Small Market Teams Pocketing Spare Change

The type of system he describes would incentivize the Pirates paying big money to bad players, simply in order to meet the payroll threshold (since FAs of quality are generally reluctant to sign with us). Thus making us less flexible, and decreasing the amount of money budgeted for international signings and improvements to facilities and such, which improves the product but doesn’t increase the ML payroll.

1. ML payroll is an order of magnitude above what any of these teams, much less the Pirates, spend on int’l signings, development, etc. There’s no meaningful sense in which revenue “saved” from payroll is going elsewhere – how much was Sanos signed for? If the Bucs were spending $15M internationally every year, I’d buy the argument. But theyre not, so I don’t.

2. OTOH, isn’t it the league office that’s requiring teams to pay down debt first? Wasn’t it league rules that forced us to trade away Aramis? So wtf is up with this argument that it’s somehow bogus that the Pirates (and others) are paying down debt instead of spending it on payroll?

Anyway, the upshot is that this is a silly argument. If every team had an $85M payroll, you’d have a lot of overpaid players, especially on teams with a lot of young players. And what kind of insane system would penalize teams for having a lot of 1-4 year players? It’s a sustainable way to build a club! Are the Pirates supposed to pay Rickey Henderson $40M to come out of retirement so that we get our payroll up to a given level? Besides, a salary floor makes no sense without a salary cap, which we’ll get around the same time A-Rod takes a pay cut to come play in Pittsburgh.

So it doesn’t make sense for the Pirates and other low revenue clubs to spend equal money on bad players. If the Pirates have bad players, they should be paid like bad players, not good players. Only when they can get better players should they pay the players more money.

Since the Pirates can never have as high a payroll as the large market clubs, they will never compete for premium free agents.

So, there’s really only one way to get those premium players, and that’s to develop them internally.

The terrible thing about the current system is that small market teams cannot keep their own internally developed players when they become free agents. This is really the worst problem for MLB because it stifles the connection between the fan base and the players.

The solution would be for some of the revenue sharing money to subsidize small markets to keep their own free agents, but not allow that revenue be used for other things.