Bad for Baseball
The New York Yankees Are Proving that Baseball Needs A Salary Cap.
By Robert Flaxman

   Football has one.  Basketball has one.  So why doesn't Major League Baseball have a salary cap?  The basic answer is that the Players' Association isn't about to let one pass.  Why should Don Fehr and Gene Orza stand by idly while their players take pay cuts?
    A couple things about that.  First of all, the salary structure could be reworked so that while superstars make less, league-minimum guys make more and therefore players as an organization earned more (Bob Costas proposed a structure like this in his recent book Fair Ball).  Second of all, don't Fehr and Orza recognize that the lack of a salary cap is destroying the game?
    In 1985, the Kansas City Royals won the World Series.  The Minnesota Twins won in 1987 and 1991.  But nowadays, the rosters of these teams are filled up primarily with prospects.  And why is this?  Because the Royals and Twins don't have the money to pay for high-priced free agents.
    Who does?  Just who you'd expect.  Mets, Yankees, Dodgers, Braves, and a few other teams who get in the running for a few free agents like the Red Sox, Rockies, Rangers, and similar.  So what's the problem?  It was made pretty abundantly clear last season.
    No one watching baseball last season could have made the case that the Yankees were the best team in baseball.  They finished 87-74, 3½ games worse than the American League's wild card team, the Mariners.  In fact, the Yankees had the worst record of any team to make the playoffs, and were 2½ games worse than the Cleveland Indians, who didn't go.
    Yet the Yankees won the World Series anyway.  Maybe they just play better in the postseason, and certainly you could make that case.  But it's pretty obvious that what allowed the Yankees to win was money.  By the end of the season the New York payroll had ballooned to around 120 million dollars, almost eight times more than the payroll of the Twins.  How did this happen?
    The Yankees' payroll was already around 90 million at the start of the season.  But when trading time rolled around, the Yankees knew they had to upgrade, because they weren't playing very well.  Did they go out and get one player, because that was all they could afford?
    Ha.  Maybe on some other team that might be a problem, but in New York money is no issue.  So the Yankees traded for outfielder David Justice from the Indians, and picked up pitcher Denny Neagle from the Cincinnati Reds.  They also acquired journeyman power hitter Glenallen Hill from the Cubs, infielders Jose Vizcaino and Luis Sojo, and designated hitter Luis Polonia.
    We can't blame the Yankees for trying to upgrade their team, can we?   Well, technically, no.  Here's what we can blame them for: using their money solely to spite other teams.  Remember Jose Canseco?  The Yankees picked him up off waivers from Tampa Bay on August 7.  What's wrong with that?  The Yankees already had several left fielders on the roster, including Ryan Thompson, Roberto Kelly, Hill, and regular Shane Spencer.  In addition, the DH position, the only other place Canseco would have gone (and where he did go), was no issue, with Polonia and Chuck Knoblauch filling that.
    This might raise the question of why Canseco was brought on.   Simple - the Red Sox, chasing the Yankees in the AL East standings, were looking to acquire him.  Rather than allow the Red Sox to pick up Canseco, whose skills are crumbling anyway, the Yankees took him and then basically let him ride the bench.

    Isn't there something inherently wrong when a team that finishes fifth in the overall standings in its league can still win the World Series?   The Yankees didn't do it because they're that much better in the playoffs - they did it because they could afford to put all kinds of players on the roster as upgrades.   And it's not just this year - the Yankees have been able to win three straight World Series because they have the money to hold together their Williams-Jeter-Rivera nucleus, in addition to bringing on Roger Clemens at 15 million per.
    Now there's talk that the Yankees are looking to sign Mike Mussina and maybe get David Wells back from Toronto.  Great, all they need is Scott Erickson and they'll have the 1996 Orioles pitching staff pretty well recreated.
    If baseball has any interest in stopping this monopoly of the game that shuts out 20 or so teams before play even starts each spring, it will install a salary cap.  The Yankees and the few other teams that even have similar money cannot be allowed to be the only teams that can sign high-priced free agents.
    Make no mistake, the Yankees didn't win the World Series because they have some amazing surplus of talent.  The regular season proved that.  They won because they could outspend everyone else when it counted.  And that has to stop if the playing field is ever going to be level again.