How Revenue Sharing is Slowly Killing Parody in Baseball
Revenues sharing has been one of the more debated topics throughout major league baseball over the last 10 years and it doesn’t seem like the topic is going to die anytime soon. So what is revenue sharing? Well revenue sharing is where teams with high pay rolls have to take some of their money and “share” it with teams that don’t have high pay rolls. Sounds simple doesn’t it. However, it is very controversial in the baseball world.
Not everybody agrees this is the right way to even out pay role discrepancies between teams. Higher level teams, such as the New York Yankees are paying huge amounts of money into this revenue pool. Last year the Yankees contributed the most money to revenue sharing with a whopping $63 million dollars. That money was then distributed to teams like the Kansas City Royals, Florida Marlins, and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Those teams are in-turn supposed to use that money to make their ball clubs better by bringing in better players and coaches. This is where the argument gets sticky. The upper echelon teams like the Yankees and Red Sox’s believe that the majority of the money given to smaller markets is being pocketed by the owner instead of going to the team. I think you can see where this is going and its not pretty. Neither side can prove it one way or the other, but that is essentially the argument.
So what is the solution? Well that has yet to be determined by anybody associated with major league baseball. The commissioner Bud Selig believes everything is on the right track and doing just fine with revenue sharing. While others involved in smaller markets like the Royals, are arguing for more money. There is one way to solve this problem. Add a salary cap to major league baseball. Every other sport has a salary cap, so why not baseball? This would create an equal opportunity for everyone. If the salary cap was $80 million dollars, every organization would have that much money to spend on players. This is just a dream though, because this will not be happening anytime soon. Wealthy organizations will not allow this because it takes away from their ability to make huge amounts of money.
Major league baseball will tell you revenue sharing is doing an amazing job of holding down large market teams. The truth, however, is it’s really not working. Large markets continue to get bigger and small markets seem to get smaller. Until somebody steps up and takes control of this situation this huge deficit between teams will continue.
