I promise, no more Yankees...after this
07/17/2002
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I didn't want to do it, but you've left me no choice. I tried to move on, tried to put this all in my rearview mirror, but you just couldn't leave it alone. You flooded my inbox with e-mails, questioning my motives and my baseball knowledge, and now I have to respond. Again.
Because of you, the readers, I find myself writing about the New York Yankees. For the third week in a row. Yuck.
This all started with me declaring my hatred for the Yankees two weeks ago after George Steinbrenner "traded for" (or "bought," whichever you prefer) outfielder Raul Mondesi from the Toronto Blue Jays. Last week, I answered a few e-mails I received in response to that initial column, thinking that I could finally move on to more important topics.
No such luck.
The e-mails kept coming... and coming... and coming... and, well, you get the idea. I replied to the first couple messages before realizing that I was faced with yet another potential column.
I'll spare you some of the mindless messages while simultaneously asking everybody to please send me only complete thoughts and intelligent comments. Oh, and let's all try to remember that our friends Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, Sam Adams, Captain Morgan and everybody else pictured on the labels of our beloved liquor and beer bottles do not help us write more coherently. I may be an editor, but even I have a hard time trying to read through something that seems to have been written by a drunken hippopotamus with a learning disability.
Having said that, I'd like to kick this off with another visit from my favorite loaded hippo, John Sanderson, who last week informed me that I sucked and the "Yanks RULE!!!!!!!!!" Imagine my excitement when I saw his name pop up again in my inbox.
You still suck and the Yanks still RULE!!!!!!!!! Get used to it!!!!
Did it take you all week to come up with that one, John? It's great to see that you've really expanded on your already impressive vocabulary. Oh, and thanks for all the exclamation points, those pretty vertical (which means "up and down") lines with the little dots on the bottom -- now I know that I should be screaming your messages rather than simply reading them in a normal tone. I appreciate the clarification.
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Moving on, Wally Zappa, a Yankees fan who also was featured in last week's column, came back to me with a much more insightful question than Mr. Sanderson's:
If baseball had a [salary] cap, you sir would still hate the Yanks. And if they had a cap, they would still win, and you would find some other reason to hate the Yanks. Admit it, you're a Yankee hater, money or no money... . Maybe we should throw the Yanks out and play without them and keep Montreal and the Marlins and the Twins. So in closing, I'm all for a level playing field, so what's your solution and why can't it be done?
This same question was raised by another reader, who didn't leave his name:
True, a salary cap would be the most effective way to balance the playing field and create a sport that ALL Americans can enjoy again. BUT...
A salary cap will also present the APPEARANCE of jeopardizing potential pay for all individual players and not just the high-end teams.
QUESTION:
Do you or the Zealous Yankee fans think that even the smaller teams can hope for a league-wide salary cap, when the small teams' stars won't support the potential for their salaries to be docked?
If there is a way to make it work, then baseball has a chance. Otherwise, the question of who is going to win a baseball game or get to pop champagne in October could become as trivial as wondering which professional wrestler is going to win the next pay-per-view wrestling match.
Baseball and pro-wrestling, money equals wins, equals more money, equals.... 'Nuff said.
To both questions, the answer seems complicated but, at the same time, necessary for the good of the game. I seriously doubt a salary cap would ever be included in any collective bargaining agreement for the reasons laid out above, though I still contend that setting team limits at somewhere between $90 and $95 million would still allow the elite players to get their hefty contracts. I mean, the Braves had an opening-day payroll of about $93 million and both the Mets and Dodgers stood at just over $94 mill, yet somehow all three teams managed to pay guys like Chipper and Andruw Jones, Mike Piazza, Mo Vaughn, Kevin Brown and Shawn Green more than $10 million this year. Hell, even Montreal ($38.6 million), Oakland ($39.6 million) and Pittsburgh ($42.3 million) are paying a few $8 million contracts. A $95 million cap wouldn't necessarily limit the amount of eight-figure salaries in the league as much as it would limit the number of eight-figure salaries each team could afford while also forcing owners and GMs to spend their cash a little more prudently.
But a straight salary cap, or even the luxury tax owners are currently proposing, isn't the only answer because you'll still have teams like Tampa Bay and Cincinnati that could never sport a $90 million payroll, and in the end the monetary gap between big-market and small-market teams would still be gigantic. For that reason, revenue sharing seems to be the key, giving smaller market teams more finances to work with, which in turn gives them a better chance to sign those elite free agents.
See, the problem here isn't really that Steinbrenner has more money than the other owners. Yankees fans always say that other teams and their owners choose to not spend the amount of money Steinbrenner spends on his squad. But as Cleveland owner Larry Dolan said earlier this week, "... George is not spending George's money. George is spending revenue that most of us don't have," revenue that comes from enormous cable deals and merchandise sales, revenue that, as Dolan pointed out, most other teams simply can't match. That's where the Yankees gain their biggest financial advantages, and that's why increased revenue sharing (the owners are asking for a jump from 20% to 50%, the players are standing firm at 22.5%) looks to be the best answer. In the end, the same amount of money is being spent each year, but it's being spent more evenly throughout the league, especially if you then also institute a minimum that each team would have to spend every year, a stipulation that would no doubt make the players happy. Plus, even if that shared local revenue is upped to 50%, large-market teams like the Yankees and Red Sox would still have more money than almost everybody else in the game -- the difference just wouldn't be so exaggerated.
