Time for Brooklyn Baseball
From The New York Sun
Before anyone gets overly excited about the Alex Rodriguez trade, it should be remembered that for all his maddening and significant flaws, Alfonso Soriano is one of the 15 or 20 best players in baseball. As a 25-year-old second baseman who hits .320 with 40 home runs and 40 stolen bases, Soriano is historically rare. He also plays, to judge by various defensive metrics, a better second base than he has received credit for from many critics, myself included.
It makes a fine measure of Rodriguez’s greatness that he is worth somewhere from two to four more wins a year than Soriano, but those wins do little for the Yankees. After all, whether they win 100 or 105 games, they’ll go to the playoffs, in which luck and timing are factors too great for the differences between a player like Soriano and one like Rodriguez to be significant.
Nonetheless, the Yankees now have the best player of this generation under contract for seven years — for less money than they’ll be paying the vastly inferior Derek Jeter (who should now shift to second base or center field, where his inability to move to his right will hurt the team less). Given his health, Rodriguez should be closing in on his 700th home run by the time his deal ends.The Yankees have got a bargain. Consider that the difference between a Texas-subsidized Rodriguez and Soriano — who is due big raises in arbitration the next two years and worth probably $12 million a year after that — will come to only around $4 million or $5 million a year, and the new third baseman seems an even bigger bargain.
That said, this trade is an obscenity, not because the Yankees can afford Rodriguez but because they can also afford Jeter, Jason Giambi, Mike Mussina, Bernie Williams, and Kevin Brown, each of them among the 12 highest-paid players in the game, while still paying out 10-figure salaries to many other key players.The Yankees’ payroll this year will be higher than that of the last two World Series winners combined.As strongly as I believe that baseball should be run by free markets and free minds,this is too much.
The Yankees’ ability to spend so much money is partially due to their consistent excellence and aggressive marketing; yet it seems to me obvious that it is largely due to a flukish anomaly of which they have taken brilliant advantage: the fact that New York City only has two teams.
To vastly oversimplify, market size in baseball is affected by three factors: population, fan interest, and income. Leaving alone the likes of Kansas City and Milwaukee, compare the three two-team cities in MLB. According to the most recent census, the New York metropolitan area is 21,199,865 strong. The figure for Los Angeles is 16,373,645; for Chicago,9,157,540.
According to a survey performed by Scarborough Research for MLB, 21% of New Yorkers who describe themselves as “very interested” in major-league baseball, as compared with 15% of Los Angelinos and 13% of Chicagoans. According to the most recent figures I was able to find (they’re from 1999), per capita income in the New York metropolitan area is $38,539. The figure is $28,050 for Los Angeles and $33,857 for Chicago.
With these numbers it’s easy to make a very crude estimate of the potential dollars each team has access to: Figure the number of avid fans in each city, and multiply it by per-capita income.There are of course many other factors, such as international marketing, corporate spending, the percentage of casual fans in each city, the affluence of sports fans, and secondary markets such as Iowa, but none big enough to substantially alter the broad picture, of which this figure is meant only to be indicative.
Thus the total income of avid baseball fans in Chicago is around $40 billion. The total income of avid baseball fans in Los Angeles is around $69 billion. The total income of avid baseball fans in New York is around $172 billion.This means, then, that the Yankees and Mets inhabit a fiscal universe where they are, theoretically, drawing from a resource pool of around $85 billion apiece — more than four times that available to the two teams in the massive city of Chicago.
A third team in New York would cut the figure to around $55 billion for each team. Even this would maintain grotesque financial advantage for New York teams, which would still draw on a fan base more than twice as rich as that of the White Sox and Cubs.
Would moving the Expos to Brooklyn to attack the advantage of the Yankees (and the latent advantage of the Mets) be unfair? Of course not. This is a sport where an entire labor agreement has centered around attacking that advantage. Such a move would be nothing more than a recognition that there is significantly more demand than supply for baseball in New York, and a correction of that situation.
New York could easily support another baseball team. I’ve read studies suggesting that New York could support as many as eight reasonably competitive teams. A new club could play in Shea or Yankee Stadium until a new park was built along the Brooklyn waterfront, with a lovely view of the downtown skyline just beyond the outfield. Fiercely prideful Brooklynites would pack the stadium even if the team was worse than last year’s Tigers.
The Yankees and Mets could not block such a move, if MLB and the other 28 clubs were determined to make it happen. The only legal recourse available to them would be a suit under antitrust law; MLB of course has an anti-trust exemption.
I think that by expressly jury-rigging the most recent collective bargaining agreement against the Yankees, Major League Baseball and the other 29 clubs have lost all moral right to complain about Yankee spending. But that doesn’t mean they’ve lost their obligation to actually do something about it. The way the system is now designed, the Yankees pay a steep penalty for every dollar they spend above the luxury tax threshold. If George Steinbrenner is willing to pay that penalty, the power brokers who incompetently set out to thwart him should not criticize the Yankees. Instead, MLB should examine how its policies have encouraged precisely that which they were supposed to deter. Among the possible solutions, a new team in New York is, I think, the best.
But such a move is not being seriously contemplated. Rather than allow market solutions to address the fundamentally unfair situation in which the Yankees can swallow up every star player they come across, the lords of baseball would prefer to build Rube Goldberg-esque salary-cap contraptions as stalking horses for their real objectives, which are to drive down player salaries and stuff their pockets with revenue-sharing money. To be fair, no Brooklyn-based buyers have come forward for the Expos, either.
Perhaps some New York Sun readers have $300 million they’d like to spend well.
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