MLB will never make structural reforms without Congress forcing the issue. The labor issues always come down to mental gymnastics one must do to justify and work around the government granted monopoly the major sports leagues have (de jure for MLB, de facto for the rest). The leagues should be structured much more similarly to European Football with relegation, promotion and league cups. That structure eliminates tanking, salary issues, service time and arbitration, deflates some of the power of TV and marketing budgets, and a whole host of other issues. It also gives smaller American cities a shot at seeing major league teams play locally, which for baseball at least, seems like a no brainer thing that should happen.
If you are going to restructure the leagues, it should be done geographically - West, Southeast/MidAtlantic, Great Lakes and East. With the elimination of the DH, it makes exactly no sense for LA teams to each play 50+ east coast games and only 6 against each other. That would also allow for some expansion as cities like Nashville, Portland and SLC could easily fill out some of the regions.
Yes and: adopt European style club system for all intramural sports, thereby separating scholatics from sports in our public education system. As a taxpayer, I object to subsidizing professional sport's farm system.
Aside: the book Mine! by Heller and Salzman touches on professional sports in the USA. Ownership, property rights, labor relations, etc. Has some nice complimentary insights.
MLB has a de jure antitrust exception granted in 1922. The other sports leagues have consolidated and the government has failed to break them up, ergo, a de facto monopoly.
Agree that MLB should have its antitrust exemption revoked, but relegation would be a tough pill to swallow with how much has been invested in MLB stadiums. Globe Life Field opened in 2020 at a cost of $1.1 billion. The numbers don’t work if suddenly it’s hosting minor league games.
Then maybe don't spend $1.1B for a stadium, and especially don't subsidize it with public funds unless the public either owns the team or then owns the stadium and leases it to the team.
Interesting thought experiment, but as is often the problem in North American sports, it hurts small market teams. What free agent is going to willingly join a small market team out of the champions league that has less capital to expend than large market teams. You end up with a negative feedback loop in which small market teams have an even tougher time affording to compete or incentivizing free agents to join. This is already a problem and a structure like this (namely, the 3-5 year qualification period) only compounds it. If a smaller market team hasn't had any qualifying seasons in 5 years it essentially pits them into purgatory.
Personally, I'd like to see the season shortened (in # of games) to give each game a more outsized impact. Give teams a bit more rest to enable shorter rotations (star pitchers get more game time) and expand the playoffs slightly (via play-in games) to lessen the soul crushing nature of missing the playoffs by a single game after a grueling 162 game season. Not that any of these ideas are novel or perfect, but it's clear baseball has engagement issues that are not improving any time soon.
>but as is often the problem in North American sports, it hurts small market teams.
In the case of baseball, the negotiations are being held up by the small-market owners because the existing system is so beneficial to them. There is a de-facto salary cap through the Competitive Balance Tax, which directs money straight from the richest to the poorest teams. Meanwhile, there is no guarantee that the poor teams spend that money on actually improving their team.
I don't see any non-North American system where small-market teams perform this well. In the NFL, small-market Cincinnati was just in the Super Bowl because of a draft process that rewards poor performance.
Leicester City. And they won the EPL trophy straight out of League One the year they were promoted.
I would also argue that this would negatively impact small-market teams, which would all but guarantee a much smaller overall total revenue stream for the sport. (If I'm a small market fan, why should I pay to watch sub-par performance?
There's a reason AAA ball or MLSNext or G-League teams draw much smaller crowds.) Players would get paid less, owners would get paid less. Who is going to sign up for that?
What's funny is that with the power shifts in the NBA to the players these days is that the stars are essentially dictating where they want to play, and those spots (generally) do not include small-market arenas. Indeed, several players have been pretty vocal about this. So we may already be headed in the direction of multiple league tiers for each sport already just by virtue of the shift in player mobility.
This is the exception that proves the rule. The fact that winning the EPL was such a monumental upset and that you have to go back 5 years to find it, kind of proves the entire point. Them falling back to 12th place is further evidence of the difficulty of maintaining success as a small-market in European soccer. Compare to the sustained small-market successes in US sports like Oakland A's or Tampa bay Rays in the MLB, Green Bay and Pittsburgh in the NFL, the Memphis Grizzlies or San Antonio Spurs in the NBA.
