Attanasio "We have to be fiscally responsible..." [merged... Mark A.: Sign of strength or sign of weakness? reply #52ish]

[RobDeer 45]

I think as Brewer fans we can't expect MA to go out and spend tons of money every year on players. This is not a year for us to do that. Be thankful that our owner took a chance last year and stepped up and spent the money needed to make a run. Now you scale back and get a few more young prosepects ready and then go at it in a year or two. Our rotation can't be fixed by adding a free agent, they are just too over priced. We have to develop our pitching from with in and then spend money when the time is right. Gallardo and Parra are prob still a year off from being what we need them to be so there is no point in spending money now. We will still be competitve but we can't expect to have a year like we had last year every year. We are a small market team and we need to build from with in, period!

[endaround]

No this is the year to do that since salaries have been actually below trend this offseason. Mark A has never taken a chance. Baseball team ownership is a rigged game where everyone makes money, just how much is up in the air. Attanasio has made more with the Brewers due to operations than the Seligs ever did.

[brewtank34]

With Mark A's comments to Bloomberg, it raised a question in my mind. The question is whether or not his comments are a sign of weakness or strength/smartness.

 

I actually going on record applauding Mark A for his comments. A salary cap is not desperatley needed in MLB, however who can argue that it wouldn't make it better? I out there hoping that many of us don't feel that Mark A's comments were a sign of weakness, rather a pleed to better the game of baseball. Look at the NFL and what a salary cap can do.

 

Here's me hoping that the rain of the wicked Yankees is close to ending.

 

 

(added link --1992)

[diener34]

I like it.

 

NYY vs. MIL CC bidding

 

Mike Cameron Trade

 

Ben Sheets

 

The Yankees Piles of Money

 

It seems the Brewers are starting to stand up to the Yankees, and it only took 2 years of competitive baseball. Even if it doesn't get anywhere, I like that Mark A. is not just sitting back quietly.

 

I don't Care if he ends up looking bad, or gets ignored, he's feisty, and I like it.

[tigerbrew]

I guess Mark A has finally seen the light about those damn "pinstripes" and renounced his Yankee fanship. This is too far from a level playing field, and that is very unfair for us Brewers fans.

[BrewCrewForever]

A salary cap in baseball seems like a no brainer to me. Look at the great parody in the NFL because of the cap. Nuff said as far as I'm concerned.

[endaround]

Yes teams from Boston and New York never dominate the NFL

[BrewCrewForever]

Yes teams from Boston and New York never dominate the NFL

I never said they were not good. But look at the parody of teams that make the playoffs every year. Look at the Super Bowl winners of recent besides the Patriots little run there it always seems to be a new team.

[bklynbrewcrew]

Yes teams from Boston and New York never dominate the NFL

As a Jets fan I can tell you first hand that the reason New England and the Giants dominate football is because they are well run organizations. They have the same salary structure as the rest of the league and do well most years because they draft well and have great coaching staffs. I love the fact that there is a cap in the NFl and that teams like the Packers and Buccaneers have just as good a chance as my lowly Jets of succeeding every year.

[Invader3K]

The alternative to the salary cap would be to increase the luxury tax teams pay for high payrolls. Last year the only teams that paid on it were the Yankees and Tigers. I think the Yankees are even exempt starting next year because of their new stadium, which seems pretty silly to me.

 

My dad offered an alternative last night...move two more teams to New York. The population could support it. I don't think it's necessarily a great idea, but it would be better than the current situation.

[sveumrules]

i could be wrong, but i believe the yankees will still have a pretty high luxury tax bill, but their revenue sharing will be less because they are paying off debt from a new stadium which can be written off against their revenue sharing total at year's end. the luxury tax essentially acts as a salary cap right now anyway. in the 6 years it has existed the yankees have paid 90% of the total amount received.

[bucksbeat]

I understand that the MLBPA would fight a Salary Cap to death but couldn't there be some kind of compromise? Maybe setting a salary cap and a salary floor?

 

I have to believe that teams who spend pocket change on rosters are as much to blame as those who seemingly have endless wallets.

 

As of MLB Opening day 2008 the Yankees had a payroll of over $200 million and the Marlins had one of just over $21 million.

