Tom Matlack thinks he can fix the game we all used to love.
I grew up in Western Massachusetts and have lived my entire adult life in Boston, save for two trips to Connecticut for education and one god-awful summer in Manhattan back in 1991. I was the Little League home run champ in my hometown during my 12-year-old year, 1976. I can tell you where I was for the Yankee playoff game, Billy Buckner, and the 2004 World Series win.
But this week, I made some pretty good pocket change betting with my friends against the hometown squad and on that team with heart and no payroll, the Rays. I took exquisite pleasure in watching the three minutes in which the Sox fell completely apart, with the poetic justice of Crawford missing a catchable fly ball to seal the deal, while the Rays roared back to beat none other than the Yankees.
You see, from the most diehard fan, I have become a cynic, only going to games a few times a year to visit with friends. My single buds are only there to catch a glimpse of Heidi Watney, the Miss California now the roving sideline as a reporter for NESN. None of us care about the game. After a couple hours of betting on whether the ball will land on “dirt” or “grass” between innings—even a tight game against the Yankees—we get up and leave. Who wants to sit in Fenway for five hours? I live a short walk from the park, so I amble on home and go to bed without even checking the score.
J.D. Drew, Carl Crawford, and John Lackey represent all that is wrong with baseball. Huge guaranteed money by a big market team, no heart, and frankly, limited talent over promised by agent Scott Boras.
But I have a plan to fix all that is wrong with the nation’s pastime. Listen up John Henry and Buddy Boy Selig. You have to do something before this game sputters into oblivion. If you have lost me, the rest of your fandom is soon to follow.
♦◊♦
Sports in the modern era are all about money. So let’s review some of the economics that are standing in the way of a product that fans can endorse. The beauty of tennis and golf is that you actually have to win to get paid. The problem with baseball is that you just have to negotiate the best contract.
The NFL, still the best sports product out there with 16 regular season games that matter, will top $9 billion in revenue this year. The new deal with players shares 50% of that revenue, with owners able to earn another 3% if the league, as a whole, grows the pie. The NFL has the advantage of national TV deals and a hard salary cap that maintains parity and puts a premium on the team concept and coaching. You cannot even begin to try to buy a championship the way the Yankees and Red Sox do every year.
The MLB will do just over $7 billion this year. Markets are fragmented by the size of local market television audience (with YES and NESN being the biggest). There are 2,430 regular season games played each year in the 30 parks.
There is a revenue sharing system in place that moved $312 million from the most financially successful clubs to the less successful. No one likes this system. “Baseball has to address the disincentives created by large scale transfers of revenue from successful clubs to less successful clubs,” John Henry has said. The complaint is that bad teams just pocket the revenue sharing checks. There is no incentive to spend on players or winning.
So here’s the way to fix it.
♦◊♦
Let’s start with the NFL math that sharing equally between ownership and players is fair. Then let’s split the players’ portion of the pot into two equal pots, one based on guaranteed money and the other on performance.
The 25% of MLB revenue paid to sign players remains unchanged. That $1.75 billion is used to acquire and keep the best talent that any given team can afford. Existing contracts would have to be renegotiated to comply with this new system, pushing some portion (like half) from guaranteed money to performance-based incentives. But all teams would be playing by the same rules.
Rather than the $312 million of revenue sharing, under this new system, the league would require a full 25% of all revenue to be centralized. In other words, the other $1.75 billion in performance pays for players. All teams have to contribute 25% of their revenues to the pool.
The incentive pool would be allocated: $750 million to the regular season and $1 billion to the playoffs.
The winning team in each of the 2,430 regular season games would receive $308,642 in incentive pay. Personally, I’d like to see all the players split the proceeds equally, but that’s a wrinkle that can be worked out later.
The $1 billion for the playoffs goes to the winner of the World Series in a winner-takes-all tournament. Each of the 25 players on the winning squad takes home $40 million.
Just to put those numbers in perspective, Lady Gaga gets $1 million a show, but she doesn’t have the chance to win the World Series.
♦◊♦
What would this system accomplish? It would restore competition to baseball and flush all the grand posturing—the Theo and Boras and utter nonsense that is ruining the sport—down the toilet. It would put pressure on management to assemble winning teams, flipping the leverage from players looking for handouts to players looking for teams capable of winning the big dance. It would make baseball a team sport, where one player has a real stake in making sure that his teammate is doing his job and where team heart and chemistry matter more than anything else.
Players could certainly still make a lot of money, whether or not they ever win a game. But to make big money they would need to put together a 90-win season and bring home the trophy for their city. No longer would they be able to make $20 million a year for sucking.
Most of all it would make a great game great again.
(Oh, and one more thing: Can we all also install a pitch clock so Yankees-Red Sox games take two hours instead of five? Thanks.)
—Photo laffy4k/Flickr
About Tom Matlack
Vocalyze
Tom: I don’t necessarily find fault in your proposed system, but I absolutely abhor the kind of “fans” who go to Fenway to chat, don’t stay the whole game and don’t care about the outcome. If you no longer like baseball, that’s cool. Don’t go to the games. But part of the reason I am no longer a crazed Red Sox fan is because the fans at Fenway are a wine-and-cheese, “pink hat” amalgamation of douchiness!
I’m upset the Red Sox came out on the wrong end of things Wednesday night. However, you look past the fact that Wednesday night is widely considered the most exciting night of baseball in MLB history, with so many playoff spots undecided and coming down to the wire. The product isn’t bad (although I think there should be a time clock between pitches to speed things up) and I’m not even sure the money issue needs fixing. Hell, a team with a $42 million payroll just knocked off a team with a $180 million payroll for a playoff spot.