> And they won the EPL trophy straight out of League One the year they were promoted.
A change like this would never happen. But it is a fun thought exercise. The current system in North American sports rewards losing. Between getting better draft picks helping to improve the roster and revenue sharing agreements minimizing any financial impact of losing, it is better to be a bad team than a mediocre team. Over the past 10 years or so, the result is that there are the teams that are trying to win championships, and the teams that consist of replacement-level talent. The current rules only make sense when everyone is trying to win with similar effort every year.
It’s probably more accurate to say something like “NA sports rewards losing after a certain threshold of mediocrity”, but you make a good point. The division of talent tends toward the extremes.
This is interesting but I think this fails to add the excitement that the other leagues have and baseball doesn't. It is true that the one problem is that there is this assumption that there have to be 162 games that all mean the same. We can throw out a lot of the records after two divergent years of playing
I'd rather see something where the regular season is shortened to like 140 games and have it end around Labor Day. Then have a full 8 teams per league make the playoffs with FULL 7 game series with the World Series still finishing at the end of Oct / beginning of Nov.
Then if you wanted to have something like this relegation setup for the teams that don't make it in, go ahead. They can all play each other and their minor leaguers still get to have all the "call up" time that the playoff teams don't get.
I also think we need to get rid of the nonsense of pitchers hitting, fans want more scoring, not less. Additionally, we can address some of the length with a simple rule that any pitcher that enters the game must face 3 hitters. If the pitchers are injured, they can bypass this rule but must go on the DL.
Well, what I was proposing still gives you 70 home games in the regular season. If you home team doesn't make the playoffs, you'd end up with about 15 pseudo-exhibition for next year that would be even cheaper. It would also reduce the price for playoff games as teams would have more of them to go around. Instead of a 3 game series with only one at home you would always have at least 3 home games per series.
For National Association play only, the starting pitcher or any
substitute pitcher is required to pitch to a minimum of three
consecutive batters, including the batter then at bat (or any sub-
stitute batter), until such batters are put out or reach first base,
or until the offensive team is put out, unless the starting pitcher
or substitute pitcher sustains injury or illness which, in the
umpire-in-chief’s judgment, incapacitates him from further
play as a pitcher.
My understanding is that promotion/relegation systems tend to lead to more lop-sided leagues where the winners keep winning because of the virtuous cycle of: more money from the TV rights from being in the "champions" league -> buy better players -> the better players keep you in the "champions" league.
That said, there are no American sports with a promotion/relegation system (probably because those systems evolved organically in Europe from local teams just becoming good and gaining a following, and the American way of having billionaires owning one of a small, fixed set of teams means that they want to protect their investments and wouldn't accept a chance of being relegated and losing their valuable TV money), so it would be interesting if one of them picked it up. From an outsider's perspective, though, I think it'd probably be better to bias towards simplicity instead of trying to fix every problem. E.g. instead of having the "must win 86 games in two/three seasons to make it to the champions league", fix the number of teams in the top league and promote the top of the bottom league and relegate the bottom of the top league. Making the system more complicated to prevent teams from tanking probably isn't a worthwhile tradeoff, since 1) it sucks when teams tank, but it's very exciting when a bad team starts to do very well (e.g. the Bengals at this year's Super Bowl), and 2) that system still doesn't stop the teams at the bottom of the second league from tanking, since there's no punishment for them and they can get better draft picks.
Though my 2c to improve baseball as someone who just started watching football and tried to follow baseball when I was younger:
1. Reduce the number of games. In football, there are so few games that each one matters a lot. In baseball, there are so many that it's hard to be invested.
2. Find a way to make games more fun to watch on TV. Going to a ballpark in person is always a fun, chill experience as long as you bring a friend. That atmosphere doesn't translate when you're watching on TV, so the game itself probably has to be made more exciting in some way (add more time pressure, or let the players take steroids /s).
In Europe you can't have rules about salary taxes and maximum spend because football (soccer) is a truly international game and other countries don't agree.
Also the TV money split is very inequitable in Spain with Real Madrid and Barca getting ~50% of the leagues TV money where as in England the TV money split is much more equitable. Baseball also doesn't have a Champion's League so that's no issue.
