Cycle of Destruction

Derek Zumsteg

If there's something that gives me hope during this fine offseason of the super-team (the team where the stars demand to be traded, where all the good free agents sign, where Scott Boras' phone calls are returned), it's that there's a good possibility in about five to ten years that every team will be on equal footing at just the time when I'll want to introduce my kids (shudder) to the game.

Take a now-super team like Los Angeles. Desperate to make deals this offseason, they've made a series of remarkably bad ones. I don't begrudge Kevin Brown his money, and I'm sure the Dodgers knew what they were signing on for, but that contract will become a burden in only a couple of years, and then the best-case scenario for the Dodgers may be career-ending injury so they can collect 75% insurance on him. And while the Dodgers may be convinced that this madness gets them something -- respectability, attention, whatever -- is it really possible to overlook the fact that the back-loaded years of this contract are insane? Kevin Brown will make only a little less than the Expos' roster.

There may be a cycle of destruction in all this, and that makes me smile. Teams that invest heavily then must try to protect their investments. The Dodgers, for instance, stupidly traded Mike Piazza for Bobby Bonilla and an asshead to be named later (and paid through the nose to buy out asshead's no-trade clause -- $5M, if news reports are to be believed) and now, to cover their butts, are spending money as fast as Fox can put out 'World's Superlative Noun Plural Verb' specials. These contracts will haunt them.

As much as I mock teams with unlimited resources like LA, you can already see what's going to happen in the near future -- they're going to be stuck with a roster of overpaid veterans, and unable to do much about it, like Baltimore in 1998 (and probably just as over-rated).

That's what should really cheer up baseball fans. If there was anything more fun than laughing at the inept Orioles, I don't know what it was (besides throwing ginger snaps at them). How many $100M contracts can a team conceivably eat? If George Steinbrenner decides to hand Derek Jeter one in the near future, which is likely, along with some shorter-term deals for his favorites, equally rich, even the richest, cash-flush franchise is going to start looking at that guaranteed payroll and see red ink.

I can only hope the good citizens of New York will tell Steinbrenner where to put his new stadium when his own mismanagement starts to show actual losses.

There's a cycle inherent in team management: the rebuilding cycle. The Twins were really good at this for a time, building up a winner, then trading off peaking players for prospects to build a winning team again. A fundamental problem with tampering with competitive balance at all is that when the Yankees can't acquire that crucial fifth ace through free agency, the Athletics can't fill out a rotation they can't home-grow in the same way. Steps to make it easier to rebuild (by strengthening the draft, massive revenue sharing) also mean that the rewards for assembling a winning franchise are more fleeting and comparatively smaller.

Even if no real progress is made in revenue-sharing, I grin thinking of all this, because what may well come in 2002 and 2003 is that the teams who seem unbeatable today will have insane payrolls, probably exceeding $120M/year each, and they'll also be unable to compete. The tiny luxury tax these teams pay will make nimble and smart teams like the Astros of today the dominant force in the market as the newest bunch of free agents finds themselves faced with a weird new world where, maybe, their talent is better judged by GMs who have survived for a decade by being unable to afford high-priced mistakes.

And on that fine day, when the smart beat the agile, Scott Boras may well find himself fitted for cement slippers by his neighborhood garbage men, who'll be a little tired of paying $125 for left field seats to see an injured Bernie Williams hobble around the field.

about the author

Derek Zumsteg has perfected the perfect ballpark pretzel. Unfortunately, each one costs $13 to make and must be cooked to order. Explain that after being dipped in mustard it doesn't matter anyway at dmz@strikethree.com.