There's hope in Milwaukee.

The interesting thing is that of the five teams he mentioned, only KC is hopeless for the time being.

Pittsburgh's not going to win anything this year, but they have a solid core of young pitching that they could leverage into a competitive team.

Detroit has gone from putrid to mediocre, and if they'd make a couple of smart signings as opposed to Todd Jones or Kenny Rogers, would have a better chance.

Tampa Bay has an amazing core of young talent, and may be able to compete in a couple years.

And Milwaukee is a popular dark horse pick for the wild card in some circles.

I'm already a bit skeptical about the expanded playoffs we already have. I would be annoyed if baseball expanded its playoffs any more. Who cares about the regular season in the NBA or NHL? There's no need to when half the league makes the playoffs. Trying to figure out which .500 team will fill out the last playoff spot instead of following pennant races between good teams would make the regular season a bore.

Dave, if MLB had slotted salaries for top draft picks it'd also help. As it is, even the draft works against small market teams.
Does anyone really think that Tampa has a prayer of winning the AL East? What would they have to do to beat out the Yankees and the Red Sox? Or even the Blue Jays? Anyone?

An expanded playoff system may help an extra few teams that already have strong backing, a good media market, and a stable fan base to see a post-season, but it will dilute the post-season even more.

Wild-card teams are notorious for knocking out teams that have been in control of the leagues the entire year, and while that is sometimes good for the game, if it goes too far, it will diminish the game's integrity. An expanded playoff system would do just that.

I think John Romano's argument is resting on a faulty foundation. I don't think Bud Selig or anyone who watches baseball would ever say that EVER SINGLE ONE of the 30 teams is on equal footing on Opening Day. However, I do not think it is incorrect to say that many more teams are on equal footing than was the case a few years ago. Look at this year: 19 teams finished within 4 games of .500. That's fairly competitive.

As for David's draft analysis, I think that's a very good one. Look, for example, at the Milwaukee Brewers. While it's taken them approximately forever, they've recently had a few strong draft cases. They've turned some of those picks into Major League talent through trades and others through development. While they may be longshots for a playoff spot, they did manage a .500 finish this year for the first time since 1992. Progress will not come overnight and a playoff system that rewards crappy teams just because they don't have a lot of money or their owners are unwilling to spend money should not be viewed as a positive idea, in my opinion.

Rather than a payroll tax or revenue sharing, which I believe are unfair, and assuming a salary cap will never be accepted, I would propose instead a tax on FA signings. My initial feeling would be that it should be about 10% of the value of the contract.
That tax money goes to the team that loses the FA, paid by the team that signs the FA, but the money can only be used to sign other FAs, or re-sign players currently on your ML roster. If the team does not spend that tax money within a specified time frame (for example, 90 days), it goes back to the team that signed the FA. So, Billy Wagner signs with the Mets for $43 mil. The Mets then owe the Phillies $4.3 mil. The Phillies must use that money within 90 days to extend the contract of a current player, or sign a FA.
There might be a set date (May 1?) after which all remaining FAs are 'tax free'.

This accomplishes two things:

1) Teams that lose FAs are able to get help to fill their rosters or to retain other promising players. This is immediate help rather than compensatory draft picks. The amount of tax received could be substantial depending on the number and quality of FAs lost, especially for small-market clubs.
2) It raises the price tag for those trade deadline deals where small-market teams with no hope of retaining a potential FA sell them off for prospects. For example, would the Royals have traded Carlos Beltran to Houston at the deadline if they knew that they would be getting 10% of whatever he signed for as a FA? I doubt it, unless Houston gave KC a much better return on the trade. (It ended up KC would have received $12 mil, a significant pool of money to use toward payroll)

This does not restrict player movement at all. In fact, it encourages smaller market teams to be more active in the FA market and in re-signing their players. Otherwise they would lose any of the tax they might receive from a player lost to FA. This means more teams in the bidding for top FAs, not just the same 5-6 clubs every offseason.

