Salary Cap?

[TheCrew07]

If College football is the NFL's minor league, then it's A ball and down. There are way too many flame outs in the draft to make that claim hold up, the draft is just as much a crap shoot in the NFL as it is in MLB and MLB has 5 levels of the minors to wash players out. I'm not going to hate on one sport for the other when they are extremely dissimilar in almost every way.

 

The point should be that in baseball a small market team has virtually no chance of hanging onto to an icon in the sport for the majority of his career. Arod, Giambi, Bonds, Sabathia... who was the last icon in MLB that spent the majority of his career with one team? Jeter? Who plays for the largest market in the game? That's the issue that needs to be addressed in my mind, there has to be a way for every team to realistically afford 1 high priced and home grown talent, but even with the Brewers having a payroll around 80 mil a season it doesn't make sense to pay 1/4 of that to any single player in the current system, there realistically isn't enough money to go around to the other players if a deal like that were to happen.

[Ennder]

who was the last icon in MLB that spent the majority of his career with one team?

 

Smoltz, Glavine, Ripken, Biggio, Berkman, Halladay, Chipper, Hunter(11 years) to name a few recent ones. Football careers are generally shorter and it is really only the QB that sticks with his team long most of the time, maybe a few RB but they almost always burn out young.

[TuesdaysWithRillo]

I have a lot of other grumblings about football. One of them is steroids. Players like Shawne Merriman can test positive for steroids and it's a small article on the bottom of the page, but when a big time baseball player does steroids, it has "tarnished" the sport. The NFL gets away with so much because of it's popularity. That really doesn't have much to do with the salary cap, but I'll watch a baseball game before a football game any day of the week which is why I ended up missing a lot of Packer games in September and October this year.

[VeggieBadger]

I think I'm like most people here that agree something needs to be done. I'm not sure if a salary cap is the answer or not. What makes the salary cap nice in football is that it forces teams to "pay" for their mistakes to an extent. How much this hurts is reduced with the non-guaranteed contracts. In baseball, with the guaranteed salaries, a cap would have an even greater negative effect for clubs that sign players to "bad" contracts. However, as things stand now, the smaller market teams already feel this while the big market teams don't.

 

The fun thing now is how we think of options to fix what we see as a problem. So, I'll go through what I see as a problem and offer, sometimes creative, solutions.

 

1. Teams don't always draft the best player because of economic reasons.

-- Players must declare for the draft (no option to say, "I'm going back to college"), teams retain rights until a contract is signed

-- Each pick has a pay slot

-- Draft picks are allowed to be traded

 

2. Only certain teams can sign big free agents.

-- Greater revenue sharing

-- Visiting teams receive 40% of ticket sales

-- MLB negotiates TV deals, not individual teams. (something like all games are shown regionally on the MLB network. ESPN, FOX, etc. get games of the week, night, etc.)

 

3. Teams that lose free agents have to wait years to see the benefit of gained draft picks.

-- The team that loses a type A free agent is allowed to choose one player with fewer than 50 AAA at bats or 20 AAA innings pitched from the team signing the free agent (teams can protect three players) in addition to draft picks.

[brewcrewreview]

Cricks28 (and several others),

You forgot the, by far, top 2 reasons why football always has the highest ratings in all of sports:

 

1. Gambling

2. Fantasy football.

 

 

It's really that simple.

 

Even professional wrestling consistently draws higher ratings than baseball (except for the World Series).

[SoCal Brew Crew Fan]

I'd love to see a salary cap too...but it will never happen. Between the big market teams and the player's association...it will never happen. We will probably just get more tweaks to the system to at least give the small market teams a chance if they execute perfectly...like Tampa this year and avoid from having too many "Washington Generals" out there that don't offer enough legit competition to the big market teams. Baseball views it in their best interest to keep the Red Sox and Yankees strong...and if they aren't they will always get the option to rebuild quickly through free agency like this year. The overall league and I believe even the players would benefit from the cap, but there are certainly big interests like the Yankees and Scott Boras who may have to sacrifice. No way they ever do that.

 

One other thing working against competitive balance in baseball versus football is the playing life of the player. Also, it takes more players to make a difference in football versus baseball. Those items and the cap makes football more balanced and has certainly played a role (not the only one) in the relative success of football over baseball in recent times.

[nate82]

Even with a salary cap the Yankees would still have been able to sign Sabathia, Teixeira, and Burnett to deals. The salary cap will not and does not effect free agents from signing to big clubs. Look at the Cowboys in the NFL as I said earlier in a post they can and will try to sign Ray Lewis who is probably the biggest name in the NFL as a free agent this coming off season.

 

With the amount of conracts the Yankees had coming off the books this year a salary cap wouldn't have prevented the Yankees from signing those three players.

[MJLiverock]

What if MLB had a franchise player type designation for a player like the NFL? If a team like the Brewers threw a franchise tag on CC. he gets a one year deal at the average of the 10 highest paid pitchers or if the Yankees sign him the Brewers get the Yankees first round pick and any player they want out of the Yankees farm system.

 

After his one year deal is done he is unrestricted and can't be franchised again. The team gets a sandwich pick or something for losing him.

 

BTW; I don't think Green Bay has been shut out of the free agent market in the NFL, I think it is more of a reflection of the management not pursuing free agents. Thompson has been a well known front office guy who focuses on the draft and not free agency. I don't know that Sherman was a big free agent guy either.

[trwi7]

What if MLB had a franchise player type designation for a player like the NFL? If a team like the Brewers threw a franchise tag on CC. he gets a one year deal at the average of the 10 highest paid pitchers or if the Yankees sign him the Brewers get the Yankees first round pick and any player they want out of the Yankees farm system.