With baseball you could have a fairly equitable split on TV money and a salary tax at a certain point so you would still get different teams winning over time.
> My understanding is that promotion/relegation systems tend to lead to more lop-sided leagues where the winners keep winning because of the virtuous cycle of: more money from the TV rights from being in the "champions" league -> buy better players -> the better players keep you in the "champions" league.
This is sort of true, but I'd argue it still results in a better product than the American model. Pro/rel in Europe tends to vary based on the way TV rights money is divided and how much is available. In Spain, your description is pretty accurate, since Real Madrid and Barcelona can negotiate their own rights with minimal revenue sharing. Those two teams will always be near the top, as demonstrated by Barcelona's performance this year - they've been complete trash and are still tied for 4th on points. In England the TV money gets divided up more evenly, and the result is that big clubs can fail if their management is poor - Newcastle, West Ham, Aston Villa, Fulham, and other large clubs have experience relegation. Everton is at risk of it for the first time ever (I believe) due to some really poor decisions by their front office. On the other hand, Leicester City - a team no one had heard of - won the EPL in 2016.
I'd prefer the league with a handful of locked-in elite clubs where mobility is possible than a league where 1/3rd of the teams are incentivized to lose, and another 1/3 know they have nothing to play for while the season is still going.
Seems to me to be extremely biased towards teams like the Yankees who spend their way into success. I'm pretty sure you'd create a situation like college football where you have the same small handful of teams who are always in the championship, which is pretty boring. (The focus on the Astros is interesting, especially given it would have stacked the odds against them in that infamous 2017 season)
If this much change is going on, you might as well introduce salary caps too, which helps deal with teams like the Yankees who can just buy their way to victory.
They have tried. This proposal seems to be a way to "right that wrong", especially considering the Astros were the primary disruptor the past few years. (Disclosure: I'm in Houston, so my opinion is biased)
I think that this article looks to European football as a model, whereas it would do better to look to the NFL.
I'd implement a few economic reforms:
- Decent wages for minor leaguers
- Hard salary cap and floor per team such that players take home ~55% of revenue
And a few gameplay reforms:
- Pitch clock, to speed up pace of play
- Tweak the baseball and/or mound placement, to discourage the home run / strikeout style and incentivize more balls in play
- Cap the number of relief pitchers per game
This would make the game faster, more visually appealing, more equitable between teams (so every team will be forced to spend / have a good shot to keep their best players) all without any extreme changes.
It all comes down to wasting stars on bad teams. That's the underlying problem.
Maybe there should be some negative/positive weight on draft picks based on how "moribund" a franchise is over time. Calculate a running average of the pick quality and project a statistical estimate of how good your team should be. If it sucks over a long time (I'm talking a rolling 10 year average and as a somewhat fan of the Detroit Lions... yeah) then the team shouldn't get the cream of the crop, they should lose 5-10 positions in the first round.
And that's the real rub: at some point bad franchises aren't bad luck, bad players, bad coaches, or even bad GMs. They are failures because of ownership which is far more entrenched.
Relegation in soccer is really the only mechanism for this.
I also think there should be an exclusive "national signing day" for pro football where each team gets 1 player a year they can sign regardless of their draft position in the first round (assuming they can get a player wants to sign with them) and they forgo their first round pick. That would counteract tanking in the NFL because the really good players will avoid the crap teams. Of course there is a pay scale in the first round so they would take less money...
Baseball has strange levels of collusion among the owners, I think from generations of labor strife, which the NFL has avoided for some reason.
College athletics are kind of a multi-tier league like the article. And I'm not talking D-I/II/III. There are the Power5, and then even within the Power5, there are established powerhouses. Preferential placement, games that change in importance and estimation in the "rankings".
Of course college doesn't have the draft, which this entire proposal revolves around: preventing tanking for the draft. College has forced 4-6 year turnover that prevents decade-plus star careers from overtilting the advantage and seems to be a sufficient "chaos monkey"... although the 4 team CFP in football seems to have concentrated power in only a couple schools.
Is this "good"? Eh. It does make name brands. It makes for lazy reporters in an otherwise cacophonous landscape of a 100-odd schools who only follow five or ten schools.
interesting proposal from the competitive aspect of the game and as a fan this would likely be more exciting. However, a proposal like this is quite incomplete without factoring in the draft, salary cap and most importantly, IMO, the revenue share.
