Baseball Is Broken: BanBaseball.com Wants to Help!

Major League Baseball is broken and they won't fix it; things are going too well for them at the moment. Attendance is up, the league is full of shiny new stadiums, and eight teams have won the World Series in the past 10 years.

However, the fundamentals of finance, business, and logic will catch up with baseball like they caught up with people with interest-only mortgages.

We at BanBaseball.com believe we cannot let ourselves be fans of a league where one player gets paid more than another team's entire roster.

Baseball has never made major changes unless they were forced to do so. They hammered players for a century with the reserve clause which bound players to a team for life.

Only when forced by law did baseball free agency begin. Major League Baseball itself formed only after lawsuits and failing business forced it to change.

Pittsburgh and Kansas City are minor league teams with no hope of winning next season. Every year a Tampa Bay or Milwaukee will surprise everyone for one season before receding to mediocrity for years.

Everyone knows about Moneyball, and well-run teams like Oakland and Minnesota can maintain some level of competitiveness.

However, they have done so while other small market organizations were being poorly run. Moneyball principles do not work when everyone is following them. That's when money starts talking louder.

Everyone know this, but not everyone will admit it. Many who refuse to admit this are Yankees fans and are blinded by their geographical lottery win. Others will point to the relative parity in baseball - which on the surface is compelling. As written in a recent SI article:

"

-- Over the past 10 years, eight different teams have won the World Series. In all, 15 teams made the World Series -- half of the teams in baseball.

-- Over the past 20 years, 14 different teams have won the World Series. In all, 22 teams made the World Series. Now, we're at more than two-thirds who have reached the Series.

-- Over the last 30 years, 20 different teams have won the World Series, and only four (Cubs, Mariners, Rangers, and Expos/Nationals) have failed to get there.

By comparison, NFL teams that have not made the Super Bowl the last 30 years include: The Jets, Browns, Chiefs, Saints, Cardinals, Lions, Jaguars, Texans and Vikings. That's 10, almost one-third of all the teams in the NFL...

I'm not saying that the Yankees will not win in 2009, that's an awfully good team now, absolutely the best that money can buy. But just remember that key fact: 20 teams have won a World Series in the last 30 years. And by comparison:

-- Only 14 teams have won the Super Bowl over the last 30 years.
-- Only 14 different men have won Wimbledon over the last 30 years.
-- Only 13 teams have won the Stanley Cup over the last 30 years.

-- Only nine teams have won an NBA title over the last 30 years.

"

As these figures and recent Yankees teams have proven money does not guarantee success, but it helps. That's the problem: money helps a lot. A recent Sabernomics.com article helps us measure exactly how much money helps:

"Using data from 1988-2006, Brook reports that payroll differences explain approximately 18 percent of the variance of wins across teams. This result comes from regressing wins on a measure of relative payroll. Now the point is that if 18 percent is responsible, then 82 percent of other stuff is playing a bigger role.
"

The author goes on to explain another approach to measuring the impact of salaries on wins, which led to a 17 percent result.

With two independent techniques arriving at nearly the same result, let's agree here that roughly 17 percent of a team's win-loss record is determined by payroll.

Not every series, not even every year, but over time and across the league a 17 percent impact appears to be statistically valid.

Would you play poker with someone that gets an automatic Ace every hand? Would you run a 100-yard dash against someone that gets an 17-yard head start?

Sure, these advantages don't guarantee any results. The poker player might draw a Pavano, Brown, and Giambi, and the runner might be old and distracted by the media.... but 17 percent is an undeniable advantage.

Some day Ken Burns will produce Inning No. 12 of his baseball series discussing the silly era when teams' balance sheets were more important than their pitching rotation. There's a reason baseball is the only sport without a salary cap.

Players and owners won't do anything (yet), and the government has long ago said baseball can run itself. So it's up to fans to say this sucks and we're not fools.

Baseball is not just entertainment; we can go to the movie theater or a concert for that. We're supposed to care about baseball, to trust that it's fair and our team has a chance.

You tricked us with steroids, and we probably helped let that happen. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice...

So don't go to baseball games in 2009. Don't watch on TV. According to many people, the Yankees have already swept the 2009 World Series, so why bother?

The economy is tough now, so save yourself a bunch of money and stay home and play baseball yourself.

Teach a kid to play baseball, go to the beach, run a marathon. Do something, anything else but support baseball this year. Please. I'd like Major League Baseball to become relevant again.

Join the cause at BanBaseball.com. We love baseball, just want it to get fixed before the owners have to blow things up to get a cap in place.