but in all sports. I know that the Yankees make all their money but what about the teams that can’t make all that money? That don’t have much of a shot. Sure, every few years you have a team get a bunch of low budget guys together that work great and make it far. The Rays got really far, but they lost. I’m not even worried about my favorite team in this whole thing. What about Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Tampa Bay, Miami, San Diego, Toronto, Washington, Minnesota, and Cincinnati? They can’t make that much money. They can’t go out and sign a bunch of big players every year. My favorite team in the NFL is the Pittsburgh Steelers. Their salary last year was $128MM. They could spend twice that much, but there is a cap. I still support it. The NFL has a lot of really good teams. The MLB does not, because teams cannot pay for quality players. I am also for a minimum cap.
Ben,
Never be ashamed of baseball. Be ashamed of fiscal policy in the MLB, but never be ashamed of baseball. Being ashamed of baseball is like being ashamed of apple pie. It can’t always be perfect, but when it comes down to it, it’s always pretty good.
tjsportsnut7.mlblogs.com
As far as comparing it to the NFL I do not like a league that has a ton of mediocre teams and a few good ones and no great ones. It is all about how the organizations are managed. The Padres’ situation has nothing to do with baseball and look at how the Royals do things…why are they signing Kyle Farnsworth to a 2 year 10 million dollar deal? The Marlins have won 2 World Series in the last 11 years. The Twins and Blue Jays are fine organizations. The Pirates, Reds, and Nationals are just horribly ran organizations from top to bottom.
http://the1constant.mlblogs.com/
I definitely don’t support a salary cap unless they can get one that doesn’t get a players strike started. What I’ll like to see is the luxury tax on the larger market teams raised and for the yankees to be forced to bail out the auto makers instead of the tax payers. Well there is some wishful thinking on my part, Happy Holidays.
P.S. hate the yankees not baseball !!
Ben, I think I’m in the minority with you – I think there should be a salary cap. If not, then I like wisbrave’s idea of having the Yanks bail out the auto industry. And please, don’t hate baseball. Hate the greedy bas***** who are the agents and owners. I have to give my Red Sox some credit for walking away and not driving the price up even more. And you know what Ben – WHEN the Yankees DON”T win it all next October, we can laugh our heads off as all those Yankee fans burn effigies of the Steinbrenners. Keep the faith my friend. Merry Christmas!
Julia
http://werbiefitz.mlblogs.com/
I agree baseball needs a salary cap.
Bigpapi72, http://bostonsports.mlblogs.com/
Thanks Julia and Papi. I don’t hate baseball, I was just blowing off some steam. Baseball does need some serious changes though. There are so many terrible teams in the league because they simply cannot afford to sign any of those critical pieces. You can only build so much of your team within the organization. When a team needs to go land that big piece they are always outbid by the evil empire. Like I have stated before, I am not in anyway biased as my favorite football team is in the top 2 richest teams in the NFL. I still support the cap. Instead of having a few really good teams and a bunch of crappy ones they have a lot of evenly matched teams. Which in the end makes for great games. Baseball needs to take some lessons from the NFL. They are the most successful sports league in the world for a reason.
As a fan of the “other” team with lots of cash, I’m fine with the way it’s set up now. Lower payroll teams get top draft picks if they finish at the bottom and, like the Rays, wind up with an entire team of young future superstars. If the Red Sox were under a cap, they’d never get Dice-K and J.D. Drew and Julio Lugo (oh, wait, he stinks).
These Yankees look like the fantasy league Yankees of 2001-2005. Good teams, no rings. The Yankees need to remember that their glory days of the 1990s came when the team developed great players from their farm system.
Steve T.
http://soxblog.mlblogs.com
This is really frustrating to me, too. The Padres have about $20 million to pretty much build a team. But the Yankees go out and sign all the best players. Obviously, they are the only ones who can afford them, but still. It’s crazy!
http://kaybee.mlblogs.com
Someone defending the Yankees once told me: Everyone said the Yankees were ruining baseball back in the 70’s. Obviously baseball is fine.
I disagree, baseball is not fine. The ratings are in the tank. Nobody even knows a single player for most of the small market teams. Hell, even Kruk from baseball tonight can’t name a single player on the Royals. The NBA’s ratings are through the roof, people would rather watch a bunch of thugs run up and down the court than America’s Passtime. I’ve had enough. When America’s Passtime isn’t one of the 2 most watched sports, that’s it. The Yankees have ruined baseball. We need a salary cap RIGHT NOW. Great article, I love your position.
I know people love making that NFL argument, but I truly believe that sport is pulling the wool over all of our eyes. The truth is that the season is so short that the majority of who is good/bad revolves around luck.
The sample size (16 reg. season games) is so small that anything can happen. While that sounds all good and exciting, it limits the need for true skill. In the end, you’re just rooting for the uniform because teams are good one year, then bad the next, then good the next… With few exceptions, there is no real reason to get emotional about your team because they will be completely different the next season.