For a small market team, not spending on player salary to be competitive is simply a profitable proposition due to revenue share from the entire league. There is little incentive to spend a ton of money and be profit negative in the hopes the team may win and experience a transient increase in popularity. So much of the money comes from TV contracts and a team becoming good might get them a few more primetime games per year but their local TV contracts which broadcast half of their games are based on viewership which simply isn't that elastic - are people going to move to an area if a team is good for 2 or 3 years? Are complete non sports fans going to be compelled to learn a myriad of rules, player names, league competition scenarios, etc. out of the blue? Are there local demographic changes (population, age) which would negate any positive momentum in the preceding issues?
i'm not naïve enough to think there is a simple answer to any of this; MLB has presumably known and been working on this for close to 30 years. Is the game of baseball simply reaching the end of its place in time?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but does this proposal essentially say that half the teams will be playing something like a 70 game season as they're only part of the "Standard" league? How is the revenue sharing agreement going to work, you only get a cut of the rev from the leagues your in?
The issue right now is that the Yankees and Dodgers each get one vote, while the Marlins and Pirates also each get one vote on any matter like this. Most of the teams are not located in NY, CA, or Chicago where there's major fan bases and ownership that's willing to spend to appease these fan bases. At best, I could see about half a dozen owners benefitting from this, a dozen actively harmed by it, and the rest in a grey area of "being motivated to do better at baseball" by it.
I can see how this idea serves the fans and players, but how does it help billionaires fleece local governments for stadium subsidies/cozy up to local politicians to help grease the wheels of their ACTUAL businesses? I'm very anti-owner class, but I'll still admit you need to propose an idea they would actually like for it to be considered serious. This does not help the majority of owners fulfil their actual goals, which is acquiring currency at the greatest rate possible.
This wouldn't really be pro/rel, not as it's implemented in European football anyway. It's a single league where entry into the lucrative year-end tournament is partly based on long-term (3- or 5-year) performance, whereas now it is only short-term (1-year).
I think the biggest problem with baseball is you can buy your way to greatness. Not always mind you, but teams with seemingly unlimited payrolls like the Dodgers, Giants, Phillies, Yankees have a huge advantage over smaller market teams in terms of attracting top talent and they are perennially "in the hunt" which makes the chances of smaller franchises all the more smaller. I know they implement revenue sharing to the smaller teams but restricting the top teams salary would make for a more compelling product.
Compare that to NFL football which has a very restrictive salary cap and you get a scenario where any team in 1-2 years despite how bad they are in a given year with great coaching and a smart draft can get to the superbowl or win it all(see this years Cincinnati Bengals, or last years Buccaneers).
Yep, that’s the takeaway that I hope non-sports-fans will have from this thread. The salary caps in the NFL/NBA promote parity extremely well while maintaining the same pay level for the vast majority of players. I’m told European soccer and MLB suffer greatly from big-market teams heavily hoarding the success.
You're not wrong, the state of football in Europe feels quite unsustainable to me and rewards clubs who make huge financial gambles or manage to get lucrative investment from billionaires (or both!). Every now and again you'll see a flash-in-the-pan where a slightly less well-off team will succeed (Leicester a couple of years ago in the Premier League springs to mind, though they were owned by a Thai billionaire...) but overall it's pretty predictable.
It's a funny situation though because having stupendous injections of cash doesn't always pay off. Paris Saint Germain have been profligate in the transfer market and have little to show for it on the European stage (and domestically they didn't even win Ligue 1 last season). And sometimes just a modest investment, raising the wage bill by shrewd signings can really upset things. There was a fairly sizeable backlash at RB Leipzig - a team bought by Red Bull which progressed through the ranks to the top level - suggesting that they'd bought their way to success. Which is true in a sense but in reality everyone who's successful has basically bought that success. Bayern's average salary is 8x that of Leipzig's[0] - as an outsider it seems they were just nervous at the idea of someone upsetting the balance. Right now Leipzig are the fourth-highest wage bill and are fourth in the Bundesliga.
