Good News for Baseball: Mauer Stays in Small Market Minnesota

Author: Scott Taylor

March 22, 2010

Scott Taylor's E-Take is sponsored by BioTech Laser, who utilize a low intensity laser that stimulates the natural healing of tissue.

The Minnesota Twins announced yesterday that they had signed superstar catcher Joe Mauer to an eight-year, $184 million contract.  That’s $23 million a year if you’re keeping score at home.  It’s a contract that will keep last year’s American League MVP under contract to the upper midwest’s small-market team through 2018.

It might be the nest news baseball has received in decades.

After all, Major League Baseball loves to point to the fact that the low-payroll Tampa Bay Rays reached the World Series in 2008, that the low-payroll Florida Marlins won the World Series in 1997 and 2003 and that there were eight different World Series champions (and 13 different teams in the Fall Classic) between 2000 and 2009.

Those are all pretty good arguments in favor of keeping the salary cap out of baseball, but none of them really fixes the game’s biggest problem.  And yes, that problem is simple.  The competitive balance in baseball really belongs to only four or five teams and outside of the New York Yankees and, perhaps, the Boston Red Sox, there are no other teams that win consistently.

Sure, 13 different teams have made it to the World Series in the past decade, but only the Yankees, Red Sox, Cards and Phillies made it more than once.  Other teams, like Detroit, Colorado, Florida, Houston, the White Sox, Anaheim and Arizona have made it to the Fall Classic, but in most cases, those teams were broken up because the payroll had reached the breaking point.

If Major League Baseball is ever to be a legitimate competition, it needs “the great competitive trio:” a salary cap, no guaranteed contracts and open free agency.  That’s what made the NFL great and, ultimately, it’s the only thing that will save the NFL from collapsing in the future.

But in baseball, we’ll never see a salary cap.  The MLB Players Association wants no part of a cap and that’s why most of the game’s 32 teams will never, ever reach the World Series – ever!

In fact, if you look at the Toronto Blue Jays, Minnesota Twins, Pittsburgh Pirates, Kansas City Royals, Baltimore Orioles, Cleveland Indians, Milwaukee Brewers, Atlanta Braves, Seattle Mariners, Cincinnati Reds, you will see 10 teams that might never again (unless a future owner has a trillion dollars and doesn’t mind spending it) reach the World Series, let alone win it.

In fact, it’s unlikely that more than a handful of teams today have a legitimate chance to get to the Fall Classic.

Now, to be fair, a team like Minnesota might have a chance now that its star will be around for almost a decade.  And let’s be honest, baseball needs Joe Mauer in Minnesota, just as it needs Albert Pujols in St. Louis, Prince Fielder in Milwaukee, Grady Sizemore in Cleveland, Justin Verlander in Detroit, Ian Kinsler in Texas and Ichiro in Seattle.  Just as it needed Roy Halladay (Phillies) in Toronto, Jason Bay (Mets) in Pittsburgh, Matt Holliday (Cards) in Colorado and C.C. Sabathia (Yankees) in Cleveland.

These days, all the star players are going to the same half-dozen teams and that can’t be good for the game.  And it’s not like baseball doesn’t understand that.

This week, Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci reported that MLB had created a committee to look into the concept of "floating realignment."  The idea is simple, but difficult to sell.  According to SI, clubs would no longer be assigned to a certain division.  Instead, they would be given the option to shift divisions, based on geography, payroll or even their own perceptions of whether or not they were contending teams.  No team would be able to move to a time zone more than two hours away from its own.

As an example, Verducci used the Cleveland Indians hypothetically moving to the AL East.  The thought, in this particular case would be that the Indians, this year, at least, were in a rebuilding mode.  They probably wouldn't win the AL Central anyway, but if they played in the East, they would have 18 lucrative home dates with the Yankees and the Red Sox.  Meanwhile, the Orioles and Rays, battling to beat teams with payrolls that are $100 million more than their own, could move to the AL Central, where they would have a better chance to reach the postseason.

As interesting as it sounds, this concept will never be approved, but as Verducci pointed out, in the 15 years since the advent of the Wild Card system, the Yankees and the Red Sox have accounted for 38 percent of all American League postseason berths.  That is not parity and be sure, revenue sharing hasn’t done anything to make it better.

Baseball’s problem is a simple one.  The season hasn’t started and yet half the teams don’t have a chance to reach the post-season.  This year, the Yankees will have a payroll of more than $200 million while the Royals will barely be at $50 million.  The Royals don’t have a hope.

The only thing that works, the only thing that will create an overall competitive balance in any professional sport is a salary or payroll cap.  But the MLBPA will never allow it and as a result, the Yankees, Red Sox and, for now, the Phillies, Mets and Cardinals, will be the only teams with a real chance to win it all.

Sure, a team like Detroit or Milwaukee could fool us now and again, but unless Prince Fielder stays in Milwaukee or Justin Verlander stays in Detroit, those teams will never fool us more than once.

And guess what?  Without a cap – or the players’ own decision to take a significant haircut on their contracts – chances are good that they’ll eventually wind up in New York or Boston.

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