(By the way, after sending Wally my response, he admitted that, "... I am embarrassed to be a Yankee fan at this time. I don't like Steinbrenner either, never did. I'm a Yankee fan by birth so what can I do? But you're right, we need to do what you wrote about. I'm not such a bad Yankee fan, am I?" No, I guess not, Wally.)
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As refreshing as it was to see a Yankee fan like Wally admitting that something just wasn't right with the way his team is run, Brian Henry from Myrtle Creek, Oregon, took the all-too-familiar "you're just jealous of our success" route:
It was interesting reading about your dislike of the Yankees' success. The part that reaches me is the fact you don't like that the Yankees do what they have to, to win. They are within the system, playing by the same rules as the other teams, on the same playing field as the other teams, yet winning 25 championships while the Red Sox... and the Cubs win one. Is it that you don't like what the Yankees are doing lately, or for all time? Success breeds envy and the ire of losers. Winning is the American way. Win and you're envied, lose and you're forgotten. You just have a problem with winners.
Too bad, sucker, that's what sport is about -- winning.
Actually, Brian, being somewhat of a baseball historian, I admire the Yankees' long and storied history. In fact, two of my all-time favorite players donned the Yankee pinstripes for their entire careers, Lou Gehrig and Joe D.
So, to answer your question, I would definitely say that I don't like what the Yankees, under George Steinbrenner, are doing right now to the game. As many people have correctly pointed out, the real problem is the game itself, the system that is currently set up. True, Steinbrenner technically is doing nothing wrong because he hasn't broken any rules -- he is, as you stated, "within the system." But I can still blame him for fully exploiting that system to his advantage, spending $25 million more than the second-place team in terms of payroll and three times more than six or seven other teams.
Yes, doing whatever you can to win is commendable, but at what point does George's desire to win start to diminish the competitive nature of the game? Because this is, after all, still a game. Underneath all this labor talk, the multi-million dollar salaries and the debate about steroids testing, this is baseball, a game in its simplest form, and in my mind there should always be some level of consistency and equal opportunity throughout the league. While it's obvious that this modernized version is unfortunately centered around dollars and cents, that doesn't mean we should be so willing to let the business side of baseball completely swallow the game itself.
Or do you, like so many Yankees fan, disagree with that?
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Unfortunately, I won't be able to get to all the e-mails I received -- my apologies to, among others, Robert Carbone, Wayne Young and Howard Salinger, a Yankees fan who amazingly is sympathetic toward the small-market teams and their suffering fans.
But I couldn't leave this one out of the column, a supposed true story sent to me by Salan73:
"Somewhere in New York, the third-grade writing class was just beginning, and the teacher told the class to write about their favorite baseball team. After the class was done, the teacher perused the finished work. One piece of work caught the teacher's eye. The paper stated that the little girl's favorite team was the Seattle Mariners because that was her parents' favorite team. For some reason this steamed up the teacher pretty bad. After all, they lived in New York! The next day, as the class sat down the teacher asked the little girl to stand up. When she complied, the teacher asked why her favorite team was the Mariners. The little girl replied, "Because my parents like them!" The teacher then said to the class that we are in America and that we are able to make our own decisions on who or what our favorite things are. She then asked the little girl, "What if your parents were morons? Would that make you a moron?" The little girl (with a sly smile and a twinkle in her eye) stated, "No, that would make us Yankee's fans."
Classic -- I love it!
Hopefully, this is the last Yankees column I'm going to write for a long, long time. That doesn't mean you should stop sending me e-mails, though, because I could probably carry on this debate for months.
I'll close by again saying that I'm not simply a jealous fan who wishes my team was as successful as the Yankees, and I'm not whining about how the "big bully" is roughing up all the kids on the playground. I'm stating facts, and the facts are that no other team in the game can match the Yankees dollar-for-dollar on the books. That undoubtedly gives them an unfair advantage over the rest of the league, a situation that, as I stated earlier, weakens the overall competitive nature of the game. That's a problem.
Everybody says that baseball is a business, and unfortunately that's what the game has slowly mutated into, a ruthless business that cares more about dollars than fans. But the difference is that while the goal of any shrewd businessman is to make money by eliminating the competition, the goal of any shrewd baseball owner should be to win by overcoming and outplaying the competition. That doesn't seem to be the case, though, as small-market teams that simply can't compete financially with the Yankees and the Red Sox and the Mets and the Dodgers may soon be forced to fold, leaving behind empty seats and disappointed fans. And when that happens, the game we all grew up with, the game we've loved for so many years, will be in serious trouble.
So in the end, we have to figure out what's more important, the success of a few select teams or the continued existence of Major League Baseball as we know it. I know what my choice would be.
In the Bullz-Eye
Of course, it's Tiger Woods. Two down, two to go on his way to the PGA's first ever Grand Slam. After winning the Masters and the US Open this year, Tiger heads across the pond to Muirfield with his sights set on the British Open title. Not many people seem to think Tiger can win this week, much less complete the elusive Slam, but after all he's done throughout his already storied career, I don't see how you can ever count him out.