I kinda hope one of these big clubs has a high-profile collapse, it's a shame that it's Barcelona who have come closest because I don't feel too much disdain for them. Scots tend to have a soft-spot for Catalonia :) Interestingly we weren't without our own big-spending-investor stories, Gretna (tiny club from a town of 3,000 people) were bought by a supposed-millionaire who bankrolled them to the top-level, took a turn for the worse, withdrew his support and the club then fell to pieces.
Anyway yet another ramble-y football comment from me, you can tell I hang out with people who do not like the sport :)
One might argue that's an ownership incentive problem - there are insufficient incentives for owners to spend enough money to field a competitive baseball team. A bunch of owners are more or less explicitly in it for the guaranteed profit that comes with cheaply fielding uncompetitive teams.
(It's notable that teams in capped leagues also do this, most noticeably in the NHL. So the salary cap doesn't solve this problem so much as it redirects revenue from players to owners.)
How many times have the Rays had a better record than the Yankees in the past decade?
It's not all about the payroll any more. It's about who actually wants a good team and is willing to hire the right people.
The small market excuse is just that, an excuse. The value of the franchises has been exploding. Direct revenue isn't a meaningful constraint on payroll.
Small markets notoriously can't afford to keep their talent around. Pros know they have a limited time in the league and want to maximize revenue so they go to whoever offers them the most. The tweet below is relevant to the sentiment:
>Small markets notoriously can't afford to keep their talent around.
I highly doubt this, as a longtime Marlins fan. I strongly suspect that "small market" teams are those owned by people who notoriously don't want to spend more money than they have to.
According to Forbes, the Rays were purchased in 2004 for 200 million and are now worth 1.1B. In 18 years ownership has received a total return of more than 500% on their investment.
Now, for some strange reason, these teams don't want to publish annual audited profit/loss numbers, but the Marlins had those numbers leak for some of the franchise's bleakest years. The leaks showed them making money hand over fist. I suspect the same is true of the Rays during much of the last 18 years. So, you have a profitable business (I speculate) that's also appreciating in value at an incredible rate. Sounds like someone who can afford to pay the people who actually put butts in seats.
You can try to buy your way to greatness, but it really works as a long term solution. Signing at 28 year-old star to a 10 year contract means you have to managed an expensive older player that will under-perform at the end of the contract. In a few occasions that works, but generally you are spending more for less at that point. Sure, you can keep spending, but you eventually have an old aging team that is difficult to upgrade, unless you trade players and agree to pay part of the salary.
The biggest problem in baseball is you have to maintain a minor league AND a major league. You need younger less expansive players, inexpensive players to fill the roster, and expensive players. Depending on the market you need to either trade your younger talent before it gets expensive (getting younger players from other teams) and be able to develop those players. Or, you have to be able sign high price players and make trades to bring in lesser talented players from other teams to developer your farm system, where you'll often trade your best prospects for older, more expensive players.
Both systems have worked lately. Cleveland has had one of the best records in baseball since 2014, but the Dodgers and Yankees spend and do well.
The larger problem is revenue sharing in MLB. While there is revenue sharing because of the TV contracts, New York, Boston, and LA make a huge amount of money off local TV deals. Cleveland, Tampa, et.al. make a lot less. So, unlike many other sports, revenue is not shared equally and teams need different ways to acquire and use talent.
In the NFL, you need to have a very good QB and you can build a team around them. In the NBA, you need 2-3 very talented players, mid-cost starters to fill your game day rotations and strong reserves to handle injuries and such. Since those leagues share revenue that can implement caps and floors with salary. Sorry, I can't talk about the NHL, I don't understand their business enough.
The bigger problem with the MLB is their lack of equal revenue sharing makes a floor and cap next to impossible to setup. MLB teams simply are not going to put all their money in a big pool and share it.
The products don't understand what they're selling (or are desperate for Blackrock money). They continue to alienate fans by continually injecting ESG propaganda into the product, when most fans I know use it as an escape from all that inane bullshit.
haha very much agree here. Baseball fans are probably one of the more conservative/older fan bases in sports and the leagues tilt towards ESG is quite baffling from a business perspective. I think they are trying to be more relevant again to younger fans by embracing stuff like this but could see it backfiring by alienating a whole generation and another with a strike on the horizon. Going back to the strike back in the 90's that really mad alot folks mad and set the stage for a large percentage of its fanbase to leave and some of which never came back.