Big market teams will still outbid everyone for top talent, regardless of the tax. But it will encourage most teams to push for more in-house development rather than building through FA. And it will compensate small market teams that currently develop young talent but cannot afford to keep it when it blossoms. Now they may be able to keep more of it.

Almost anything is better than expanding the playoffs.

Maybe I'm not giving clubs and GM's enough credit, but look what Oakland is doing with their payroll. I think if Tampa Bay shelled out an extra $40 a year for a subscription to Baseball Prospectus' website, they could probably scrape together a few more wins.

Look at the number of clubs that were in contention for playoff spots late in the season. Until September, literally every team in the NL East had a shot at a playoff berth, and they all finished at .500 or better. In the NL West, the division winner barely finished over .500. If you can't scrape at least 85 wins, you don't deserve to go to the playoffs. The point of competition in baseball is not that everyone go to the playoffs. This isn't an elementary school science fair where every kid gets at least an honorable mention ribbon. That's what beer league softball games with your buddies are for. Also, while money definitely helps make a team more competitive, it doesn't guarantee anything. The Mets spend a lot of money and they haven't been to the post-season lately. The key is to spend your money wisely. If some teams are stupid enough to spend their money poorly, that's their own fault. They need to get better personnel on the field and in the front office. Oakland and Minnesota have been doing okay for quite a while, because they make (for the most part) intelligent decisions in running their clubs. KC has been in the crapper for a while because the team is run by a bunch of morons. From the mid '70s until the early '90s, the Royals were a proud franchise that was always competitive, despite playing in a small market. They've fallen on hard times, because they squander the talent they have and they pay too much much for free agents that are not very good. If they had a payroll in the $60 - $80 million range they would probably still suck because no one there knows how to run a ballclub.

Every year, even in the so-called parity paradise, the NFL, there are 4-5 teams that have no shot at winning, or are hinged on one player or a million lucky things. Why? Because they are run terribly. Baseball is the same way, and if 20 or so (or more, even) teams can start every season saying, hey, we've got a real window of opportunity (even if it's contingent on getting help), that's enough competitive balance for me. Getting each and every team to have that chance is almost always going to mean penalizing teams for spending some money and doing their homework.
Besides, that argument would have been stronger in 1999 or something.

James d. and Jack Greene and Mike are entirely correct. The problem here isn't money. You have bad rich teams (Seattle) and bad poor teams (KC). And you have good rich teams (Boston) and good poor teams (Oakland, soon to be Milwaukee). And the delta between smart teams and dumb teams is much larger than the delta between rich teams and poor teams.

Baseball's competative balance is crap at the moment, it's true. And that's no tbecause of money, it's because some franchises are run by morons. How else do you describe Cinncinati, Seattle, Tampa Bay, or Seattle? When you make poor decisions about how to spend your money, you won't suceed if you have a $40 mil payroll or a $100 mil payroll. Player salaries are, even this year, entirely in line with revenues.

Terrible idea to expand the playoffs. The great thing about baseball is that the regular season really means something. Expanding the number of playoff teams will only make the regular season more meaningless and baseball more like hockey and basketball. Those sports, by the way, suck.

While I'm relieved every poster agrees expanded playoffs is a horrible idea, I'm shocked everyone has defended (only Kabak acknowleding it even slightly) that MLB teams work on horribly inequal footing.

I'm not going to rehash the well-known debate, but its bad for baseball that a significant portion of teams have huge competition advantages.

First of all, I'd bet that we could all agree on this general team ability order in baseball:

1) Well run, Rich.
2) Well run, Poor.
3) Badly run, Rich.
4) Badly run, Poor.

