Are the Yankees Ruining Baseball?

I detest the Yankees and Red Sox as much as any underdog-loving, fair play advocating, home team adoring baseball fan. I adopted the Oakland A’s as my team because I appreciate the craft of building a team, not buying one. However, a salary cap is not the panacea small market teams believe; better management, fiscal responsibility and personnel evaluations determine success more than dollars spent.

In the major sports leagues, football operates with a convoluted hard cap that insures parity by penalizing good teams; the NBA operates with a soft cap, meaning a team can go over the cap to sign one of its own players; and baseball operates with a free-spending, no salary cap system benefiting, it seems, the owners with deep pockets who annually attract the top free agents.

The perception is baseball owners buy championships through free agent acquisitions. The truth, however, is less concrete. While quick to criticize the Yankees, small market proponents ignore the New York Mets, a franchise that spends more money per win than any team in baseball, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in average baseball talent over the past decade.

To most outside the Bronx, the Yankees are the Evil Empire, the epitome of every egregious error in sports and capitalism. The Yankee’s free-spending boss George Steinbrenner is the scourge of society, scoffing at the plebes and paying the price to insure the Yankees have the optimal opportunity to win the Fall Classic. Recently he quipped that baseball was not a socialistic endeavor and he hopes the commissioner will not increase its revenue-sharing program which penalizes the big spenders by taxing these teams and donating funds to the small market teams.