CKNW Editorial
for May 4, 1999

Neil Macrae will be in here after my neck with a curved goalies stick ‘cause here I go with my second sports editorial in a row. Shows how dull things are in Victoria and Ottawa!

My friend Jay, the Yankee fan, Ray, whom I also suspect of Yankee tendencies and I, a Dodger fan might just agree on what I’m going to say today.

The game of baseball is in danger of being ruined by the ability of a handful of teams being able to buy teams simply because they have more money. The two teams that come instantly to mind are the Yankees and the Dodgers.

The other day the Kansas City fans all turned their backs on the Yankees when they came to bat in protest of the way George Steinbrenner is able to buy the team he wants. Two years ago, an expansion team won the World Series by paying outrageous money to free agents.

It’s not just that the Yankees and Dodgers – and a few others – get the huge gates and thus the lions share of gate receipts nor is it just that they are in great television markets and thus rake in more of the boob tube revenue. It’s that their owners are very rich. In the case of the Dodgers as rich as Mr Rupert Murdoch’s empire is rich.

It is true that other teams with rich owners have done poorly – the Seattle Mariners being a good example – but the rule rather than the exception these days is that the rich win pennants and the others provide cannon fodder. Oh I know that the dirt poor, by comparison, Minnesota Twins with the wonderful Kirby Puckett won a few years ago but by and large, money talks

Of course it always has. There is a reason why the Yankees, Dodgers and Cards dominated in the old days – their owners had money. In fact during the fifties and sixties the Yankees treated the Kansas City Athletics like a farm club, sending players down for seasoning and taking the best for World Series time. Which would have been fine except Kansas City wasn’t a minor league club but played against New York in the American League.

I don’t suggest you can take money right out of the picture. Even if everyone started dead level, in time one team would have more money than another. But you can bring in some rules to make it fairer.

But before I get into that, why bother?

You bother because baseball is a great game – in my view the greatest. And in order to stay great, there must be reasonable parity. It was recognition of this fact which had baseball break itself into divisions and then add a wild card team. You had to do something to keep interest in the game, especially for teams in smaller markets. Moreover, lack of parity hurts good clubs as well as bad … for who in their right mind wants to see stinker after stinker just because your team with money is up against a team with none.

You have to approach the matter on a broad front. The game must decide that all who are in it count, one as much as the other. It’s a team game and it’s a game of teams. The starting point is absolute parity at the gate and TV. Sure, the teams with the bigger stadiums and the bigger crowds (the two don’t always go hand in hand) will scream but the fans are all over North America (and elsewhere for that matter) not just in New York City or Los Angeles. And while fans will put up with lousy teams for a long time they must have some hope. One shudders to think how the Cards and Cubbies would have done either with their own gate or that of their hosts had there not been a couple of guys named McGwire and Sosa around.

Then you simply have to have salary caps. $42 million dollars for a pitcher is just goofy, it’s obscene. And it can be paid not just because the Dodgers have good crowds and are in a good TV market but because to their owner this is only a tax write-off and not that big a one at that.

Baseball was pulled out of doldrums of their own making – the strike – by the terrific home run races – yes there were three, McGwire and Sosa against each other and each against Roger Maris. But the recovery was by no means complete.

They – indeed all professional sports – had better clean their acts up or we’ll see the same thing all over … many prize franchises in trouble just because their fans are bored with being beaten up year after year by the dollar sign.