Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
August 04, 2003
Selling Players

Jose from Spain writes in regards to this post on Selig preventing a $3 million transfer from the Yankees to the Reds:


Selling players is a great way of transfering cash between teams, and Bud should do a way with a limit that was put in place to spite Finley.

This is totally correct. Here in Europe transfers of soccer players between clubs are always done through money. Real Madrid buys Beckham off Man U for 25 million. Barcelona buys Ronaldinho off Paris Saint Germain for 30 million. Then the team goes and uses the money for what it sees fit, usually to buy itself two or three smaller players. Transfers almost never involve other players, sometimes you hear of a team offering one of its players in the deal "to cheapen the transfer", but it's all together very rare. Money rules.

I must say I was very intrigued at the beginning when I saw that baseball players moved through teams by trades or free agency and never by pure sale, until I learned of the $1 million restriction. I was very surprised by that. Here in European soccer, small teams are encouraged to have a good farm system because if they groom good players they can sell them for a huge profit to a cash-rich powerful team. I don't see why that couldn't work in baseball.


There was a time when things did work like this. The minor leagues were not always vassels of the major league teams. The minor league teams could often make money by selling their best players to the majors. Even major league teams did this. Connie Mack was famous for building up a winner in Philadelphia, then selling the players when they became too expensive for him to support. Of course, the most famous sale may be of Babe Ruth to the NY Yankees for $100,000.

One problems with sales has been that the owners haven't always put the money back into the club. Some argue this was true with the sale of Babe Ruth, others do not agree. It all came to a head in the 1970's, when faced with losing players to free agency, Charlie Finley put together deals to sell some of his best players to NY and Boston for millions of dollars. Finley realized that he was going to lose players to free agency, and he was going to need cash to rebuild. But commissioner Bowie Kuhn hated Finley, and invoked his powers in the best interest of baseball to nix the deal. Kuhn also put a cap on how much you could get for selling a player, which was recently raised to $1 million. However, I would argue that there should be no cap, and that the market should decide what the cap is. According to Jose, that's what happens in Europe.



Posted by David Pinto at 09:58 AM | Commissioner | TrackBack (1)