Artie: In the old days everything depended on signing and developing your own players, and guess what? The bigger markets had an edge in money then, too. But with free agency there's a flow of players into the open market, and a team that spends wisely can make big changes.
Frank: The key is "wisely.” The Yankees spent a ton on guys who didn't produce championships: Randy Johnson, Kevin Brown, Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright, Jason Giambi.
Artie: Their payroll was more than double the Brewers' last year, but the Crew made the playoffs and the Yankees watched. I say no salary cap. Let teams sink or swim by shrewd management.
Frank: How do the Twins keep getting to the playoffs? How did Tampa Bay suddenly make the World Series in '08? How do the Marlins rebuild every few years?
Artie: And Florida's on the rise again, with young talent.
It's nice to see some common-sense arguments be made in the aftermath of the Yankees World Series where it seemed everyone agreed that the Yankees are guaranteed champs for the next decade and baseball will be irrelevant without a salary cap. Jonah Keri did a good round-up of why that is false and that it is more than possible that some of the several older players will regress next year and the Yankees take a step back -
The Yankees face another regression-related situation. They had an old roster in 2009. Two of the top three starters, five of the nine starting batters as well as the Hall of Fame closer were 33 or older.
It is possible that 35-year-old Hideki Matsui’s knee problems are behind him and that 28-homer seasons will remain the norm. It is conceivable that Johnny Damon’s tying a career high for homers at 35 (he turned 36 on Nov. 5) means we should expect a big power threat for the next half-decade. It is imaginable that Andy Pettitte, a 15-year veteran who has flirted with retirement in recent years and has nearly 3,000 regular-season innings under his belt, will keep winning games well into his late 30s and beyond.
But it is not likely. Few players are more likely to see a regression in their numbers than those getting well into their 30s who have suddenly had a big bounce-back season. The Yankees caught lightning in a bottle with Matsui, Damon and Pettitte, who are free agents, as well as incumbent 30-somethings like Jorge Posada. Even (gasp) Mariano Rivera cannot fight Father Time forever.
It's nice that the Shepherd Express gives some space every week to Clines and Kumbalek to talk sports since the Journal-Sentinel is too frequently pretty awful. Today, Michael Hunt (no link, J-S charges you to read his stuff online) jumps around from one weird argument to another in his 800 words. Under the headline, "NFL looking a lot like baseball", Hunt ledes off with this -
Like Karl Marx's vision for a classless society, Pete Rozelle's plan for NFL parity has been shattered. Expose both to the light of real-world conditions, and they wither.
Apparently riffing off the idea that the NFL is going to get rid of their salary cap after this collective bargaining agreement ends, Hunt believes that Rozelle's "favored "on any given Sunday" maxim no longer applies in a general sense" (he mentions Tampa Bay beating Green Bay, but calls it a "random occasion"). He thinks that -
What we're seeing now is a preview of how the NFL could emerge without a salary cap, especially in the NFC: a couple of ruling elites, a vast wasteland of have-nots and a sparse middle class.
That Minnesota and New Orleans are presently sharing the mountaintop is illusory. Both are financially strapped...Point is, like in baseball, only the select few appear capable of winning it all anymore
Well, forget that if he had read The Shepherd Express Hunt would know that baseball has had the most diversity in champions over the past decade, but how does any of Hunt's statements connect at all? The NFL, under a salary cap, allows financially strapped teams rise up to the top of the league, but, because they succeed with a salary cap, that success doesn't count? No, I'm guessing Hunt feels that football is totally uninteresting unless every single NFL team finishes the season 8-8, and the salary cap has failed unless it achieves that vision of a Marxist-athletic society. I don't know which is more ridiculous for Hunt to believe, but it doesn't really matter because Hunt drops this line of argument in the 6th paragraph to question whether the Packers have the ability in the next 5 games to make the leap from the shrinking middle-class to one of the elite teams because, "If so, the Packers will rattle the NFC's gated community without security being called." Michael Hunt apparently believes that the potential upward class mobility of the Green Bay Packers is evidence of NFL class stagnation. He also apparently believes that the Vikings and the Saints are evidence of a ruling elite that is inevitable without a salary cap, like in baseball, but the Vikings and Saints aren't really ruling elites because they could only be ruling elites in a system where there is a salary cap, and that somehow indicts the salary cap system as it hasn't created the Marxist-Rozellian dream of a classless NFL society.
Following this tortured logic I think it would be probable to assume the J-S hires the best area writers to cover sports in order to charge customers for their product, while The (Free) Shepherd Express is doomed to the vast wasteland of have-nots, pitifully begging for a salary cap in order to attract the best talent. Or maybe, as Clines, Kumbalek, and Keri might argue - money does not guarantee success, money may make success easier, but the world is filled, from sports to journalism, with examples of the failures of big pockets.
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