The well run, rich teams will always have the ability to have tighter winning cycles, require shorter rebuilding times (read: Red Sox, Angels, Yankees*). The badly run rich teams will always think that they don't have to really rebuild, and will continue to overpay for has-beens (read: Orioles, Steve Philips' Mets). The well run poor teams will always have great peaks, as they build their teams for the longest championship-quality window of opportunity as they can, and accept longer rebuilding cycles (read: Indians, Oakland A's). And the badly run poor teams will always suck, their owners crying poverty even as they line their own pockets with money saved from publically funded stadiums, their own cover-concession business, and revenue sharing (read: KC, Tampa Bay -prior to this year...here's hoping they climb out of the pit-,Pittsburgh)

Throughout its history, variable revenue streams from local markets have ALWAYS had a huge impact on teams' winning it all: this is not a recent phenomenon; there was never that rose-colored time some would have us all believe when baseball was all smiles, apple-pie, and all teams more or less equal. Baseball has always been greed, greenies, chaw, coke, booze, 'roids, cheatin', and unevenly distributed revenues. We still love it, perhaps even more so because of its excessive and seedy nature.

The joke here isn't the idea that all 30 teams are on an even playing field; it's that yahoos like Romano think they ever were, or should be. That's like cheering for all teams to be "average-tastic". It would be better to ask for all teams to have an organizational vision in place at the beginning of the season that could give their fans something to root for, even if it's not to win it all this year or even next, but rather to root for their new picks, or to cheer last year's contenders as they age.

I think the problem is internal in each organization. Every game that someone wins, someone also loses. Pro Football is considered competitive, but they still have an undefeated team as well as teams with way more losses than wins. Atlanta has kept winning dispite less than optimum attendance and a corporate decision to cut as much as $40 mil from their highest payroll. Granted, $80 mil is considerably more than $40 mil, but it isn't the $160 mil or close to $200 mil the Yankees and now the Mets are spending. Baltimore has been throwing money at the problem for years and still haven't come close. Look to your general managers and farm systems. NO MORE EXTRA PLAYOFFS!

This is such a tired and silly argument, and I can't believe people are still churning it out. Minnesota won three division titles playing their home games in a dome stadium in a relatively small maret. What's Detroit's excuse? They play in the fifth largest city in the country, in a new stadioum to boot. I know that Detrot is a little more economically depressed than other major cities, but the idea that they absolutely cannot compete while teams in smaller cities - Minnesota, Oakland, St. Louis - repeatedly put together competetive ballclubs is a joke. It is Detroit managament (it seems to be a common theme there in football and baseball) that has ruined the Tigers, not a lack of true competetive balance. And as others have mentioned, the team is improving, as is the case with Milwaukee and Pittsburgh.

By the way, which sport has produced the most number of unique world champions since 1980 (and the advent of free agency?) That would be Major League Baseball, where nearly 2/3 of all teams have one at least one world championship. And since the Wild Card system began, only 6 teams have failed to make the playoffs, and several of them are big-market teams that simply are terribly managed.

Where are our Gooden or Strawberry?

They are named Kazmir and Young. Of course one didn't come from the Rays draft, but still....

Not to mention a couple of terrific talents in Upton and Niemann. And solid major-leaguers in Crawford and Rocco (both with the tools to become terrific players). They missed on Brazelton and Hamilton, but those things happen to everyone.

If there is one thing the LaMar crew did at least decently, it was the draft. That hasn't been the problem.
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Detroit is not the fifth largest city in the nation. New York, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Phoenix are all larger than Detroit. According to Infoplease, Detroit ranks 11th in the nation. But your point remains. Plenty of smaller cities have better teams than Detroit.

Wow, it's dropped that far? I was basing that on my (obviously) outdated by now geography lessons in school. It used to be only one of six to be over a million, and it's not even that (over a million) anymore.

But yes, the point remains. And Philly is another great example. They've put some competetive teams out there in recent years, but they haven't even made the playoffs in 12. Again, it's not solely or even principally about market size or revenue, but how the team is managed.

Wow David.

I really respect your opinion, but you've badly missed the boat on Tampa Bay. There are some tremendous prospects in the Devil Rays' system, as Jay points out above.

