Salary Cap

It’s time for a salary cap in baseball.
Now, I know what you are thinking. Smitty is a Red Sox fan (true), and this is just a big batch of sour grapes because the Yankees won the World Series (false).
Full disclosure-I do hate the Yankees. Passionately. But let’s also be clear-they did absolutely nothing wrong. They have a lot of money, and they spent it. As they should.
Frankly, a salary cap would hurt the Red Sox arguably more than any team other than the Yankees. So I’m not lobbying for this to help my team.
I’m writing for you Kansas City. You too, Pittsburgh.
Baseball’s biggest problem, in my opinion, is that there are certain teams with absolutely no chance of winning. Ever. They can’t spend money on big free agents, and when they develop good talent they can’t keep it. That’s so frustrating for a fan base. You can’t even get attached to your star players, because if they truly are good, they won’t stay.
Your best case scenario as a small market team is to be the Florida Marlins. Have a bunch of nice young prospects that gel at the same time, make a title run for a two year window, then blow it up and start over. Which means being a lousy team for the next three years. That’s a pretty hopeless scenario.
The great thing about other sports is you can go from worst to first in any given year. The Bruins finished in 8th in 2007, then 1st in 2009. The Dolphins when from 1-15 to 11-5 and an AFC East title. Why? The salary cap levels the playing field. Everybody has the same shot to land great players. With a couple of shrewd moves, you can go from the outhouse to the penthouse.
Now, are there some awful teams in the other leagues? Of course. But aside from just having the ability to turn it around quickly, you still have some interesting star players on those teams. The Saint Louis Rams are terrible. But you get to watch a great running back in Stephen Jackson. The Oakland Raiders are god awful. But Nnamdi Asomugha is fun to watch. Even the bad teams have some interesting players, rather than the best players being only on a few teams.
A salary cap won’t magically make these teams better. Some of the small market teams are frankly just poorly managed. But at least then the fans can get angry at their management, rather than being stuck in a system where they can never succeed. Maybe some of these teams would change management if they thought they had a chance to compete. Right now, they don’t.
Again, this is not a knock on the big money teams. Spending money doesn’t guarantee you a title by any stretch, but it’s such a big help. Baseball is like a giant game of Monopoly, where a few teams start with $10,000 and a railroad, and everybody else starts with $600 and no property. You can fluke into a win here or there if you get very lucky with the $600, but it’s an aberration. Over the long haul, the big money teams will beat you.
To rob The Shawshank Redemption, Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of all things. I think baseball would be so much better off if in April, 32 teams thought they could win. Be that’s not the reality. The reality is many of these teams have zero hope. And that’s a sad state of affairs.
You can’t win titles in professional sports without star players. Find me the last team that won a title, in any sport, without a legitimate superstar. These small market teams in baseball can’t afford superstars, at least not for very long. Until that changes, you will still see only a handful of franchises in baseball compete for a title.
It’s time for baseball to make things more interesting. Give KC a chance.