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The New York Yankee's are the Goldman Sach's of baseball.
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Once again we are treated to the rule of money over anything else and unfortunately it is our national past time emulating our pathetic federal government and its treatment of Wall Street. I haven't read it and I likely won't but I caught Ken Rosenthal's title about not hating the Yankee's. The reason is that even though the payroll is 200 million the emotion of winning is real.
I imagine the emotion is real when Goldman's employee's cash their several million dollar bonuses while the rest of us struggle to pay the bills with declining paychecks even though they are the financial morons who crash landed the economy and put many of us in this bind. I am wondering when baseball will use Wall Streets favorite excuse and decide that since the Yankee's spent more than the entire value of the Washington Nationals or my beloved Baltimore Orioles we should just scrap the inefficiency of actually playing the season what with injuries and all, and just declare them World Champions next year as well.
The way the Comissioner relates to the Yankee's is very much like Tim Geithner's relationship with Goldman's. How may I grease the skids to your success Mr. Steinbrenner? How high did you say you wanted me to jump?
This is a microcosm of everything that is wrong with how our entire country works. It doesn't seem to dawn on these fawning dimwits and their sports media apologists like Rosenthal, that the fans in other cities will just stop coming if baseball continues as is. It is not too far removed from the inverted versions of the truth we get on the news helping to convince the rest of us that no reform of health care is all the reform we need.
They will continue to spout the delusion that the system is working and everyone has an equal chance. and that its the Free Market after all. All the other teams get to split up a miniscule pot of luxury tax money on the order of the !% of its entire income Goldman's pays to the Federal Government. That is the paltry bribe to keep quiet about the grand delusion that there is anything competitive about baseball.
They will say but the Yankees are a top draw when they come in to Baltimore. Forget that on any other night of the season Camden Yards is becoming more like a mortuary. That is their excuse for why we shouldn't have a salary cap like football and basketball.
Forget that the games are more competitive and far more entertaining to watch and that when there is more parity the fans are far more invested in buying the expensive paraphrenalia and therefore there are overall greater profits from competitveness, no that isn't a reason baseball understands. Baseball like Congress on why we can't protect American jobs because that would be protectionist, hasn't grasped that we need protectionism to have jobs, as we need a salary cap to create more competitve teams because greater competition leads to greater overall profits for everyone. But Oh I forgot myself, Big corporations in Capitalism abhor competitveness just like the Yankee's in baseball. Underneath all the crap about competition the goal is really to have all the marbles.
By the way Yankee fans will wail they haven't won the World Series since 2000. Poor babies the Orioles haven't won more than 75 games since 1997 and haven't appeared in a World Series since 1983, ironically against the Phillies. I have no sympathy and won't until I see a salary cap cause the Yankees to have at least just one real losing season as in 65 and 97.
Free Agency is the sham behind why baseball is losing its competitiveness. Look in todays trumped up fraud of a market the Orioles would have lost Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson and Jim Palmer to free agency and they would be Hall of Fame Yankee's. Free Agency is to baseball what High Frequency Trading and Dark Pools are to the stock exchange. On paper everyone can uniformly pretend well everyone has the same options.
In reality that is truly laughable because in the rule of money you can buy access to an advantage of just a few milliseconds peek at orders on the stock exchange giving you the equivalent of insider knowledge of stock trades because it is not illegal, only because the law hasn't caught up to the latest technology and gives 5 milliseconds time between the recieving and posting of trades on the stock exchange or you can just pay so much money in the Free Agent market that no one can compete for players and no one is even willing to even look at offers from other teams .
The result is that the Nationals and the Orioles have a zero chance of winning the World Series while the Yankee's have a zero chance of finishing in last place 64 and 98 like the Orioles. Mark Texiera's manipulative adventure using the Orioles and Nationals bids as nothing more serious than a way to squeeze more out of the Yankee's is about like how Wall Street and Goldman's treat the small investor with Dark Pools it is also very instructive of how the system in reality fails to work.
For those of you who don't know what Dark Pools are in stock trading, they are where the Big Dogs meet behind closed doors to trade stocks for the really serious money leaving the rest of us out. and then we end up paying a higher price on the market. In the baseball system the best free agents are never going to come play for some teams no matter how much money the Orioles, Nationals, Royals and a few others dangle out there. They aren't going to win and the best players know that.
So the Yankee's and their Wanna Be's like the Red Sox meet to sign up the best free agents then every one else gets to divey up the rest. With no salary cap some teams in both leagues are little more than the real minor league farm system for the Yankees and their Wanna Be's du jour.
You can put a massive effort into building your farm system and selling some of your better players in Baseball's annual post All Star game Wal-Mart shopping spree to contending teams for potential talent. to begin what to most teams is called rebuilding. Some teams have been rebuilding for a very long time because their good players keep getting bought off by the Big teams.
On the average you struggle for four years and then have one meteoric season the way the Tampa Bay Ray's did. By that time some of the young talent you have built up has completed their five year apprenticeship prior to being elgible to be free agents and are now ready for the Yankee's, Red Sox, Dodgers, or Mets to buy off. Your team begins the descent back to oblivion exhausted from the struggle just to get one year of play off contention.
Now as I say this I also know you can point to the Orioles owner Peter Angelos as a major player in why the Orioles are so bad. But as last years free agency actively demonstrates even if Angelos or several other owners were ready willing and able to spend it still wouldn't matter. If the Orioles were under new management with money to spend the best free agents won't come to play for the Orioles and in a system where the Orioles have virtually no chance of winning I don't blame them. In baseball the Yankee's are considered to Big too Fail even though the game would be far better if they did. Of course many of us also said that about Wall Street.
Why should the Yankee's be guaranteed that they will never be last while The Commissioner's office makes sure by the way they push back reform efforts,some teams will not have much chance to be anyting else?
The fact is a majority of owners know that baseball needs the salary cap or its fan base will continue to erode.The additional problem of the continuing escalation of salaries of players even on losing teams makes the cost of tickets more and more out of the reach of typical Middle Class families which further erodes some teams ability to compete in a money driven system.
I have heard it said about Baltimore, that soon the millionaire players will only be watched by millionaire business people who will be the only ones who can afford tickets and will be spending time wheeling and dealing on cell phones and portable laptops instead of concentrating on the game only to use the 7th inning stretch to leave and get ready to go to the office the next day.
Look you can say it is sour grapes all you want and some of it probably is. But I didn't write this column because the Yankee's won the World Series even though I wanted the Phillies to win. I wrote this column because the system fails to make it so the Yankee's can also lose and I don't mean just one World Series game. I mean the outcome of whole season's and having the same chance of being in last place as everyone. Baseball treats the Yankee's as too big to fail In reality no one should be to big to fail not even the New York Yankee's.
