While commissioner Bud Selig will point to five different World Series Champions over the last five years as proof of parity in the league, you won't find anybody in Tampa Bay, Kansas City, or Pittsburgh willing to agree. Upon closer inspection, it would be difficult for a fan in any city to see it Selig's way. The same core group of teams seems to make the playoffs each season, with a couple of surprises here and there being the exception. The New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Atlanta Braves, and St. Louis Cardinals seem to be there every year. Others like the Anaheim Angels, Chicago White Sox, Oakland A's, and Houston Astros are annually among the top two teams in their respective divisions. The way things are looking, it's safe to predict it will remain that way for years to come. It has just happened to work out in recent history that the random exceptions got lucky and won the whole thing. That doesn't mean that there is parity. "Parity in baseball" would indicate to me that every single season and in every single division, all teams have some kind of a chance to advance to the postseason. Throughout the course of a 162-game schedule, the best team is assured of October baseball; unlike the NFL where playing only 16 games it is not uncommon for a team to get lucky for a stretch. The team with the highest payroll, the Yankees, has five players making more money than the entire Florida Marlins team, who of course posses the stingiest payroll in the league. New York also has three of the top seven highest paid players. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays have the second lowest team payroll in baseball and they play in the same division as the two biggest spenders-New York and Boston. The Devil Rays will NEVER (recent history tells me it's okay to use the word "never" here and in several other places in the coming paragraphs) win the A.L. East because they can't afford to keep their budding young players under contract long enough for them to progress into superstars, nor do they have enough money to replace those young players with other team's superstars. The Kansas City Royals, Pittsburgh Pirates, Colorado Rockies, and Washington Nationals will never make the playoffs under the current system, where Major League Baseball shares revenues with all teams. More needs to be done. I hate to say it, but baseball needs a salary cap. The Player's Association would never agree to it, which is why it will probably never happen. Just like fans in Kansas City will never know what it's like to face the Yankees in the ALDS. For that matter, the fans in New York will never know what it's like for a baseball season to end in late September.