Wherefore Art Thou Salary Cap?

Baseball, football, and basketball all have their similarities.  They are all team sports pitting one fierce rival against another.  The main objective in each of the sports is to outscore your opponents.  All three of the sports offers a chance for world class athletes to make their living playing the sport that they love and live for.But they also have their differences.  One major divergence, other than the size and shapes of the balls of course, is the presence of a salary cap.  While this may have not caused much of a dilemma in the golden age of baseball, in this day and age the difference in payrolls is outlandish and to some extent unfair.

In the last four years alone, payrolls have sky-rocketed and plummeted in dramatic proportions.  First, let’s look at the swell in payroll for the Yankees over the last four years.  During the 2000 season, the Yankees payroll was around $95 million.  That may seem like an excessive amount of money to pay a ball club, but it sits in the shadow of the Yankees’ gargantuan payroll for the ’04 season.  Their payroll was nearly $187 million, that’s a difference of close to $92 million dollars.

Let’s put this in perspective.  That is nearly four times the payroll of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays whose payroll was a paltry $24 million.  Surprisingly, the Devil Ray’s payroll was at $61 million in 2000.  Those aren’t the only substantial changes in payroll over the last four years.  The Red Sox payroll increased by $55 million, the Angels’ went up by $61 million, and the payroll of the Phillies increased by $52 million dollars.

You might say that money doesn’t buy championships, but let’s see what money can do.  Six of the eight teams in the 2004 playoffs were among the top ten highest payrolls.  The only two teams that made the playoffs outside of the top ten were the Atlanta Braves ($79 million), and the Minnesota Twins ($54 million).  Neither the Braves nor the Twins were able to move past the divisional series.

Now I would like to compare a few of these numbers to those of twenty years earlier.  In 1984, the Yankees’ payroll was around $15 million, a difference of right around $172 million.  The average payroll in 1984 was right around $10.5 million.  Last year the average payroll was about $68.5 million.  Teams have used their owner’s deep pockets to buy talent more and more over the years.  That is why the term “on any given Sunday” was coined in the NFL and not in Major League Baseball.  Some teams consist of kids in their very early twenties with a few veterans in the late years of their career sprinkled throughout.  And then you have teams like the Yankees who have two players with contracts that exceed $100 million.  Every year the list of players with $100 million plus contracts increases, with the newest member of the gang being Carlos Beltran who received a $119 million contract from the Mets.  

I don’t see a salary cap being instituted any time soon, and maybe never.  If it ever is seriously considered, it will be an exceedingly difficult task to handle.  One way that I could see this possibly happening would be to set a date in the future, maybe seven to ten years down the road where no contract can exceed.  Then after that season have teams renegotiate their contracts with a set salary cap.  Players would have to accept pay cuts, but I think it would ultimately result in much more equal and over all more entertaining baseball.

I know that is just dreaming and probably will never come into play, but wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where there isn’t a $163 million difference between the Devil Rays and the Yankees?  To live in a world where the Brewers and Red Sox have the same amount of money to bid for the top free agents?  Whether this is a dream, a fantasy, or hopefully a soon to be reality, baseball would benefit tremendously from a salary cap.