Perhaps revenue sharing money should be restricted solely to either (1) improving on-field performance or (2) marketing the team to build revenue streams to get sustainable funds to improve on-field performance. If an owner can't account for a good use of last year's revenue sharing receipts, he's docked this year's receipts.

Secondary suggestion, the team with the worst attendance in each league can't recieve any revenue sharing dollars.

Perhaps a more fair, simpler approach. Revenue sharing becomes a 1-1 match of payroll expenditures up to a certain maximum. You want $50M from the kitty? You better be willing to spend at least that much on your players.

If its a 1:1, then that means there is no sharing...
I don't like the worst team getting nothing, since there can be fluke teams that just end up doing bad. I agree something should be done, but I haven't thought of anything yet.

RMR, then Loria spends $12 million and makes $12 million. I'll take $12 million a year.

I was thinking the payroll idea as well. If Florida has a team payroll of $8 mil this year, then they only get $8 mil in revenue sharing.

Worst team in each league gets sent to AAA.

Worst team in each league gets sent to AAA.

Relegation is the best idea!

Sabernar, that's a good idea, although I'd like to see a AAAA league that sent two teams to the majors every year while the worst MLB teams get sent to AAAA. There would be no revenue sharing in AAAA. Don't think the teams would go for it, however.

Are there any rules by MLB about what the revenue sharing is supposed to be used for or does it come with no ties attached?

They could have something like a multi-year moving averages. Say if you lose 90 games a year for 5 years you lose a percentage of your revenue sharing money money. 7-year at 90 games you lose more. 10 years you should be forced to sell your team.

Let's say you set this cap at 95 losses.

Teams over the last five years that would have been affected: Cubs, Padres, Brewers, Mets, Expos, Diamondbacks, Pirates, Rockies, Devil Rays, Royals, Mariners, Tigers, Orioles.

Teams not affected: Marlins.

Just saying.

Dan,

As I said in the post, I don't have a problem with a low payroll if you can do that and be competitive. Up until now, I've been impressed that the Fish were competitive with a low payroll. Without Cabrera, that becomes much tougher.

What if there was a clause that required each team to spend at least a certain dollar amount on a specific player or a group of 3 players? For example...if every team was required to spend at least $20 million during 2008 on 3 players, then you'd be forcing each team to either overpay bad players or try to be competitive. Another idea in my head is...what if any team who didn't spend at least $20 million combined on 3 players during the year, wouldn't receive anything from the revenue sharing cash cow. Those ideas would give each team some independence on how to manage things without penalizing teams who just happened to be bad but tried to be good. Anyone not spendin at least $20 million on 3 players, isn't trying to be good.

You make a hybrid of these suggestions. Every team has a share in revenue sharing. Teams that lose more than 90 games (or whatever the cutoff is) still get to receive their revenue share, but ONLY if they plow say, 80% of it back into player salaries.

This way, bad teams are penalized, and forced to spend money they "earned" to get better. They can't keep most of the revenue for profits, but they don't get any at all unless they spend most of it. Given the choice between none or some, you know what they'll choose.

Of course this does nothing to prevent a team that simply goes for perpetual mediocrity of 80 or so losses.

I just don't understand how we can decry bad signing after bad signing, year after year, and then discuss ways to force teams to spend money. Barry Zito's contract fulfills most of these proposals. The Royals' recent "let's throw a lot of money to show we're 'serious'" contracts fulfill most of these proposals. Throwing money at people is not the solution.

Meanwhile, what I was trying to say with the list of 95+ loss teams is that performance isn't really a great factor either, at least single season. The post is titled "Penalizing the Marlins" and more generally is about finding a way to penalize teams for not trying to be competitive. Meanwhile, the solutions given would affect teams that spent big on bad players, teams that were doomed by injuries, teams that are in divisions with monster opponents, etc. etc. Seemingly every way to lose except purposeful lack of spending! That's not exactly what I would consider a solution.

The suggestion that makes the most sense is geb4000's, since it judges franchises over longer periods of time. But are you really going to tell me that with the players the Marlins have, with the deals that they make year after year (firesale after firesale), they won't put up enough good seasons to come out with an average that's, well, average?

You have to be able to develop some talent to be stay mediocre if you keep having fire sales. I'm OK with the Marlins. It's the crap teams like the Pirates and the Devil Rays and the Royals that piss me off.

Lots of good comments here and good ideas. I like Devon Young's second idea a lot.

The $20 MM on 3 players idea is interesting, but I'm not sure I agree with forcing a team to spend a set amount of money on a defined number of players in the current season. Assuming every team that currently receives money from the revenue sharing plan wishes to keep the money train running, then wouldn't there come some year when they were required to spend a relatively large amount of money, probably between $16-18MM, on the free agent market? That rarely seems to work out well for small teams looking to make a splash. I guess they could trade for a high priced guy under contract elsewhere? I might be misunderstanding the concept a bit...but it sounds like something that sort of forces a team to spend for spending's sake.

My idea would be to require clubs to lock up certain players beyond their arbitration years. Failure to do so means a team is disqualified from revenue sharing in the present. In other words, either the club keeps one or two of their homegrown stars for a year or two beyond arbitration--see Dan Haren, Grady Sizemore, and I think Joe Mauer for examples of what I'm talking about--or revenue sharing funds dry up. If a club's required to have $25MM in payroll committed four years down the line--not just a ton of guys reaching their arbitration years, but guys with actual contract extensions--to keep revenue sharing funds coming in, owners can't keep pocketing everything they receive.

