In ANY type of salary cap the only group that will see their wealth enhancement negatively impacted is the players, which is exactly why they would fight one to their last breath.

And, unless the “haves” with their own cable network or outrageously profitable cable deals share all the broadcast rights equally, like the NFL does, you still will have rich clubs and less rich clubs. But, let’s be clear, there are no poor clubs. There are already clubs, (the Yankees and Cowboys), that are sheltering as much of their concessions revenue, (which in MLB is subject to revenue sharing), as possible by creating companies to run concessions. Then they “award” the concessions to their own company at a lower than market rate price and the extra profit is exempt from MLB revenue sharing. The Yankees were the first MLB team to do it, I believe, but they certainly won’t be the last. So the owners clearly don’t think much of revenue shaing, whch is essentially an “owners salary cap”.

See what happens after you tell the owners with their own big cable networks/contracts, they now have to share it. They’ll fight that to their last breath.

It would seem ONLY the fans, (and then mostly the ones that aren’t Yankee fans), think a salary cap is a good idea. The players hate it. The owners don’t think it’s worth fighting for nor are they interested in subjecting all or, at a minimum, any more of their revenue to revenue sharing. And, if this article is to be taken at face value the economics are questionable too. If competitive balance is the goal perhaps a salary cap is not the answer.

As for siding with billionaires against millionaires, I don’t think average Americans feel they’re on EITHER side of that fight. They’re all filthy rich as far as I’m concerned, I just wish the Indians had a better chance of being competitive. Ownership isn’t going to spend money that it doesn’t have, and Cleveland isn’t in a fair position to bring in revenue when compared with many other franchises.

If the options were: ‘the Yankees only make the playoffs once every three years but their owners get even richer’ OR ‘the Yankees make the playoffs every year but their owners are only kinda rich,’ it wouldn’t be hard for me to choose.

The article didn’t have much to say about a salary cap’s impact on the balance of competitive opportunity, which is what’s in need of fixing.

Ironically the NFL is not under salary cap rules this year and their product is as competitive as ever. An argument can be made about notoriously cheap teams like Arizona and Cincinnati falling back from the pack (on the presumption they’re spending less because they can).

However the real difference between the leagues in terms of parity may be in how they schedule. The NFL has a balanced schedule and in typical years you have to think the salary cap helps the smaller market teams. How else would a town like Green Bay compete against Chicago given the market size?

I’m not fully convinced a salary cap would be horrible for baseball, but for now there are ways around that for the bottom feeders. The Tampas and Floridas of the world can slowly build up a winner, blow it up when it becomes too expensive to profit, then start all over again. Unfortunately because of player development times it takes closer to a decade to fully rebuild from the bottom. NFL teams can retool in a matter of 2-3 years.

But we already know that baseball moves at a slower pace.

So, you want a salary cap so that other teams can feel free to make the mistake of signing AJ Burnett? I’d rather the Yankees be the suckers.

You can’t stop other teams from making tough decisions on who to keep and who not to sign by forcing the Yankees to spend less money. It just makes the Yankees job easier. And who’s to say that wasting all that money on Burnett this year didn’t matter? They had to pitch him, after all.

The only reason it works in the NFL is almost all the money (TV, merchandise, etc) is pooled and doled out evenly amongst the teams. You’d never be able to get that agreement in MLB because a bunch of teams have their own TV deals (Yanks, Sox, Mets, Rangers to name a few) which would be a net loss for them.

Regarding the Pats/Steelers/Colts vs. Lions, I think we all could point out that sound business/personnel decisions are the difference. Regarding WS winners, or MLB playoff participants, I think the evidence is pretty clear that sound business decisions AND the disparate financial ability to sweep poor business decisions under the rug conspire against low-revenue teams.

Having said that, I’m not a saying a salary cap is the Holy Grail of sports leagues or anything. Just wanted to point out that the Forbes piece seems to rely on profit margins as the evidence that salary caps “don’t work.”