Symptoms, Problems, Solutions

Derek Zumsteg

What strikes me as weirdest about this offseason is not the amazing spate of bizarre signings but that Mike Piazza, easily the most valuable free agent of all, went meekly into that good contract, and now seems almost like a chump for signing so early, and the Mets, who took a big leap to sign him early, now seem like the clever students of a very, very dumb class.

So here's a quick scorecard for those of you keeping track:

Mike Piazza - One of the finest offensive players at his position, ever - A
Al Leiter - Fine pitcher - A
Randy Johnson - Likely to continue his dominance with a crewcut - A
Albert Belle - You want offense and offensive? Sold - B
Bernie Williams - Um, does that contract include playing time incentives? - B
Jose Offerman - I guess someone finally noticed that OBP, and yet... - B
Mo Vaughn - Give the huge fat old guy with the bat whatever he wants - D

And where does this leave us? There are only so many teams with unlimited resources, and they've more or less locked up the front-line free agents. There are two things that can happen now:

First, the insanity over, teams with limited resources will bid what they can for what they really need. The Mariners will overpay for some crappy veterans, for instance, while the Giants shop for utility players and pitchers. These contracts will be much more moderate, for shorter lengths.

This may have to wait, however. There are teams that were looking to up their payrolls and compete and haven't done enough. Teams like Texas want to win and were willing to spend the money to do it, but couldn't compete with the insanity. What may well happen is that these not-New York teams will bid the sky on each next downgrade of talent in an attempt to improve, however costly it may prove.

You think these opening signings have been bad? Imagine what happens if the Red Sox and a host of others are all looking to get a free agent third baseman, and the only one left is Robin Ventura. Ouch.

What may well result then is the thrift-store shopping. All the super-high payroll teams may well sign all the really good and the just-good players, leaving the middle-class teams to wearily pick at Mike Blowers and Chad Krueter.

Baseball needs better revenue sharing like a man in the Sahara needs water, like a starving man needs food, like sportswriters need cliches, like Bud Selig needs a brain transplant. The death bell of baseball has been rung many times before by the likes of Bill James, who once compared the pathetic Indians franchise to the canary in a coal mine.

But it's nearly obscene now. The Yankees have nearly infinite resources to run a massive international scouting program, a top-notch farm system, pay the finest dollars for the finest free agents, and eat the salaries for high-priced contracts that don't turn out, in effect using smaller-market teams as paid retirement farms for their has-beens. What can any team, however smart, do to compete? Try to reform the system?

To a certain extent, baseball is fine the way it is: a team that wants to rebuild can trade off its players to pennant contenders for prospects and come back in a couple of years, picking up a couple of free agents on the way. Every tweak you make to the system has a negative effect: if you share revenues there's little incentive for a team like Pittsburgh to ever win, since they make fine money sucking it off teams like the Yankees, and it makes it much easier for any team to bounce back from the cellar by purging and rebuilding, supported by the safety net.

And making all amateur athletes free agents, as suggested by the likes of Scott Boras, would likely make prospects more valued and farm development far more important than they are today. Smart teams would sign talented prospects and hope to develop them into Jamie Moyer-Greg Maddux types, while moneyed teams could sign all the name players.

The end result of thiat, however, is that teams that currently have unlimited resources can sign everybody, limited only by the number of farm teams they can run, and in effect run MIT for farm teams while everyone else tries to run State U. I kind of like this myself, because I think the lot of minor-leaguers is terrible, an injustice to their work and their talent, and if that means teams will have to scout better and treat their minor leaguers with respect for their workloads and their development, all the better.

I find myself sympathetic to baseball's nay-sayers more than ever, though. Maybe it's because I live in Seattle, pit of despair for the baseball fan, but I find myself less and less interested in a sport so unbalanced and so in denial of its problems that it can't do anything but pat itself on the back for a season that thrilled the world.

Baseball has a special exemption in American law as a national institution worthy of exclusion from the kind of protection we ask from Bill Gates and his legion of bad coders, which allows baseball to be a particularly profitable and cross-country sport. Whether baseball deserves its exemption or not, I think we deserve better, more competitive seasons from baseball, and a look at the real issues that challenge the best sport in the land.

 

about the author

Derek Zumsteg's career goals include early retirement for himself, early retirement for Gary Sheffield, and a batch of tasty beer. Tell him one out of three ain't bad at dmz@strikethree.com.