Hit the Floor: Why Baseball's Future Doesn't Require a Salary Cap

Even for a Boston fan, it seems ridiculous that Red Sox owner John Henry is again suggesting a salary cap. For Henry (seen above) or anyone else to believe that restricting how much players can make will change the balance of power across the board is baffling for several reasons.

It's alarming that numbers-guru Henry and every other media member who has ever called for a cap are missing (or avoiding) a glaring oversight. You see, a salary cap won't help even out the playing field but rather a salary floor—a starting payroll number every team must start the season at...or else.

In 2000, the New York Yankees won their 26th World Series, along with taking home the honor of that season's highest payroll. Since then, there hasn't been one team to replicate that feat with the closest being the Yankees (losers in both '01 and '03) and Boston, who won both of their titles while second in overall payroll.

So doing some quick math, only five of the 18 World Series teams in the past nine seasons have been in the top three in payroll - just 28 percent. Just this past season, the poster kids for low player salaries—Tampa Bay—made it to their first Fall Classic after a decade in the dumps and in a year where they had the 29th lowest Opening Day payroll.

In other words, there is an argument that a team with a Top three payroll is not likely to win the World Series or even make it to the Fall Classic.

What Henry and others are attempting to argue is that the disparity in money equates to a disparity in winning. However, it's not the money spent that is the problem here, but the money not spent, an issue that has plagued MLB for years.

Why restrict those that can spend when we aren't trying to make the bottom end more efficient in how their spend their money?

The owners will never get the union to accept restrictions of players' incomes, nor should they. (One would think getting the B.C.S. overlords to implement a playoff system would be easier.)

Before a ticket is even sold, owners get tens of millions of dollars in revenue sharing to start the season. For example, Pittsburgh brought in $59.5 million from revenue sharing/luxury taxes in 2006 and had the 27th lowest Opening Day payroll at $46 million.

When you take in all the other revenue streams (sponsorship, ticket sales, merchandise, etc), a successful franchise can be a profitable one if the right ownership and personnel are in place.

There are a group of teams (Kansas City and Pittsburgh especially) that have wallowed in the dregs for over a decade for no other reason than repeated mismanagement and repeated false starts have helped foster a woe-is-our-financial state overwhelming sense of despair at the beginning of every season.

It's not a good thing when you start the season with ZERO chance at making the playoffs, much less a ZERO chance of even getting to .500, for a decade straight.

While there are other teams who float in and out of relative competitiveness (see San Francisco, San Diego, Texas, Baltimore), putting a limit on how much other teams can spend isn't going to change anything for them. They are hapless for a reason.

But setting a floor would help bring competitive balance back to baseball's lower tier because cheap owners would be forced to reinvest in their own product and also have to be smart about it—including in the unappreciated areas of player development and overseas scouting.

Every team should be forced to spend at least $50 million on player salary with a one-year exemption. If they cannot manage to meet the minimum in two consecutive years, that franchise would be retracted or sold to someone who could meet the standards.

Last season, the Pirates, Rays, A's and Marlins had Opening Day payrolls below $50 million. The year before that, the Pirates, Nationals, Marlins and Rays fell below the $50 million barrier and while that would mean the Rays' magical run of '08 might have never happened, it's possible it could have happened a lot earlier.

It's time to stop the thought process of penalizing those that will pay and not penalizing those who won't. Ballparks will be filled this year, all of the revenue sharing checks will still clear and it will be another healthy year for Major League Baseball despite the economy.

Bud Selig and the owners need to demand better from the shallow end of the pool and push for a more effective use of revenues by those who claim to be under water.

Owning a baseball club isn't a right, but it's a privilege. However, making every effort to field competitive teams is a necessity, something a lot of owners are failing to live up to.

Josh Nason has owned and published New England-based sports and media blog Small White Ball since 2007. He can be reached at josh [at] smallwhiteball [dot-com].