I feel like I'm engaging what is a dead horse at best and trolling at worst, but.... You do know that the Marlins won two World Series within ten years, right? And that the Giants won last year with a salary only slightly above average, beating a team with one of the leagues lowest payrolls (Texas)? While admittedly harder, it's not like it's theoretically impossible to win when not in the top 5 for salary.
Its always going to be the haves and the have nots. Big money teams are always going to have the name veterans who are known to produce. Luckily they play the games and other teams are able to topple the giants so to speak, but it is somewhat stacked. To put it simply, as a Braves fan I want Ted Turner paying for our guys, not Liberty Media.
I'm a lifelong Pirates fan, but also a Yankees apologist. I've always viewed it like this... First, I don't fault the Yankees for how much they spend. I think of it like a business. They are earning a ton of income and choose to spend it by reinvesting in their product that they deliver to their customers. I can't blame them for wanting to improve their product as much as possible. It's better for the fans, and ultimately it earns them even more money. Coming from the perspective of being a fan of a team who seems to have the money but won't spend it, I can appreciate what the Yankees ownership does there. Nevertheless, I don't think it's a great defense saying if teams like the Marlins and Giants (who actually had a payroll of $96m putting them in the top 1/3 of the league) then anyone can. Sure, anyone can win the World Series every year. But let's be honest and admit that in terms of being able to sustain relevance over the long-term, it isn't very easy. Additionally, if you look at it in terms of playoff appearances and not championships, you'll see the league is generally dominated by the same handful of teams. I think any rational person will agree that having a higher payroll can greatly increase your chances as long as the team isn't spending it like an asshat (e.g. Cubs, Mets). Nevertheless, I am not a fan of uncapped spending. I feel that leveling the playing field financially for teams would benefit the sport. And I do blame the Yankees for continuing to perpetuate MLB's current paradigm and pretending like everyone has an even shot. Obviously it's up to the owners to agree upon and fight the MLBPA for a salary cap, and I don't see that happening any time soon. Of course part of the problem is also a lack of transparency and teams opting to pocket luxury tax money instead of spending it on payroll. While that is a possible solution, I feel more confident that a salary cap would ramp up competition that greater transparency and a high salary floor. ======================================== Baseball on the field commentary: Pirates are now 3-1 and the Orioles are 4-0. Surreal. Charlie Morton pitched a 6 inning, 3H, 1ER game against St. Louis last night. This is the same guy who was on pace to lose over 20 games last year with a 7.57ERA. I don't like his 5BB:2K ratio, but he's getting outs, particularly from grounders and he didn't lose his head and implode like he always would last year. The Pirates are currently 6th in MLB ERA at 2.83. Best of all, starting pitching was supposed to be the Pirates weakness, but is currently better than the bullpen, coming in at 2.60ERA while Evan Meek has struggled in relief.
Obviously I didn't mean to suggest that it's a level playing field. That is a foolish argument. It greatly increases ones chances. Otherwise, no one would do it! But there are ample examples of teams with high payrolls floundering and those with low payrolls succeeding. There's many examples of competitive teams with low payrolls. In addition to Florida and SF wining the WS (SF isn't low payroll, but certainly we can all admit they aren't on a NYY/Boston/Philly scale), there's the Rays making it with to the WS with a bottom-barrel payroll, the extended success of the Oakland Athletics, the Rangers WS run last year, and Colorado in the bottom ten payrolls in 2007. Last year's Reds had a low payroll, and the Braves were right around league average. There's enough examples that a team like the Pirates would be somewhat disingenuous to point at the Yankees and complain, without answering why they are perennially worse than economically comparable teams. Also (although Arms Akimbo obviously didn't say this), it's dishonest for any fan to complain about payroll discrepancy without admitting that if his team were to spend $120 million a year on player salaries, he would be probably be fairly happy with the situation. Everyone would love to have the Steinbrenner family wallet available to their favorite team, just not to other teams.
Is it also the Yankees fault that teams take their revenue sharing money and stick it in their pocket and don't spend it on their teams while making a profit? The Steinbrenners aren't even close to the richest owners in the sport.
"Of course part of the problem is also a lack of transparency and teams opting to pocket luxury tax money instead of spending it on payroll. While that (sic, should be "it") is a possible solution, I feel more confident that a salary cap would ramp up competition that (sic, should be "than") greater transparency and a high salary floor." My grammar always deteriorates towards the end.
