Rob Manfred spoke today about a number of issues and competitive balance made the cut:
Manfred said labor has been addressed at the owners meetings this week, but he declined to elaborate on those discussions.
“What I would say about the issue of competitive balance is that we have a significant segment of our fans that have been vocal about the issue of competitive balance and in general we try to pay attention to our fans,” Manfred said. “So it is a topic of conversations.”
ESPN.com
Current revenue sharing rewards poor revenue generating teams and poor performance, as the two tend to go together. Instead of discussing salary caps and floors, MLB should talk about increasing incentives that lead to building at least an interesting team, or even better, one that wins.
I would propose that 50% of team revenue goes into a pool. You do not have baseball if there are no opponents, so 50% of team revenue would be used to pay for the opponents. (I suspect it work as well with a 60/40 home road split, but let’s keep it simple.) That would include ticket sales, concession sales, local TV revenue, and local radio revenue.
The simplest way to divide that money would be to give each team an even share. That does not give that much of an incentive to build an interesting, winning team, however . MLB would come up with a formula that takes into account a team’s road attendance (or % of capacity), road TV ratings, road radio ratings, and winning percentage. We want to reward teams that are interesting to watch, but we also want to reward teams that win. I suppose one could even factor secondary market ticket prices into the equation. In the end, the best road draws/winners would get somewhat more than 1/30th of the pool, and the worst road draws/losers would get somewhat less than 1/30th of the pool.
Yes, the current big teams do well under this system, but that is a good reason for them to accept it. This would replace the luxury tax, end talks of salary floors or ceilings, and lead to less subsidizing of non-competitive teams. A system like this might work much better than the current one. This is a bold move the MLBPA could propose, rather than playing defense against a salary cap.