I Heard it Downtown

“Hating the New York Yankees is as American as Apple Pie, unwed mothers, and cheating on your income tax” -Mike Royko.

So all in all, I’d say I had a pretty good Christmas haul. I didn’t get any jetpacks or bulletproof clothing, but I did get plenty of socks, a few movies, and a wonderfully thoughtful book of metaphors and similes, which I can sprinkle my little articles with (like the above quote from one of my literary heroes). I certainly can’t complain with my little modest bounty.

But a few books and DVDs can’t really compare with the 400 Million Dollar gift the New York Yankees bought themselves over the holiday break. 400 Million bucks can buy a whole lot of things…but the pinstripers used it on just three baseball players…CC Sabathia, AJ Burnett, and Mark Texiaria. When you add in the monster deal they signed A-Rod for last year, they’ve committed over 600 million dollars to the payroll of just 4 men.

If you’re anything like me, once we start talking numbers bigger than CC Sabathia’s expected weight in 3 years (so lets say around 400), I start to lose perspective. Let me break down these huge contracts, so you can properly understand them.

CC Sabathia, the manboob-endowed pitcher from Cleveland and Milwaukee, signed for 161 Million. His contract alone is worth roughly thee times the entire yearly payroll of the Florida Marlins. ESPN put up this nifty website, where you type in your salary, and it tells you what CC has to do to earn it. I plugged in my expected salary of 37,000 as a public school teacher for next year…which is roughly what CC makes every time HE RECORDS AN OUT. No….I’m not crying right now.

Now, clearly CC has some marketable skills that I lack. My fastball tops out at roughly 60MPH, and 40,000 people aren’t crowding into a room to watch me write a funny article (YET). I’m not going to sit here and bemoan how much money our professional athletes make, when thousands of skilled Americans are losing their jobs, and teachers and journalists sweat out every last buck. I’ll leave all that huffing and puffing to the rest of the high horse sportswriter posse. My concern isn’t that obese pitchers make too much money, but that the Yankees throwing money around like they’re playing Monopoly might ruin our American pasttime.

The other major sports in the US have a salary cap…they have a finite ceiling on what each team can spend on players each season. If a team wants to go out and sign a superstar to a huge contract, they have to plan ahead, or cut other high paid players. This system allows franchise in all cities, not just New York, Chicago and LA, to field competitive squads, if they use a little fiscal ingenuity. This system allowed for the a pro football powerhouse to appear in Indy and for great basketball teams to play in Portland, Salt Lake City and New Orleans.

Baseball has no system. Teams throw as much money at players as they want or can. Teams in smaller media markets, or who are owned by groups that suffer actual financial restraints are often borderline eliminated from signing free agents. Even if ownership had passed around plates in every church in the greater Kansas City area, the Royals had no chance of raising enough dough to sign CC Sabathia. Any decent player on their team must come from their own farm system, and if they become good after 3 or 4 years, that player will sign with the Yankees (or Red Sox, Dodgers, Angels, Cubs or Mets). It becomes fiscally impossible to field a competitive team year and after year. Before opening day in April, nearly half of Major League Baseball’s teams will be out of playoff contention. Check out the payroll rankings for 2008…pretty strong correlation between a high payroll and consistent success (although there are outliers).

And lets say one of those small teams manages to pool enough dough to give a good player a huge deal. If that deal doesn’t pan out, the team is crippled for 5 years…and even if it doesn’t, they wont have the capital to surround the player with role players. When the San Francisco Giants accidentally gave Barry Zito a record setting contract, and watched in horror as he turned into the 9 year old kid from “Rookie of the Year”, they were screwed. They’re still screwed. If the Yankees or Red Sox make that mistake (JD Drew? Kevin Brown?)…they just buy another dude. Roster Management isn’t a necessary skill when you have no accountability for roster mistakes. Its why people were loath to bail out auto companies.

I understand the value of the Yankees as a “villain”…I wrote my very article article about it. We love sports partly because they have clearly defined good guys and bad guys, and the Yankees are about as clearly “The Bad Guys” as the Taliban, or Darth Vader’s crew….but having a “Bad Guy” isn’t helpful if they manage to destroy the entire sport in the process. The national sports media already pretends that baseball is only played in Boston, Chicago, New York and LA. Rampant unchecked spending could make that a reality.

I’m also aware that many small market teams have been competitive recently. The Yankees haven’t won a title in years, and the Devil Rays, (payroll 44 Million) made the World Series last year. You’ll notice that with the exception of the Twins, those tiny teams don’t have staying power. In a few years, they will have a talent fire sale, and restock to try again in 5 years. The big guns reload every year.

LA Angles outfielder Tori Hunter put it rather nicely. “Man, that’s crazy,” Angels center fielder Torii Hunter told the Times. “Those damn Yankees! They don’t play around. When they’re trying to win, they’re trying to win. It’s crazy. They just paid $27 million in luxury tax. That’s like 27 dollars to them. They don’t even care.”

They don’t even care if they turn half of baseball’s cities into irrelevancy in the process. Supervillians indeed.