An uprising over revenue sharing
Posted: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 8:38 PM
The bitterness between baseball's most lucrative franchises and its teams that don't spend at the highest levels for players lingers beneath the surface for now, but in some places, it’s not too deep. The slightest flesh wound allows it to gush forth as it did for Yankees general partner Hank Steinbrenner last week.
It was the Yankees' dustup with Tampa Bay that triggered Steinbrenner's verbal blast. The tension started on March 8 when Tampa Bay's Elliot Johnson crashed into Francisco Cervelli at the plate, breaking his right wrist. Yankees manager Joe Girardi said the play was unnecessarily violent for a spring training game. And after the Yankees’ return shot -- Shelley Duncan’s hard slide into Tampa Bay second baseman Akinori Iwamura with his spikes high which ignited a bench-clearing incident -- emotions were flamed.
Enter Steinbrenner who said several days later: “I don’t want these teams in general to forget who subsidizes them, and it’s the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, and Mets...I would prefer if teams target the Yankees that they at least start giving some of that revenue sharing and luxury tax money back.”
A direct shot to the heart of baseball’s biggest change in the Bud Selig era -- the revenue sharing that defined the NFL in the 1960s. It’s socialism and the NFL enforces it rigidly. Several years ago, one NFL team reached a deal with a fledgling satellite radio company to offer separate broadcasts of the team’s games. When the NFL heard about this the deal was squashed and within months a league-wide deal was struck with Sirius satellite radio.
Baseball acted similarly in the early days of the internet and the result -- a centrally controlled MLB.com -- is the greatest financial success for the sport. But the resentment over revenue sharing isn’t soothed by such success stories. And it isn’t just the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, and Mets who are resentful over the game's financial framework.
In San Francisco, the Giants took on massive debt to build a ballpark. It became a revenue machine thus forcing the Giants to write significant checks each year to revenue sharing. Meanwhile, seven miles away, the A’s, under the Schott-Hofmann ownership, spent little and received large “welfare” checks each year. Suffice to say, the concept was not well received in San Francisco. Perhaps this winter’s move in which the Giants were given ownership in a regional television sports network, thus becoming the A’s TV rights holder, is viewed at Pac Bell Park as some measure of revenge.
Here’s the point: the game is flush in cash. In times like this, we think common sense should prevail and that there’s enough money for all. But history tells us prosperity often leads to division -- just look back at the Roman Empire for an early example of this. So as the Yankees prepare to open their own concession company for their new stadium in 2009 -- an investment of almost $150 million -- are they really going to continue being satisfied writing checks to Tampa Bay and Kansas City? I have a sense that maintaining revenue sharing -- his greatest success -- may be Bud Selig’s biggest challenge in his final years as commissioner.
Elsewhere around spring training, reports from Vero Beach indicate the Dodgers may be leaning towards Andre Ethier in left field. That would make Juan Pierre a $44 million bench player. And Pierre’s skills aren’t suited to a reserve role.
How’s the offseason going for agent Scott Boras? Kyle Lohse, he of a career 63-74 record and 4.81 ERA, was told he would be this year’s Gil Meche? I fell for the ruse as well, thinking Boras would package Lohse with A-Rod. That didn’t work and Lohse ended up signing a modest one-year deal in St. Louis. Meanwhile, Carlos Silva, 55-46, 4.31 ERA, signed the Meche-like deal with Seattle.
Let’s connect the dots: Boras has a bad winter and certain columns raise the issue of possible collusion. I’d love to be in the room for the hearing when A-Rod, Silva, Aaron Rowand (five years, $60 million for goodness sakes!), Torii Hunter, Francisco Cordero (four years, $46 million) and Jose Guillen (three years, $36 million despite his link to performance enhancing drugs) are called to testify.