 

As of NFL Opening day 2008 the Cowboys had a payroll of $151 million and the Chiefs had one at over $81 million

 

It seems it's not just the high end disparity that hurts baseball but the low end. The Marlins spent $60 million less than the Chiefs (Lowest payroll in NFL) just as the Yankees spent $50 million more than the #1 team in the NFL.

[GAME05]

it seems to me one advantage of having a cap in the NFL is that if you spend under it, the fans know it and they can rebel. they did that for a good while before the Bengals finally started paying for players.

 

it's obvious the player's union would strike over a salary cap, and certainly baseball owners wouldn't want to go through that again. there would have to be some way that the Union could see that creating a salary floor would increase revenue overall to go along with a cap. but in the Union's defense, until baseball owners open their books, it's impossible to know what they can afford and what they can't. i don't believe Selig and Co. have been totally honest about budgets, either, evidenced by his claiming that a team was close to bouncing payroll checks once.

 

plus what would happen to teams like the Marlins or the Devil Rays, whose good players are still young? what happens if they end up below the salary floor? should they be forced to put money into a player they don't want?

 

...although i'm honestly rooting for the Yankees to sign Manny, just because i think that would be one big nail in the "we gotta do something" coffin. although i thought it was ironic that Torii Hunter was railing against the overspending Yankees when he's on a team with the payroll of the Angels.

 

plus as a friend of mine brought up to me, what would happen with mid-season trades? if the Brewers were near the salary ceiling before CC, they wouldn't have been able to pick him up. the salary/trade system in the NBA is already pretty well messed up.

[mothershipconnection]

plus what would happen to teams like the Marlins or the Devil Rays, whose good players are still young? what happens if they end up below the salary floor? should they be forced to put money into a player they don't want?

 

I think they'd be best with a general operating expenses or player expenses floor. That leaves a team with multiple options for getting up the the floor, so they could sign a young star to an extension and pay a bonus up front, or they could pay more in the draft by going after 1st round talent that fell to the 3rd or 4th due to signability issues. The league could do a lot of things without making the salary floor a problem for teams.

[Tbadder]

it's obvious the player's union would strike over a salary cap, and certainly baseball owners wouldn't want to go through that again.

 

My greatest wish is that the Union strikes and that the owners just shut down the league for a full season. But the owners have always been gutless, spineless boys with toys who let the inmates run the asylum. I will defend the Union in one way--the owners must be forced to open their books. Any team that truly cannot handle a 70 to 100 million dollar payroll and make a profit really needs to be shutdown.

[danzig6767]

it's obvious the player's union would strike over a salary cap, and certainly baseball owners wouldn't want to go through that again.

 

My greatest wish is that the Union strikes and that the owners just shut down the league for a full season. But the owners have always been gutless, spineless boys with toys who let the inmates run the asylum.

That's a lot easier to say sitting behind a computer than being an actual owner. Baseball is a very big money business and a very long strike could cost the owners a ton of money. It has nothing to do with them being "gutless", it has far more to do with rich men wanting to protect their financial bottom line.

 

We aren't talking about some potential fight on the playground over lunch money here, major league baseball is a multi-billion dollar business. When deciding to lockout players or do something that they know will likely cause a strike, owners aren't worried about getting a bloody nose, they are worried about losing many many millions of dollars in the short term and possibly many millions more if a work stoppage has protracted long term negative ramifications. They have huge contracts with corporations that broadcast the games, with advertisers, are soon to be starting their own TV station etc etc. The list is very long It's not something as simple as where they sit back and think, ok if this fight goes bad, i'll put ice on my wound and be fine a few days later. It's each owner sitting with money crunchers and analyzing how things are right now for them and how thing might end up if there was a long work stoppage them, involving money figures you and others on a message board will never have to make tough decisions on.

 

You also have 30 different owners with 30 different financial net worths and many differing views on how the current setup effects them. Trying to get all these different owners who have varying agendas to agree on a damaging work stoppage isn't easy, baseball isn't like many other businesses who have only one main voice on the major decisions. This is the biggest reason the players have for the most part won these labor battles with the owners. It wasn't because the owners were "spinless" and afraid of the players, it was more because the differing agendas among the owner eventually caused a split among themselves.

[MessiahRp]

it seems to me one advantage of having a cap in the NFL is that if you spend under it, the fans know it and they can rebel. they did that for a good while before the Bengals finally started paying for players.