If they played 32 games, however, then the truly good teams would shine. I know that’s a ridiculous number, but I’m just trying to prove the point.
http://themax.mlblogs.com
I think part of what makes baseball is great is that we have teams like Kansas City, that we can all laugh at and count on for some easy wins. If all the teams were the same, it wouldn’t be that interesting….
That said, we do need a salary cap. The Yankees did earn their money, but there shouldn’t be this much of a gap between them and the lower teams. One player should not be making more than an entire team’s payroll. I don’t care who he is, that’s not right.
http://insidetheyankees.mlblogs.com/
I understand what you are saying Max. I still think that I would rather have a few bad teams, a few really good teams, and a lot of pretty good teams than have a few mediocre teams, 2 or 3 really good teams and 6 or 7 really bad teams. I think the NFL is so great because it is evenly matched. Any team (except the Lions and the Raiders) can beat any other team on any given day. In baseball you see a lot of teams get dominated by a lot of others. Teams just can’t compete anymore. It really has gotten to the point where it is kind of unfair.
We’re always going to have the giants, and the Yankee’s is ours. The NFL has them too, it’s called the Cowboy’s. Soccer has some British team, Hockey has the Red Wings. We all have them, they don’t all do it through conventional means, but that’s another blog.
My question is where do we get off saying that the Reds have deep pockets that they aren’t using? The Reds have a lot of issues I won’t disagree with that, but is our use of money really one of them?
COB
http://cobf.mlblogs.com
Everyone is making good arguments for and against baseball, but what I think upsets people like me and Ben is not that the Yankees and other rich teams buy championships (because they don’t), it’s that the Yankees skew the playing field. Free agency is meant to give a player the freedom to pick and choose what situation they want to be in instead of being at the whim of an organization. The Yankees, however, have turned free agency into a bidding war that no one can win but them. They key is not to put a cap on the teams, because the Yankees will find another way to lure players that gets around the cap. They key is to A.) put a cap on the individual contracts, no one should make more than $15 million, and B.) increase competition. Another reason players sign with the Yankees is because everyone gets caught up in their winter activity and think they’re the best chance to win. Level the playing field and give players more chances to be on a winning team, and you might see more change.
I’m trying out a new theory, check it out.
http://thegoodofthegame.mlblogs.com
There is nothing special about putting a great team together where money is no object. The Yankees would probably be in the bottom third if there was a salary cap like the NFL. Cashman and Steinbrenner can tell CC and AJ are good pitchers and out bid the rest of the market. Tex is a solid performer and they go and out bid for him. That is a ” strong ” organization? Give me their bloated budget and I could do as well.
Now they have requested millions from the taxpayers to fund their stadium overruns. That is lunacy. The federal government should see that and cut off all the pork to New Your City that Clinton and Shumer have been able to steal from the rest of us.
I am 100% for a salary cap. If a salary minimum is needed to keep the ” stingy I don’t care to win ” owners from putting on a horrible product year after year and still make a profit, ok.
What will happen years from now is there will be a league of about 10 teams where New York, Chicago, Boston, and LA can spend what they want and the population outside those areas won’t care. Espn can go into depth about those teams and we will be watching old movies. If it wasn’t for Cal Ripkin the sport would be on life support today. The baseball strike critacally injured but didn’t kill the paying fan because of Cal.
The same teams winning year after year will doom baseball as we know it. For every Tampa and Florida that temporarily jumps to the top there are the Pirates, Royals, Orioles, Nationals, A’s, Indians, Brewers, Mariners ….. that will never be on top. If you think attendance will boom this year in this economy your on drugs or something. I have followed one of the teams named above for 50 years. I have had season tickets for most of the last 25. I’m done. I have heard from others that feel the same way. The money saved went towards a 52″ Tv and the insane owner of my team.
I think thegoodofthegame put it best. The NFL is so appealing because of one word: parity. The Atlanta Falcons and Miami Dolphins are perfect examples that in the NFL, it’s not uncommon for a team to finish with a mirrored record from its previous season with a few good strategies and free agent moves and draft picks. The New England Patriots are another example.
I also agree that, though the Yankees are dominating the headlines and the free agent signings, and everyone who’s a fan of a lower-level team is getting sickened by all the pinstripes, baseball needs the Yankees. It just wouldn’t be the same.
Football needs the Cowboys. Hockey needs the Red Wings. Basketball needs the Lakers. Those franchises are the posterchildren of their respective leagues. It’s what makes those sports special.
That said, it does suck to have baseball all about who can shell the most money out, rather than strategizing about which positions a team actually needs and what it’s deep in already. I do prefer the NFL over MLB in this aspect, and agree that there should be a league-wide salary cap. It gives a feeling of hopelessness that smaller teams like the Royals and Twins have that if they raise up a player through their farm systems who will one day be a superstar, he’ll just be swooped up by the Yankees, Red Sox, or Mets and never be heard from again.
http://theconsumptionof.mlblogs.com