New York Yankees, MLB radical realignment plan

Slow Moving Dreams

This is not a surprise. All of these trends have been moving for the last few years. And the dichotomy between players and teams is evident.

Teams are businesses, and owners want to make as much moola as they can. Most would prefer to win at the same time, but few want to be foolish. Players, meanwhile, simply want jobs and chances to compete every year.

That leaves two paths. The first is to put together a good to a great team that gets into the playoffs as the Yankees are trying to do this year. And that’s because playoff revenue has a massive, five-year positive effect on a team’s finances:

"Postseason dollars are mostly measured in future revenue, unlike win dollars, which are measurable for the current year. Once a team reaches the playoffs, it can count on an additional revenue stream over the next four to five years as a result."

The other is to spend so little that the team’s share of TV revenue and tax penalties turn a profit; the Marlins spring to mind, as do the Rays.

While this is fine with the top free agents, it decimates the dreams of many of the mid-level players. They need as many teams desirous of signing free agents as they can get. Under the current structure, the gulf between these two is likely to widen.

The current climate already encourages tanking and underspending. And it is the fans who suffer.

It seems the league is on a collision course. There hasn’t been a work stoppage since the early Nineties, but that is unlikely to last forever because, as Cyndi Lauper once said, money changes everything.

If that happens, if New York Yankees baseball grinds to a halt ten years from now, then other smaller issues will have to be dealt with, as well.

Get It All Out in the Open

To start, players, owners, and agents all want more revenue in the game, whether they are New York Yankees or not. That probably has to include extending the playoffs.

But it is the worst teams who would be most hurt by that, which the New York Yankees are rarely among.

The only way right now to increase the playoffs is to decrease the regular season. However, that would take away local market TV revenue; small-market teams in rebuild mode depend on getting paid to show 162 games of new content.

And, worse, it would replace this lost regular season revenue with money that goes almost completely to the teams that make the playoffs. With no shot of making the postseason, teams that are tanking now will find it even more prudent then.

That is a real lose-lose for the game, the players, and the fans.

This could create a semi-permanent second class in the sport. Some of you might be thinking of Tampa and Miami, and believe a second-class already exists. The Marlins have won two World Series titles since 1997, and the Rays have won their division twice and played in a WS in the last decade.

Either way that makes for quite a list of issues to solve. The New York Yankees and Major League Baseball need to decrease the regular season, increase the playoffs, grow revenue, stop the practice of tanking and encourage more teams to spend money on free agents.

How many of you think we can get there by the end of this piece?