Salary Caps, Free Agency and the Damn Yankees

Okay, yes, I'm from the Cleveland area and I love the Indians. Yes, the baseball season is over, and yes, the Yankees won the World Series - again. Sigh. However, it is not so much this jealousy of everything that has to do with New York that fuels my fire and passion for hating the Yankees. Also, it is not necessarily the fact that they sign every free agent Cleveland would like to that irritates me.

What really pisses me off is that the Yankees basically have no end to the amount of money that they can put toward buying the best players in baseball. For example, the Yankees just signed Mike Mussina, a veteran pitcher from the Baltimore Orioles, and added him to a staff that includes some of the best pitchers in baseball - on one team. There are talks of the Yankees signing Manny Ramirez, Cleveland's prized free agent, but New York's offense is already so potent they hardly even need him on their roster. Toronto pitcher David Wells, who threw a perfect game for the Yankees two seasons ago, may return to the team as well. Last season, the Yankees weren't even that good until they signed David Justice, Jose Vizcaino, and Denny Neagle.

With all of these possible additions, along with their current roster, this team is going to be practically unbeatable in future post-seasons. The Yankees are pretty much paying for a dynasty. Now I suppose that if I was the general manager of the Yankees and had all that money to throw around - hey, I'd throw it. But is it any coincidence that New York represented both teams in the World Series this year?

In order for a general manager of a sports franchise to be successful, he must have a winning team. A winning team will earn money from fan support, television broadcasts and merchandise sales. But, in order to have this type of team, he must have the right players that will produce - and he must pay them. Because the salaries of the high level players are so high, the general manager needs to have the right skills to attract them to his team. Of course, if he has a lot of money, he will throw it out at the player and eventually sign him. This is the Yankees' primary strategy in building successful teams. But, because of salary caps, this task has become more difficult for a lot of other professional sports teams.

The use of salary caps, limiting how much teams can pay their players, is a fairly new development in professional sports. Basketball was the first sport to cap salaries, in the 1984-85 season, and a similar restriction went into effect in football in 1994. In football, though, shared revenues have contributed greatly to a very even level of play among its teams. Unlike baseball, for example, home NFL teams in a game bring home 60 percent of the revenue, but the visiting team still brings home 40 percent of the profits. This is why teams like the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Tennessee Titans have received an increase chance at becoming successful.

The biggest example in professional football of its policies producing a positive effect is that of the Washington Redskins. I really don't follow the NFL, nor do I care who wins, but I know that Washington payed for what they thought was going to be a Super Bowl team this year. That hasn't been the case so far, as new teams are proving to be competitive, and Washington is in third place in their division and hasn't been extremely dominant.

Labor relations models in professional baseball, basketball, football and hockey have certain similarities, though. Since the initial team sports collective bargaining agreement was reached in basketball in 1967, owners and players have experimented with ways of sharing power and dividing revenues. Today, all professional sports have a form of free agency, allowing players to sell their services to other clubs after a certain period of time has elapsed. Salary caps have emerged as a counterpart to free agency. While players are allowed to sell their services to the highest bidder (usually the Yankees), the salary cap restricts how much can be paid to players on a team as a whole, thus preventing labor costs from rising beyond the stated limits.

Salary caps were invented to limit the rapidly increasing salary figures that players are making today. A salary cap puts a limit on the player payroll of a sports franchise. It tells managers that the amount of money he pays to his players cannot exceed a certain amount. The manager can try to sign a few multi-million dollar superstars and surround them with lower-priced players, or he can try and create a team with players who would make the same amounts of money. The Yankees take the former to the extreme. They have quite a few players who make seven digits.

The problem with Major League Baseball is that without a definite limit on how much a team can spend for their players, the teams with the most money are going to continue to be the teams in contention for championships. It is unlikely that small market teams like the Kansas City Royals or the Pittsburgh Pirates will have any chance in the near future at competing with teams like New York.

Salary caps were contested in both the 1994-95 baseball strike and the 1994-95 lockout in hockey. In these sports, unions have been able to fend off acceptance of a general cap, although "luxury taxes" were put into effect on baseball team payrolls exceeding specified amounts, and hockey now has a salary cap for rookies. The problem with Major League Baseball is that without a definite limit on how much a team can spend for their players, the teams with the most money are going to continue to be the best teams.

The New York Yankees look at these luxury taxes as rather similar to the game of monopoly. In the game, if you land on the luxury tax spot it's only a fine of $75, and is nothing compared to landing on Boardwalk laced with a hotel. The Yankees don't care if they pay fines for exceeding these set amounts. They're the bastards who own Boardwalk.

There just need to be more restrictions put on baseball that to at least some degree further limit the parallelism between teams' dominance and wealth, because I'm tired of seeing the Yankees win. All I have to say to the Yankees and their incredibly rich players is - go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 million dollars.