If there was a franchise tag in the MLB, Cleveland never would've traded him.

[jjfanec]

A salary cap does seem to get people to go to less desirable places because teams are on a level playing field financially. Big name guys have signed with Minnesota, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and many other teams. As for people saying a team like the cowboys can still go get whomever they want that is not true. Right now the Packers have 23 or so million to spend in FA where the Cowboys have 10 million. The Cowboys will not be able to go out and sign a couple guys to huge contracts. They can probably get one big guy and lower level guy or two and sign their rookies.

Is the salary cap perfect? nope. Is baseball's system broken? Nope. However there definitely are things that could be done to level the field a little bit. The reality is if a big spending team has a smart gm they are set for a long time like Boston. If they have a free-spending owner but make dumb decision they are not gauranteed anything. The reality is the margin for error is so much different for the Brewers to even the Cubs and especially the Yankees that something like a cap looks more appealing each year to me.

I don't know if it is a stricter luxury cap, or higher level cap that allows the Yankees and Red Sox and the like to spend just not outrageously. Listening to Collin Cowherd (who I don't really care for) he said a cap was not a good idea but contraction would solve baseballs problems. Not really sure about that but it was an idea I did not see thrown out here.

[TheCrew07]

Smoltz, Glavine, Ripken, Biggio, Berkman, Halladay, Chipper, Hunter(11 years) to name a few recent ones. Football careers are generally shorter and it is really only the QB that sticks with his team long most of the time, maybe a few RB but they almost always burn out young.

Atlanta = Spends, Baltimore = has spent ... I'm not sure if the others qualify as icons. Hunter probably does, but there's a difference between being the face of the franchise and one of the faces of MLB. The 3 pitchers in Atlanta were, but Maddux didn't come up through the organization. Ripken played most of his career prior to what I would consider the Modern Era at this time, the disparity between the have and have nots has widened since the 80s. The YES network and TBS are a huge competitive advantage for the Yankees and Braves, the Brewers will never get that much revenue from a local TV contract.

 

What one person considers an icon is totally subjective and I understand that... I was thinking along the lines of Arod, Griffey, Bonds, Jeter... players that MLB actively markets/marketed around. However, I'm not sure that citing large markets who spend is a good example when I'm talking about small market teams retaining their stars. Hunter is the one player on that list I'll cede as small market, but by the time his career is over he may have only played half his career with the Twins. If we're talking about a player's "best years" then MN definitely got his best years just like we did with Sheets, but Sheets has never been an icon in MLB either. Santana is an icon in the sport and MN had absolutely no chance of retaining his services, just like the Indians and Brewers had absolutely no chance of retaining CC's services.

[danzig6767]

With the free agency rules in the NFL it really doesn't make any sense to have a salary cap. Take this year into consideration if the Dallas Cowboys really wanted to sign Ray Lewis or any of the other top free agents this year they could and the Packers will still be way down on the bottom of the list of teams Ray Lewis would want to go to.

 

The salary cap doesn't help the Packers and small market teams as many think it does. The big name free agents still go to the big market clubs. When was the last time the Packers signed a highly ranked free agent? Charles Woodson wasn't a highly ranked free agent at the time when he signed with the Packers remember Woodson had question marks about his injury the season before and if he was fully recovered. I actually believe the Packers over paid for Woodson. After Woodson it was Reggie White and that was it.

 

The salary cap doesn't really help the small market teams. What helps the small market teams compete in the NFL is the way players become free agents. There are restricted and unrestricted free agents. It takes a certain amount of years to become one or the other. By the time a player becomes a unrestricted free agent a player is normally at the peak of their career or in the decline of their career.

 

In the NFL you don't have a lot of free agents in the age range of 24-28 years old that are superstars. When was the last time there were free agents equivalent to Sabathia, Teixeira, Burnett, Ramirez, Dunn, Sheets, etc. for the NFL? Most of the time there are only one or two players in that caliber of players in the NFL free agency and at a higher rate you have average to below average players in free agency. Nearly every year in baseball you will have a lot of players that are in the upper echelon of players in free agency.

 

The salary cap in football helps lower revenue teams more than you imply, but the real difference in the two sports that allows for the majority of teams to compete financially on a relatively fair scale is by far the amount of revenue sharing in the NFL.

 

For the most part, all TV revenue is shared among the NFL teams. Because of this, you don't see these wide gulfs in the revenues for broadcasting rights like you see in baseball. Teams like the Red Sox and Yankees get more cash for just their local broadcasting rights than many other teams bring in combined revenues from both broadcasting right and money from attendance.

 

This allows smaller market NFL teams to have the incoming revenues to pay most of their own high quality players so long as the franchise is run well vs having to let them walk for the big market teams to sign like what happens to often in baseball. The Packers, Titans, Vikings, etc etc and their fans in the NFL don't have to constantly fret that if they draft/develop great young talents, are we going to have to trade them before they reach free agency? On the flip side, teams like Dallas or Washington actually pay for mistake signings because there is a cap. A rich owner can't just say, i'll try to buy my way out of poor decisions. Those poor decisions in the NFL come with tougher consequences than w see in baseball to wealthy franchises.

 

There are advantages in baseball by not having a cap, it allows for more trade flexibility. Plus, splitting TV revenue money is easier in a sport like football compared to baseball. They are different sports in many ways, fans can't just expect similar economic systems. I like football better, but i'm not stressing for baseball to get a cap. More revenue sharing would be the main thing i'd like to see, so long as owners getting that extra revenue sharing money aren't allowed to just pocket it.