Realignment Assignment

Derek Zumsteg

One of the many ideas that's been floated lately as a solution to MLB's payroll inequity is to reorganize the divisions into payroll-based ones.

Besides the three questions that immediately spring to mind (what happened to thinking about viable compromises? what happened to geographical rivalries? and what in Bill James' good name are they spiking the punch with at the BBWAA galas?), I thought for a minute I could consider what a season would look like, using the most commonly cited model for a payroll-reorganized baseball.

One problem commonly glossed over by the glossed-over baseball writers is when payroll levels would be determined. Each creates a huge problem: if you set the yearly reorg at spring training, teams would just wait to sign players, playing chicken with other teams to get in the cheapest division possible. If you set it at season's end, teams that salary dump late or make big trades are grouped with their new teams instead of where they spent the season.

And you can't put it at season's start, because you have to set up the schedules (and they have to put out the schedule fairly early, for TV and stadium scheduling). But for the sake of argument, let's say it's the average payroll over the last season, which solves all those problems (how come no one else thought of that? I don't know). Teams that take on or dump salary during the season get proportionate penalties or benefits, just like they do during the season. It's not perfect, as we'll see, but it's a world better than the three I've seen mentioned.

So with that magic solution in hand, let's consider the new dynamics of baseball. There will be six divisions of five teams, Divisions A-F, with 'A' being the Yankees and their ilk, and 'F' consisting of the Expos (in the real world there would be focus-tested names, of course, like 'Thrifty Division' and 'Division of Titans' or something).

First, the offseason is going to be even more wild. If you have four teams set to be in 'Division B', for instance, each one has a huge incentive to spend wildly for free agents, within the bounds of their resources, in order to achieve short-term gains. Once the divisions are set, there's no reason not to hugely outspend your opponents in order to buy a title. The next year you may end up in another division, but with all your division pals in the same boat, why worry about next year's competition?

For teams that can't spend, of course, there'd be a great pressure to develop good players and make smart trades. The Twins, for instance, might make a good living signing players to long-term below-market deals during their promising years and then selling them off to teams looking to stay in efficient divisions.

Both of these trends wouldn't last forever, though. Teams would, in general, keep one eye on the win column, another on their relative payroll rankings, and a third on their own financial limitations. The best way to win in the long term if you were in Division C wouldn't be to spend wildly and get bounced into B where you'd get trounced, but to be careful developing stars, getting other teams to bite on unhappy free agents, arbitration-eligible scrubs.

Baseball might well become a place where deals are much less cordial. Teams that now seem to make a lot of mutually beneficial deals would hesitate to do so, for helping someone in your salary neighborhood would come back to hurt you quickly.

So as the season started the division structure would already be skewed. The short-term signers in each division would carry payrolls above that of the low teams in the division above. Teams that can already see how things will end would begin to dump salary during the opening week of the season and it wouldn't stop until the trading deadline. The moment a team lost an ace starter to injury the whole roster might well go on the block, because there would be no point to carrying all the salary to be whupped in the division, especially considering a timely series of moves could result in a stronger team playing in a weaker division next year.

It's been interesting in recent years watching teams start the season signing a set of name players and then, as they start to tank, selling them off and when they rally late trying to get them back. David Cone and Jimmy Key saw this happen, being traded more than once a season despite being big-name players. Payroll-based divisions would increase the frequency players were traded, as teams already doomed to move up a division try to lock up a title and look to be competitive next year, and teams who made bad early decisions try to put themselves in a division where they won't look so bad next year.

The playoffs would be an exercise in futility, of course. While in any short series it's possible for the worst to beat the best, the difference between the Division A teams carrying $100M payrolls and the $10M payrolls of the Division Fs would make the early rounds barely worth watching. It would be interesting when the mid-division overspenders play each other, but really, by the end of the season the team that wins Division A would likely have won 95-100 games while the average number of wins per team in each division below would drop about 10 games. The Division A team would win, and no one would watch because it would, most years, be a foregone conclusion that they could beat a team with half the talent.

The Super Division, with its massive spending, would dominate the game. Players would demand to be traded to those teams (like they do today), they'd sign all the stars, and their television contracts would be even greater. When the Mets and the Yankees compete for the Division A title, that's news. If the Twins and Pirates arm-wrestle in mud for the Division F while monster trucks explode in the background, who would care?

The revenue gap between clubs would grow, not shrink, and that fundamental problem would go unsolved. And to a great extent, those Super Teams wouldn't care if they won the division this year, because they have to field a competitive team, and beyond that chance will put them in the playoffs every couple of years.

Besides Division A, though, there would be three kinds of teams at work. First, there would be the teams desperately dumping salary or pumping it on in order to work the system for a title today or in the future, in order to get a stadium after a winning season or lose to cut salary. Second, there would be teams that quietly compete on a budget constraint year after year, like the Astros today, teams working the farms and the neglected role players into enough wins to be beaten in the playoffs. And, just like today, there would be a set of incompetent teams, building terrible rosters on varying budgets, like the Royals and the Orioles.

Payroll Baseball would create a game that would be everything its jester proponents want to solve -- dominated more than ever by a subset of nearly invincible teams, creating more revenue disparity, wilder salaries and salary dumping, and year after year it would strip baseball of competitive playoffs. It would be an amusing world for people like me who evaluate GMs and think too much about payroll-to-win solution theories, but it would end baseball at large within a decade if allowed to happen.

about the author

Derek Zumsteg is in negotiations to be the Dodgers' new starting left fielder. Write him at dmz@strikethree.com but promise you won't let Kevin Malone know that Derek's even worse than Devon White.