Basically, spending a lot of money every season only guarantees you have a very good shot at making the playoffs. However, once you get to the playoffs, it's almost literally entirely luck. Even a significantly better team will only win like 59 % of playoff series, which is almost a coin flip. Obviously, the Yankees have a much higher margin for error, but other teams can easily be competitive. They just have to draft well, develop well and pick up low cost veterans who contribute. Obviously, small market teams can't do this all the time, so they go through boom and bust cycles. Look at Minnesota now (which is midmarket, but whatever), or Florida, or Tampa Bay etc. etc. It's just that they can't afford to compete year in and year out and actually have to rebuild.
I also suck at hyperlinking. Derp: <a class="postlink" href="http://sports.espn.go.com/los-angeles/mlb/news/story?id=6297020" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://sports.espn.go.com/los-angeles/m ... id=6297020</a>
When a team winds up with a $15 million profit and turns around and reinvests less than $200,000 of that into their players' salaries, they don't have much ground to stand on when it comes to other teams spending crazy amounts of money.
Will the Red Sox be 0-6 when they come home to Boston for their opener on Friday? I'm curious about how Opening Day will be if they are. They'll come around... eventually, but until they do I'm refusing to talk ball with anyone that isn't a hardcore baseball fan.
To be fair, those figures are from 2007 and 2008, both seasons where the team was stuck with players from the McClatchy/Littlefield era. Nutting, Coonelly and Huntington have yet to show whether they are willing to ante up when it comes to re-signing players the team develops. I was happy to see that they offered up sizable money for last year's top draft picks Taillon and Allie to convince them not to enter college. That definitely would not have happened 5 years ago. We'll see what happens when it comes to things like re-signing players like McCutchen, Walker and Alvarez. ====================== Rob Neyer has written a piece about a better way of measuring bullpen success. In short, if the reliever decreases win probability too much, it is a "meltdown." If he increases it a certain amount, it is a "shutdown." It makes a lot of sense to me. I also wanted to share http://eephusleague.com/. Basically a blog done by fan contributors about various aspects of baseball from stats, scorekeeping and other things that make baseball great. Finally, Pirates have won 2 road series in a row for the first time in 4 years! Raise the Jolly Roger!
And yes they will. Just read an interesting stat on teams that start 0-5. Since 1871, 110 teams have started a season 0-5. Know how many made the postseason? 2
That's an alarmingly low stat. Still, it's not even mid-April; I wouldn't get hung up on who's starting with what W/L record for at least a couple of months. That 4-0 stat by the Orioles, and the headline that it was their best start since 1997, was cute but silly. It's 4 games! That being said, that same 4-0 start IS significant when you consider that, since hiring Buck Showalter last August, they've had the best record in the AL East since that time. At least, they did a few days ago, when SportsCenter ran that specific segment. It's still a sample size of only about 60 games, but to be better than the Rays, Yankees, and BoSox in that time is rather impressive. Well, not as impressive in the case of Boston, amirite?? Also, ESPN has an article up on the front of their MLB page highlighting potential 2011 milestones. It's a short, but fun, read: <a class="postlink" href="http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=crasnick_jerry&page=starting9/110407" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/s ... ng9/110407</a>
I hate all of the Red Sox/record nonsense, it's clearly media driven and even the marginal fans realize this is nothing to be worked up over. We're less than 4% of the way into the season, if it were the NFL we'd be less than halfway through the 3rd quarter of the 1st game. While going on losing streaks certainly isn't optimal, both of the WS representatives last season had losing streaks of at least 6 games, but for some reason because Boston's occurs in the 1st week of the season instead of the 2nd like Texas', that's supposed to have greater affect on the entire season's outcome. Hell SanFran had 2 entire months that they didn't play .500 baseball. BTW, teams in the 1871 National Association played around 26 games a year, a 5 or 6 game losing streak is just a bit more significant than in a 162-game season. I'd hope no one is putting any credence in articles that make absurd connections like that.
To riff off of and/or repeat what Kinsey said: trend-hunting can get extremely annoying. Sure, there are some interesting things you can look at. Talking about, say, the percentage of teams down 0-2 in a 7-game series that win the series? Interesting and adds to the discussion. I'm very pro-data, don't get me wrong. But what annoys me is statements like "No team that started 0-5 has won a World Series." So? Does anyone think that there is something special about those first 5 games that has relevance for October? If two teams end up with identical regular season records but one of them started 0-5, does any one seriously think this means they have the lower chance of winning the WS? Of course few teams that start 0-5 end up in the post season. That's because (1) a relatively low percentage of teams compete in the post season, and (2) all else being equal, a team that starts 0-5 is likely to not be as good as others. Bad teams lose more often. But there's nothing peculiar about those 5 games that makes them magical. At the end of the day, they're just 5 games, like any other 5 games. At some point, it begins to resemble "No team has ever won a World Series with a backup catcher named Eduardo and a shortstop whose birthday is May 3."