Dude what are you talking about? The Bengals still aren't paying players. They let every good player on the O-Line and Defense go away in free agency and their best attempt to acquire a RB after cutting Rudi Johnson was Cedric Benson. The Packers are getting heat for being $20 million under the cap but Thompson won't spend it.

 

Seems to me what needs to happen is a Cap Ceiling and a Cap Floor that are reasonably close together. Say the cap is $90 million, the floor should be no less than $70 million. With all the Revenue Sharing going on even small market teams should be able to make $70 million. If not they should start working harder on finding ways to get fans in the seats. In places like KC giving people a losing product where you don't even really try is not going to build that revenue base. Same reason why the Rays are absolutely NOT the small market model anyone should follow. 12 years of last place losing meant a struggle to fill seats once they acquired enough top draft pick talent to start to contend.

 

Rp

[Invader3K]

And the other problem with the way the Rays did it is that they still had bad crowds up until maybe two weeks before the end of the season.

[KCBrewerfan34]

What about allowing a team to sign only 1 or 2 Type A FA's, that would not allow the Yankees to completely empty their pocketbooks also it would spread the talent just a bit. I love the idea of a franchise player but the Indians would never have traded C.C in the first place with tha rule.

 

 

Go Brew

[bork]

They could start by having a luxury tax with some actual teeth. It should kick in at a lower level and force the team to pay a much higher amount. What is $26.9 million to the Yankees? It's just 6% of what they're paying CC, Teixeira, and Burnett. The luxury tax is just lip service and is meaningless.

[kramnoj]

The luxury tax is just lip service and is meaningless.

 

That the Yankees are the team that only repeatedly signficantly crosses the luxury tax line shows that it isn't meaningless. Other teams do use it as a guide as a border that shouldn't be crossed. The problem isn't the luxury tax in and of itself, but there are related problems.

 

The money collected from the luxury tax isn't directly distributed to other teams. It goes into a central fund that is spent at the discretion of the comissioner. Also, with the Yankees and their stake in YES, the Yankees aren't paying themselves their full revenue for rights fees, meaning that they aren't properly sharing all revenues. There's one last thing which is basically a Pandora's Box. The Yankees are probably technically losing money, and there isn't a provision in baseball that prevents them from doing so. The Yankees are on a different playing field, on quite a few different levels.

[logan82]

I wouldn't call the luxury tax meaningless and nothing more than lip service, but I think it is to high to make any meaningful impact.

[snyttri]

Why should the players agree to a salary cap? Baseball is making money hand over fist.

 

The problem seems to be that owners can't agree among themselves how revenues should be shared and how spending should be evened out for competitive balance. The owners should be able to work out equitable revenue sharing and luxury tax arrangements. If they can't do it they could try hiring a real, neutral commissioner (instead of a fellow owner) who would be respected by all sides to force an equitable arrangement to share revenue and spending. The owners should get their own house in order, without breaking the law for a change, before restricting the players' access to the market.

 

A floor is the first order of business, not a cap. The only publicly acceptable reason for a cap is to promote competitive balance. Owners have used the luxury tax and revenue sharing to guarantee all owners a profit no matter how incompetently they run the team. The cap would be another guarantee of profits as a reward for failing to compete. Owners should demonstrate they are serious about competition by forcing everyone in their ranks to compete for the postseason instead of just collecting checks (Bud and family may have been in this category) before restricting the rights of others .

[bork]

The luxury tax is just lip service and is meaningless.

 

That the Yankees are the team that only repeatedly signficantly crosses the luxury tax line shows that it isn't meaningless. Other teams do use it as a guide as a border that shouldn't be crossed.

Possibly. It could be keeping other teams in check. Or it could indicate that the tax kicks in at a level that is too high. That makes it primarily a Yankees tax. But the luxury tax is a joke to the Yankees.

[kramnoj]

A floor is the first order of business, not a cap.

 

A floor would just mean more money goes to mediocre or even inferior players, it wouldn't do that much to make teams competitive.

 

Teams should be required to spend the money they get from revenue sharing on improving the team, whether that be major league players, more scouting, international academies, etc. The only problem is that there isn't any way to actually prove that unless teams opened those portions of their books to the MLBPA.