Baseball has a rapidly-dissolving semi-religious status in the US (losing some ground to the NFL), and its owners definitely don't get it. I think it's mostly gone after '94 anyway. My personal guess is that its popularity is correlated with family size.
Canada too. Here in Waterloo Region we have a particularly goofy situation where I believe a number of prominent public parks were formed after the land was donated in the early 20th century by wealthy local industrialists, with the single eternal proviso that there had to always be a functional baseball diamond on the property.
I'm sure this made sense at the time, but it's super frustrating now living in these neighbourhoods where there's a big park with vast green space that is mostly unused, and the amenities people actually want and use (tennis courts, playground, community garden, skate park, hangout space) shunted to the very edges of the space, and no room for potential alternative uses such as a soccer pitch.
The point is more just that you can't know the future, and any constraint like that should have limitations on it, with an upperbound of something like 99 years. That's more than enough time for your kids, grand kids, and even their kids to all enjoy playing baseball in the park, while not saddling your community with your specific vision of outdoor recreation for all time.
Like sure, the land donation was no doubt generous and appreciated, and the people involved would have foregone a potential payday had they sold it to a developer to be carved up instead. But on the flipside, it was probably also a big tax writeoff, and the city inherited the unbounded future cost of its maintenance, lost tax revenue, and so on.
I found statista saying average US family size to be basically steady for the last 30 years.[0] (median might be better but I couldn't find it). I would expect football to have fallen in popularity if it were about ability to field a team.
The steroid scandal, hd TVs, changing media consumption, sabremetrics, rule changes make more sense to me.
30 years is a short enough time in this case; one generation (my age) might play baseball because their parents did, even though the neighborhood doesn't have 18 kids with nothing to do, but the next would find no reason to.
It depends on the market. Small markets have been hurting, but teams like the dodgers have been making millions hand over fist the last 10 years, revenue only being down really because of expected covid cancellations.
They just dumped millions into renovations too, and eventually there will even be a gondola from the metro system up the hill to the stadium. It seems the owners are pretty bullish.
Baseball was a game for the "dog days" of summer, and no air conditioning. The typical, agrarian 3 months summer vacations meant there were hordes of kids trying to fill in the time between dusk and dawn. Now kids stay inside and play vidya games all summer. Baseballs time is past, imo.
It was also a game that made more sense with larger families. Back when kids all ran free until the Prince Spaghetti Night bell rang, you had all the positions covered and didn't need the "ghost man on first".
I'm only a casual fan at best, but my impression is that there are already informal tiers, and things like the draft and (attempts at a) salary cap are designed to counter that hierarchy. So I don't think this would go over well.
What problem is the proposal trying to address? From what I see, the two things it will "fix" are already non-issues.
1. Better TV slots for good teams – this already happens in every American sports league. Teams with popular star players, teams in big markets and teams performing well get the prime time slots.
2. Easier path to the playoffs for good teams – playoff eligibility is contingent on regular season performance. Why should it be any different? If you are a good team, play like it and earn your spot.
This is an interesting idea and would be something to consider if we were building MLB from scratch. I think it's a non-starter as a modification of the current system, though.
It's a great idea for an OOTP simulation. (OOTP is a highly detailed baseball management simulation game that accommodates things like this)
We should introduce a new type of basketball league for players under 6 feet tall for males and under 5 feet 9 inches tall for females. While slam dunks will disappear, we will see new types of tactics and shots.
the XFL missed an opportunity to focus on baseball instead. NFL is too strong on the marketing front and dynamically changes their rules to meet new needs.
Baseball is poorly marketed and is extremely slow to change (not always a bad thing). But an XBL, or something like it, would have been a stronger challenger to the MLB than the XFL was to the NFL.
If you are going to restructure the leagues, it should be done geographically - West, Southeast/MidAtlantic, Great Lakes and East. With the elimination of the DH, it makes exactly no sense for LA teams to each play 50+ east coast games and only 6 against each other. That would also allow for some expansion as cities like Nashville, Portland and SLC could easily fill out some of the regions.