Winning Over Profit
Baseball's critics blame the wrong millionaire.
BY ALLEN BARRA
The Red Sox have just won the first battle in the 2004 war by
taking three
of four games from the Yankees at
the rest of the season,
To most fans and sportswriters around the country, and even to
some in New
them, the Evil Empire. Mr. Lucchino didn't
go so far as to call George
Steinbrenner the Evil Emperor, but he didn't have to. To most of Mr.
Steinbrenner's fellow owners, that's what he's been for the 31
years he has
been the Yankees' principal partner.
The Yankees have a 2004 payroll of nearly $184 million--in
comparison, the
worst team in their division last year, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, will
spend about $27.3 million. Nothing less than the Yankees winning the
World
Series will justify the huge cost. And if the Yankees do win, they
cement
their reputation as the monster that's ruining baseball. Mr.
Steinbrenner,
of course, couldn't care less about his team's or his own
reputation, so
long as the Yankees win.
Bill Veeck, the late, legendary Chicago
White Sox owner, was not one of the
Steinbrenner haters. He said: "I like George. He breaks all the unwritten
rules." (Mr. Veeck was known to break a
few himself.) By "unwritten rules,"
he meant gentleman's agreements among baseball owners. This year, Mr.
Steinbrenner is breaking the most important unwritten rule of all,
and he's
doing it by playing by the written rules.
In baseball, the only one of the top three major sports without a
cap on
players' salaries, there is no rule prohibiting an owner from spending as
much as he chooses on his team. Commissioner Bud Selig
thought he had
forced a de facto salary cap on the players in the 2002 collective
bargaining agreement by instituting a "luxury" tax, to be assessed
when
a team's payroll exceeds a threshold. (This season, the threshold
is $120.5
million, and the tax for a second-time offender, such as this year's
Yanks,
is 30% of the amount it exceeds the threshold.) What Mr. Selig didn't count
on was that Mr. Steinbrenner would place winning above profit and
keep
right on spending.
The stated reason for the luxury tax was to address what Mr. Selig
constantly called a "competitive imbalance." But the issue was a
sham.
Doug Pappas, editor of the Society for American Baseball Research
newsletter,
summed up the luxury tax bluntly: "It doesn't have a thing to do
with
promoting 'competitive balance,' which was never a problem in the first
place. It was designed to keep George Steinbrenner from raising
salaries."
The reason it hasn't is that Mr. Steinbrenner is no gentleman and
has no
intention of sticking to any gentleman's agreement. He wants to win.
No single team can match the Yankees' revenue streams, but if
every team in
baseball, regardless of market size, competed for some players, it
wouldn't
be possible for the Yankees to stockpile talent. If the Yankees have
an
unfair edge in the competition for talent, it's not because they spend
too
much, but because so many others aren't spending enough. After the
Yankees
signed Alex Rodriguez, Red Sox owner John Henry howled about baseball's
need for a salary cap; what he meant was a cap that would keep the
Yankees
from spending more than the Red Sox.
It's not that the Red Sox couldn't afford A-Rod. Like several
other
major-league owners, including several in the so-called small markets, the
Red Sox bosses have personal wealth far greater than Mr.
Steinbrenner's.
Unlike Mr. Steinbrenner, they seem loath to risk their own money
on their
teams.
Why should they when they get welfare from the Yankees? The
Yankees could
be paying out as much as $75 million in revenue sharing and luxury
tax this
year. Between that, the payroll and other team costs, the Yankees
began
this season not knowing whether they would show a profit. All Mr.
Steinbrenner wants to do is win.
One of the absurdities of the current system is that it rewards
some of the
wealthiest men in the country for not investing in their own baseball
business. For instance, the payroll of the Minnesota Twins, owned by
billionaire Carl Polhad, ranks 23rd out of 30
teams. Mr. Polhad isn't
required to spend any of the money given to him by the Major League
Baseball central fund on players' salaries. He is required to spend it
on
team improvements; the catch is that those team improvements are
defined by
the commissioner, himself a former owner.
Baseball's critics are right: There is a ridiculous imbalance in
baseball
spending. But it hasn't been caused by Mr. Steinbrenner. It's been caused
by a system created by men who, in the words of the former players'
union
head Marvin Miller, "pay lip service to competition and free
enterprise,
and shudder when they see it in action."
All George Steinbrenner wants to do is win,