Quote:
Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis
I get the distinct sense that jayswin is not a huge fan of this matchup. I'm curious if he'd be raging out as much if those plucky, nearly on welfare Jays and their $220 million payroll were in the World Series right now. Methinks not.
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Indeed. I think this will be a great World Series and I'm interested in watching it. Rangers/Diamondbacks this isn't. You have the two best players in the game playing in a winner take all showdown. That's exciting, and it's more interesting to have Ohtani on the Dodgers than it was to have him back in Japan after the Angels got eliminated every year.
But he's also correct that baseball needs to have more competitive balance. I actually think they need a floor more than a cap. No trading draft picks, plus pre-arb/arb contract structure means that poor teams can get at least some decent players at low prices. If they had a bigger incentive to sign their own FAs (to get to a higher floor) I think that would largely solve the problem.
I think they should add a competitive balance tax at the bottom as well. Eg, if you don't spend 1/2 the tax limit (ie 1/2 of $237 MM is $118.5 MM) you don't qualify for the tax transfers from the rich teams. Or you pay 25% of every dollar you're under back into the pot, something like that. That would have affected 10 teams this year.
It's stupid having teams like the Pirates run just to collect money from the rich teams without ever being competitive. It's bad for their fans and its bad for the sport.
That's not to say you can't be competitive at lower payrolls (eg the Tigers this year are well under that threshold, and the Rays never seem to spend money but mostly are good). But pushing the teams that are well managed but have low payrolls to spend that extra $30-40 MM means that they can keep a few home grown guys into FA (or offer them the Ronald Acuna Jr style long term contract in arb/pre-arb).