I don't know if I explained this too well, because I'm not totally sure I know what I mean...I guess I'd just like to see a way to force a club to build around or towards something. Not condoning teams be forced to hamstring themselves with huge, albatross contracts; just the one or two year FA buyouts that Oakland and Minny seem to use pretty well.

In the end, the problem is that there's nothing wrong with trying to make a profit. It is a business, after all, and a business is about profits. The problem is excess profits at the expense of the product. If oh, a widget company did that - people would just stop buying widgets. People need to just not go to marlins games (oh wait, they already don't...). The reason the marlins still live is the revenue sharing - it's being misused.

Revenue sharing, the entire point, was to give small market teams a chance to compete because they could use that money to sign better players. That was the point. The money wasn't for pocketing. So force the owners to use it or lose it. Let them gain profits by doing well, not by doing poorly. All teams. Force revenue sharing to be salary money.

I like the idea of a hard salary floor just fine. Teams will always make some good signings and some bad signings, and forcing teams to spend more money on payroll will lead to both more good ones and more bad ones. And most importantly, it would weed out scumbags like Loria who only wish to profit as much as possible, with no regard for taxpayers or fans. Sure, that Zito deal is God awful but at least the Giants signed him because they thought he would help them win. The Marlins aren't trading Cabrera and Willis because they're trying to win as efficiently as possible, financially - they're doing it because they'll profit that much more. A hard salary floor would be better for fans, as they'll be able to actually watch the players that their team develops past their first big payday. How's a Marlins fan supposed to get excited about anyone when he or she knows that the player will only be around for 6 years, tops? That's one reason that the Marlins can't draw any fans.

I think a 30 million minimum is a good starting point, increasing ever so often as player salaries increase. Furthermore, I'd like it if revenue sharing money was required to go towards payroll.

I fourth the relegation idea, too. The independent leagues could supply the promoted teams and accomodate the relegated teams.

How about a salary floor of say, 40 mil, and if a team doesn't meet it, then they get NO rev. sharing, PLUS they have to put the difference between the 40mil and the team salary into the revenue pool for the other teams to share. That'll put an end to any shennanigans REAL quick.

Why not have a soft floor of $30 million? If a team wants to go below that they may but they lose all the money if they fail to win at least 75 games. The lost money could then be donated to the RBI program (which promotes baseball) or some other charity.

Of course, theres nothing to stop an owner from putting 25 washed up 40+ year olds on the field for 700k a piece either. You would have the same competition problem, but with recognizable names.

The Player's Association has always been adamantly opposed to a salary flow. I've never understood why but I think they're afraid that a floor would be a step towards a cap.

Woops. By "salary flow" I meant "salary floor."

I don't think the relegation thing will work either. Number one where are you going to get enough franchises to make up a credible AAAA league? Two, when one of the old, charter franchises goes in the dumper for a few seasons (Tigers a few years back), what happens if they can never make it out of the relegation pool? It's conceivable that a Yankees or Red Sox team could get caught up in it after a freakishly bad year, and because of one bad season, they would never improve enough to win the relegation pool and make it back to the show. As much as I hate the Yanks and the Sox, I don't want to see an American League without them. And think of the history of the game. The record books would be a mess.

It seems most of the suggestions are way to complex. Why not just make the amount of money spent on major league player salaries equal (at minimum) to the amount of revenue sharing received in the previous year. It would give them time to plan how they would they compensate their players. For teams that continually lose 95 or more games three years in a row, the owner should be shot.

We can't shoot owners. What happens if the new batch is worse than the old? And think of the mess. Ego everywhere. :D

The whole relegation thing is way too much like European soccer. Just Wrong.

The players have generally been against a salary floor because it's never come without a salary cap.

There are a couple of reasons that this pattern works better in sports other than baseball:
1. Strong union, which guarantees most players more money than if they'd have a salary floor.
2. Guaranteed contracts. Football and basketball have the ability to cut players (with cap consequences) but avoid paying out money in later years under the right circumstances, because the full contract isn't guaranteed.
3. Freely available talent. It makes more sense to require a certain amount of spending in football, because the market isn't generally "liquid"; you can't just go to your minor league team and get an offensive lineman. There's a widely varying replacement level.
4. Baseball can easily be broken down into individual matchups, and players can be evaluated with reasonable accuracy based on measurable performance. Football doesn't work that way - there's a smaller sample size and the positions are incredibly interdependent. Basketball is a little more amenable to this reasoning, but players aren't guaranteed opportunities the way they are in baseball.

I would be willing to set an organizational-spending floor i.e. you can spend $20M at the major league level or $10M on scouting, minor league salaries and Dominican baseball academies. In fact, requiring organizations to spend more on their minor-league systems will likely result in lower spending at the major league level, as teams quickly accumulate cheap replacements for crappy veterans.

Finally, the Marlins aren't really the problem here. They've won more World Series in the past decade than the Tigers, so they must be doing something right.

I believe it was said above, but any revenue sharing dollar received goes toward salary. If not spent on salary, redistribute it to the other teams at the end of the year. This would create a salary floor equal to the revenue sharing $$. Operating costs are in the control of the team and should be treated separately.

I'm not sure I agree that all revenue sharing must go toward player salaries. Some teams would be wise to invest at least a portion of it in player development and scouting. If you can improve in those areas by drafting smarter and developing those players to get the most out of their abilities, then you increase your chances of being able to field a talented team at a low cost.

I don't begrudge BB teams for making a profit, but it should not be subsidized by the taxpayers. No tax dollars for ANY professional sports facilities. Let them pay their own way. Any governmental agency that allows tax dollars to be used to subsidize billionaires should have a like amount of federal money withheld from them.