@MarkKnudson41
In the midst of his “poor us, the last five years have been so hard” whine-fest while announcing the cancellation of the first week of the season, MLB mouthpiece/Commissioner Rob Manfred offered this nugget of obvious: “Why have a payroll discrepancy in the sport.” No kidding, Sherlock. As if that’s some sort of justification for the MLB Owners money-grubbing profit-before-product stance during these failed collective bargaining talks with the Player’s Union.
Payroll discrepancy has long been part of the problem – not just between the Owners and Players, but between the Owners themselves. For more than four decades, actually. Big market v Small market. It’s a familiar refrain. Since there’s never been any chance that the strongest Union in pro sports would ever accept a needless salary cap in baseball, the compromise that emerged was revenue-sharing in MLB. It’s been beneficial to the smaller market clubs – but many have chosen not to spend their extra income on salaries as it was designed to do – irking the Player’s Union of course.
They also came up with a formula in which the teams that accede a set payroll threshold pay a “luxury tax” that in many cases acts like a salary cap. It’s called a “Competitive Balance Tax” by MLB. Teams can exceed it, but when they do, they pay money back into a fund that is then also distributed to the smaller market teams that don’t have as many productive revenue streams.
Neither side seems happy with the current arrangement. The Players want to eliminate all restraints on payroll spending, especially something that can act as a cap. They want to raise the threshold much higher than the owners do. The Owners – most of them anyway – want the threshold set so that more teams can legitimately spend less. A salary cap by any other name, in other words.
Throughout the years, even with payroll discrepancy, baseball has had as good if not better parity in terms of teams winning championships as any of the sports that have salary caps, which are simply designed to further line the pockets of the owners. Salary caps aren’t necessary. But revenue sharing is fair and there is a way it could work without convoluted formulas, percentages or haggling.
Simply put, if teams had to share local broadcast revenue much more than they currently do – just like they do national TV dollars – the playing field would be much closer to even in terms of ability to pay salaries. Remember, in pro football, for example, all broadcasting revenue is national and shared evenly among big and small market organizations. Green Bay gets the same broadcast revenue as New York. That’s not true in baseball, where the local broadcast revenue that the Los Angeles Dodgers make dwarfs what the Colorado Rockies get from AT&T Sportsnet. So while all teams are (were) reportedly set to earn at least $100 million a year from the combination of their various local and all national TV contracts, the Dodgers get $239 mil from their local deal alone.
So what if they just decided to do this: Since there are two teams playing every game, the local broadcast revenue for that night’s game would be shared between the two teams participating. Do that every night. It would be like sharing gate receipts, which is not an uncommon practice.
Say the Yankees are playing at Kansas City and the game is being televised back in New York by the YES network. Then for that night’s game, the Royals receive say, 40% of the local broadcast revenue the Yankees are generating for that game. And since the Royals will also be broadcasting the game locally, the visitors will also be receiving 40% of what KC brings in for TV and radio rights for that game.
Do this over the course of a full season and that local broadcast revenue, which is the big discrepancy in terms of income between the Dodgers and the Rockies, comes much closer to leveling out…which in turn gives the mid and small market franchises a better chance to compete – and pay players the way the union believes they should be paid.
The only ones who should be against this kind of plan are the big market clubs with the huge TV deals. New York, LA, Chicago. Atlanta. But they’d be in the minority within their own group. It would be ironic, wouldn’t it, if during the collective bargaining process, the major tussle wasn’t between the players and the owners, but between big and small market owners themselves. What are the big boys going to do, lock out the little guys?