The Rays' farm system is in excellent shape. But there's no way they can buy free agents at the same pace as New York and Boston. That's the real problem.

Metropolitan Area is actually a better measure of market size than city size, which depends a lot on local politics and how many of a central city's suburbs are incorporated into the main city.

By that measure, in the 2000 Census (check www.census.gov), Detroit does a little better, coming in at #8. San Antonio is #9 on the list of incorporated cities, but its metro area is only #30, smaller than any metro area with an MLB team, since there's very little in the metro area outside the city limits. The smallest city with a baseball team is technically Miami Gardens, Florida, which only incorporated in 2003 and is estimated to have a population of 105,000. Obviously the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale metro area is a lot bigger than that.

The smallest metro areas with baseball teams are Kansas City (#26) and Milwaukee (#27). The only metro areas larger than those in the 2000 census without baseball teams are #20, San Juan, which is a special case, Portland at #23, and Sacramento at #25. Las Vegas was the #32 metro area in 2000, but is growing so fast that it's probably close to Portland's size by now. Norfolk, Virginia, at #31, was the largest metro area with no major-level sports team in 2000. (Green Bay, Wisconsin was the smallest, of course).

Matt,

My point is that the Devil Rays have had great drafting position since their inception. Why has it taken them so long to get to the point where they have great talent in their farm system? The Mets of the late 70's early 80's had five horrible years that produced Strawberry and Gooden, Kevin Mitchell, Lenny Dykstra, etc. The Devil Rays have been playing for eight years and are looking at another bad season.

My solution to refiguring playoffs to address competitive balance:

http://catallarchy.net/blog/archives/2005/12/16/competitive-balance/

Dear Choir,

In the last 5 seasons, the White Sox, Astros, Red Sox, Cardinals, Yankees, Marlins, Angels, Giants, and Diamondbacks have been to the World Series. Nine teams, five different winners. Only the Yankees went twice, and they didn't even win.

In the last 5 seasons, New England, Philadelphia, Carolina, Tampa Bay, Oakland, St. Louis, Baltimore, and the NY Giants have been to the Super Bowl. Eight teams, three different winners.

Which league has a problem with competitive balance?

Sincerely,
The Preacher

People who complain about baseball's "competitive balance" want someting more like the NFL or NBA. The last thing I want to see is Major League Baseball to become like the NFL, whose quest for a parity where every team can win has created a league with three good teams, three terrible teams, and 26 mediocre ones, negating 80-plus years of tradition through rampant free agency and pointless relocation to smaller markets. Meanwhile, the only important teams in the NBA are the Lakers, Celtics, Knicks, and whomever the five best players play for. That's not what I want to see in baseball either.

Baseball does have a problem in that the original sixteen franchises established more than a century ago, with the significance the history of the game takes in baseball, have an advantage over the fourteen expansion franchises in national exposure and therefore in marketing revenue. I don't know how to solve that, but it's better than the alternative that has unfolded in the NHL over the last decade, where the Original Six, with the most history and also in the largest hockey markets, have suffered from an inability to compete with the newer teams for star players, which certainly has much to do with the popular decline of hockey.

I like the fact that the Yankees are in contention every year, and I really don't like the Yankees.

David, the Rays didn't have a top pick until '99 (lost their first 3 picks in '98 thanks to the silly draft compensation rules - though they still got Huff in the 5th round draft). They missed with Hamilton, but their 2nd pick (CC) turned out very good and their 3rd and 5th round picks turned into two of their young pitchers currently in the rotation. In the 2000 draft, they again lost their 2nd-5th round picks due to the famed Hit Show signings. But they still got Rocco and two other current 40-man players in Jamie Shields & Shawn Riggans.

I can't compare them to the Mets of the early 80's, though saying that they are failures because they didn't do what one team did 20 years ago seems a bit extreme. Their drafting and scouting hasn't been the problem. Maybe the developmental department gets some of the blame.