Free market baseball
Congress is looking at ways of curbing Major League Baseball's antitrust powers. What's interesting about this is the idea that if it passes, owners of teams would have more ability to move their teams to different cities.
I'm of two minds on this. One is that I've always thought a clear way to solve competitive issues for small-market teams is to allow them to move to bigger markets. Why does New York City only have two baseball teams when its market is, and I'm guessing here, 10 times as large as the Montreal market? That is what free market economics is all about, allowing the business to chase capital and customers wherever they might be. The argument against this is that teams might constantly move around, and fans would not have stable teams to root for in their hometowns. I wonder, though, if that would really happen so often. Would it really be that cost-effective to buy a team and move it year after year? I think there would be more stability than one might suspect.
What's more, it's a problem that could be solved by setting some rules that restrict a team from moving again until it's stayed in a city for some minimum period of time.
Of couse, there are numerous options to prevent the Yankees from being the best team year after year. Look at football and what they've been able to do to achieve more parity. True revenue sharing. Salary caps. It all comes back to what type of competitiveness you'd like to see in the sport.
And of course, none of this excuses lousy management. Microsoft is a beast, but it did so primarily by being a smart business. The Yankees, damn them, have had a great run, but a lot of the players that have been core to their run have been straight out of their farm system (Jeter, Rivera, Williams, Posada, Pettite). It's not as if they bought all their World Series rings. There are very few cases, the Expos being one of them, where a baseball team's lack of competitiveness is primarily due to lack of money. The A's are a sign that a team can be in a small market and also competitive, and that's because Billy Beane, their General Manager, is a smart smart guy.
I'm of two minds on this. One is that I've always thought a clear way to solve competitive issues for small-market teams is to allow them to move to bigger markets. Why does New York City only have two baseball teams when its market is, and I'm guessing here, 10 times as large as the Montreal market? That is what free market economics is all about, allowing the business to chase capital and customers wherever they might be. The argument against this is that teams might constantly move around, and fans would not have stable teams to root for in their hometowns. I wonder, though, if that would really happen so often. Would it really be that cost-effective to buy a team and move it year after year? I think there would be more stability than one might suspect.
What's more, it's a problem that could be solved by setting some rules that restrict a team from moving again until it's stayed in a city for some minimum period of time.
Of couse, there are numerous options to prevent the Yankees from being the best team year after year. Look at football and what they've been able to do to achieve more parity. True revenue sharing. Salary caps. It all comes back to what type of competitiveness you'd like to see in the sport.
And of course, none of this excuses lousy management. Microsoft is a beast, but it did so primarily by being a smart business. The Yankees, damn them, have had a great run, but a lot of the players that have been core to their run have been straight out of their farm system (Jeter, Rivera, Williams, Posada, Pettite). It's not as if they bought all their World Series rings. There are very few cases, the Expos being one of them, where a baseball team's lack of competitiveness is primarily due to lack of money. The A's are a sign that a team can be in a small market and also competitive, and that's because Billy Beane, their General Manager, is a smart smart guy.