Those Damn Yankees

The late comedian Joe Lewis once said, “rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel.” Nowadays, it’s more like rooting for Vladimir Putin, but U.S. Steel was also pretty unlovable back in the day.

Hating the Yankees is something that will never go out of fashion. Even if they stop spending more than every other team and lose for 20 consecutive seasons, they still have 27 championships, and teams with that many rings are polarizing no matter how good or bad they are at the moment.

But the haters’ solution to the unlevel playing field that the Yankees exploit would cripple baseball, which is the opposite of what these reformers want.

Yankee-bashers’ solution to New York’s deep pockets is to impose a “salary cap,” or as ESPN’s Neil deMause accurately describes it, a “payroll cap.” A payroll cap would limit how much any team can spend on its players. For example, this year’s median team payroll was approximately $81 million. Somewhere in the vicinity of $81 million would be a reasonable payroll cap, according to most reformers.

The effect of a payroll cap would be to limit the amount of money that spend-happy teams would be able to spend. If, for example, the Yankees had an $81 million payroll, they would not be able to sign any free agents, which would in turn put downward pressure on player salaries.

Both reformers and non-reformers equally love professional baseball. That’s why any avid baseball fan is usually emotional when debating payroll caps.

The main two arguments in support of payroll caps work off each other. Reformers argue that a payroll cap would level the playing field, thus giving small-market teams such as the Pittsburgh Pirates and Washington Nationals a chance at competing against big-market teams such as the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. They feel that normalizing pay is the best thing for the long-term health of professional baseball.

To attack the first assertion that establishing a payroll cap would level the playing field, one must only look at the World Series champions since 1996. The Yankees have led the league in payroll every year since 1996, save 1998, when the Baltimore Orioles led. In those 14 seasons, the Yankees have won five championships, meaning that in the other nine seasons, teams that spent less than the Yankees found a way to win.

In 2002, the Anaheim Angels — 15th in payroll — won it all, including beating the Yankees in the playoffs. In 2003, the Florida Marlins — $48 million — soundly defeated the Yankees — $150 million. 2005 belonged to the Chicago White Sox — 13th.

In fact, since 1985, the World Series champion has only also had the highest payroll six times.

After claiming that payroll and performance have a high correlation, reformers then argue that if small-market teams are bad enough for long enough, those teams will die out, revenues will whither away, and eventually the large-market teams will have no one to play against.

But the MLB is not the NFL. In the NFL, there aren’t stark divisions between big markets and small markets. Most NFL teams have a massive fan base and will sell out every game regardless of performance. The Detroit Lions, for example, went 0-17 this past season and only just recently began to have unsold seats. The NFL relies on the survival of each team and thus each fan base pretty evenly.

The MLB, though, has very obvious differences between big and small markets. Baseball needs the Yankees. It needs the Red Sox. It doesn’t need the Tampa Bay Rays and the Florida Marlins. Both of those teams have been surprisingly successful during their short existences, but neither of them ever really draws crowds. That’s because there are regions of America where baseball isn’t popular.

And that’s O.K. The New York-Boston-Los Angeles-Chicago-Philadelphia pentagon is what baseball needs to survive. Those are teams that can draw massive crowds similar to most NFL teams’, because those cities love baseball. If the Marlins and Rays fold, that
won’t really hurt baseball. There would still be more than enough teams and money generated by the large markets to go around. Even if a payroll cap were imposed and small market teams started winning at the expense of the Yankees and Red Sox, the MLB would lose millions of dollars. The Yankees and Red Sox would lose more fans than the small-market teams would gain, resulting in a net loss of fans and revenue.

Baseball’s survival requires that big market teams continue to draw in fans. And even though the Yankees are immensely successful —and are popular even when they are not — the worst things for baseball would be if the Yankees had 10 consecutive losing seasons and lost a chunk of their fan base in the process.

Jared Sichel is a sophomore in Newcomb-Tulane College. He can be reached for comment a jsichel@tulane.edu. For the record, he’s a Yankees fan and is still ecstatic over No. 27.