If we want to fix things, how about lowering ticket prices so normal people can afford to go? Maybe then the real fans can watch a game in its entirety instead of the morons there to ogle Jacoby Ellsbury, sing Sweet Caroline and do “the Wave.”
DF/Aaron. After being a hard core fan for 40 years now (and having a 15 year-old son who is an obsessed stats guy) it’s not like I go to games and just play dumb. I know what is going on. I know the players. I know that stats and strategy. I just want to puke more often than not. I disagree that the product isn’t that bad. It’s become all show and no substance. Yes, I love the Rays for that very reason. God bless them. But will the big teams still keep paying Boras money for players who then take a powder? Damn right unless something changes. To me it wasn’t the best night in baseball it was the worst not because my team lost but it showed just how silly this has all become when the much more talented team loses against all odds just because they don’t give a shit. They are laughing all the way to the bank.
Saying these guys don’t care is oversimplifying to an extreme degree. Yes you’ve got John Lackey, who by all accounts is a despicable human being and doesn’t seem to care. Some people argue Carl Crawford is in that same boat, although I think he’s a guy who can’t play in a big market and got in way over his head because the Sox offered him so much money.
But then there’s Ellsbury, Pedroia, Youkilis, Papelbon, Papi, Varitek and Aceves to name a few. These are not people who don’t give a shit. They play hard and they care about winning. The vast majority of players do, I believe.
And I’m sorry, but you’re dead wrong about Wednesday night. It was unbelievably exciting as the Braves collapsed, the Red Sox got beat and the Rays came back from 7 runs to win in extra innings. I wish it had turned out differently but that’s exciting. What’s also exciting is proof that the most expensive team doesn’t always win. And it’s not (all) because they didn’t give a shit, it’s because the last place Orioles took things seriously and played with pride and refused to back down. Ditto for the Rays who could’ve easily packed it in after being down 7.
So I’m not sure what “silliness” you’re referring to because on Wednesday night you had small market teams upsetting the favorites, last place teams playing hard even though they had nothing to lose and genuine excitement surrounding the wildcard playoffs. You got the best of what the game has to offer, and a quick glace across the Internet on Wednesday would show you how genuinely excited people were that night all over the country. What more can you ask for??
Paps blew the game, papilloma sqibbed a grounder with loaded bases, tek left his wife for Heidi and doesn’t play, youk is hurt, ellsbury is in a contract year. That leaves aceves and Petie. I’d go to war with a team filled with pedroias. But we have a team filled with drews.
just btw the yanks threw the worst pitching possible to give the rays a chance to knock the sox out. The sox still did it to themselves but they had help from the other overpaid team pitching AA players.
Tom: The Yankees were preparing for the playoffs, as any smart team would. Putting in Rivera for a meaningless regular season game and risking the playoffs is just dumb. If the tables were turned and the Red Sox were in that situation, I’d have killed Francona for putting Papelbon in.
Just because you blow a game doesn’t mean you weren’t trying. Just because you didn’t hit a homerun doesn’t mean you weren’t playing to win like Papi always has. I don’t really care about Tek’s family situation because he always plays hard on the field, and that’s what matters. Youk is hurt but you can’t question his effort. I’d say he works harder and cares more than Pedroia. And Ellsbury had a near-MVP season, I don’t care about contract years. Knocking someone for putting in the effort is just crazy Tom.
The whole team has the J.D. Drew, I stubbed my toe and it hurts disease. In hockey guys get a puck in the face, go off and get a dozen stitches, and come back THE VERY SAME PERIOD. Theo said at his press conference yesterday that keeping players on the field is a big priority going forward. I would say that means getting players into better shape … and players who actually want to play.
Ellsbury played great. Loved it. But man where has all that talent been? It is not an accident that he is about to go to market. On the flip side they had to play Lackey at a 6.85 ERA because he has a massive guaranteed contract.
Papi was a player with such enormous clutch hitting. Sure I like him personally but he is playing out the string now. He doesn’t have the focus and heart to carry the team. And I think it’s fair to say, specially after he admitted using steroids, to question his motives.
Again, I am not saying that some players don’t play hard for the sake of the game and their team (which is why I was cheering for the Rays for goodness sakes) but that the whole system is screwed up. Teams with payrolls of $200 million and others at $30 million. A sharing mechanism from good to bad teams with no enforcement mechanism that prevents the shit teams from just pocketing the money. The Scott Boras impact where players are able to negotiate huge long term guaranteed money completely out of whack with their eventual performance.
Most people on this planet actual get paid for performance. That’s all I am asking. And a system that focusses on team performance over the individual since its a team game.
I have a much simpler proposal. there is already a cap in place, but teams that go over just pay a fine. That means teams like the Yankees and my Red Sox just shrug and pay the fine. teams like the Orioles and KC, that used to be able to compete see the cap as a joke – and it is. Make the cap matter. Change the rules and get rid of the fine. If a team goes over the cap they are out of the playoffs for ALL the years that situation is in place. Yes, this will be a job creator for accountants, but the league can hire them first and make the rules very clear. Win all the games you like, no playoffs if you cheated, which is what going over the cap is, cheating.
“split the players’ portion of the pot into two equal pots, one based on guaranteed money and the other on performance” – that is what they did to bankers’ paychecks and they are now the living personification of earning evil in the public’s eye. At least when I was a banker I did try to generate wealth for other people (my clients), these guys just swing bats and spit.
And no more special clauses in a player’s contract that says he has to be the highest-paid player in the league. (I’m talking to you, A-Rod.) What if someone else wants that in HIS contract?
What I love about baseball is the fact that there’s such a big premium put on tradition, sportsmanship, and skill, and a lot of longing for the good old days, and yet people have been continually unsatisfied with the state of baseball for more than 150 years. People have been trying to fix various things they see wrong with baseball since before the days of Abner Doubleday.