The New York Mets and their fans have spent most of the last decade and a half trapped in the shadow of the New York Yankees.  The Yankees were the team with the abundance of cash, the flashy name players, and most importantly the W’s in the record column, while the Mets repeatedly floundered near the bottom of the NL standings no matter what they tried.  Now the Mets seem to be on the right track with an ever expanding payroll and a GM who isn’t afraid to target every big name on the market.  If you’re a Mets fan, then it’s an exciting time as your dreams of taking back the city from the Yankees finally seem to be within reach.  A word of caution though, before you get too carried away with the direction your team is heading you might want to take a second to realize that thanks in large part to the Yankees, your window for spending your way to a World Series title is quickly closing.

            Anyone who takes a look at the current baseball market can see that things are beginning to spiral out of control.  Payrolls are on the rise for just about every team as each winter brings new free agent contracts that only escalate the asking price of the players coming out the following year.  If the top pitcher on the market was worth 12 million a year this year, then next year it’s going to take at least 13 million just to get into the running.  The fact that A.J. Burnett somehow wound up with a 55 million dollar deal over the next 5 years only to be topped by Kevin Millwood and his 60 million dollar deal over 5 years further illustrates my point.  Burnett isn’t even going to be the number one guy in Toronto, Roy Halladay is, which just goes to show you that when a true ace gets onto the open market, there is no way he is going to sign for less than the 11 million a year Burnett is getting.  Baseball is quickly finding itself on a slippery slope to a labor dispute and if these early warning sides do explode into a full scale labor war, you can bet that many owners are going to be pushing hard for a salary cap.

            According to last year’s published numbers, 11 teams spent over 80 million on player salaries (The Yankees led the way at just under 206 million).  Contrasting that number, 8 teams spent less than 50 million dollars (The Devil Rays were the bottom spender at just under 30 million).  As you can see the gap between the top team and the bottom team is somewhere in the neighborhood of 176 million dollars.  In fact, you can take the combined salaries paid of the bottom 5 teams (Devil Rays, Royals, Pirates, Brewers, and Indians) and still be over 19 million short of reaching what the Yankees spent.  Now I hear the argument all the time that the Yankees spend it because the Yankees make it and I’m going to say that’s a bad argument.  What I am going to say is that regardless of whether or not they make it, the league is not better off for having them spend it.  The Yankee’s years of overpaying for talent have not only driven up the price of top players, but also what other teams have to pay to attract even mediocre talent.  Let’s take a look at the Devil Rays again real quick.  If they wanted to go out and sign Kevin Millwood, who is a better than average starter, but clearly not an ace, they would have to spend more than one third of what they paid their entire team last year, just for the right to have him pitch for them in 2006.  Now I realize that sports is a very lucrative business and that major league baseball does pretty well for itself but all the players who are maxing out their value now are doing is minimizing what future players will make.  At some point, every spending spree has a breaking point and Major League Baseball is very close to theirs.

            The one other comment that I always here when it comes to people claiming there will never be a cap in baseball is that the small market teams don’t mind because at the end of the year, the teams like the Yankees that spend all the money cut them a big check through revenue sharing.  When it comes to the actual people who run and own these teams this may be true, but there also comes a point when the business has to listen to the people whose money keeps it running.  The plain fact of the matter is that MLB risks alienating a large portion of its fan base as the gap between the few top spending teams and the rest of the league continues to widen.  It’s not that a team that doesn’t spend widely can’t compete; it’s just that the odds of them competing consistently over an extended time is slim to none.  Another side effect is that big name players rarely stay with the smaller market teams because they just can’t pay them what the big boys can offer.      Nobody likes following the career of a young player up to the big league team only to see him bolt the second he becomes eligible for free agency to a team that can pay him the most like the Yankees or Red Sox.  The player isn’t to blame for trying to maximize his value, but the only recourse the owners have is to institute a system that limits the amount of money that can be spent.  Even in a salary cap system the teams that make the most money will still attract the top talent.  Not every team is going to spend up to the cap level (although I do think they should have a lower cap as well like hockey has), so the teams that do will still come away with the top talent in free agency.  What the salary cap system does is limit the dollar value range that can separate the spending teams from the conservative teams, which gives every team a better shot of fielding a competitive team. 

            The current MLB labor deal runs through the end of 2006 at which time the rumblings of a cap system will probably be heard from coast to coast.  The system has already been proven to be successful in the NFL and so far the results are looking pretty good in hockey as well.  Most importantly since every team would find itself in a competitive situation, fans around the country would really embrace this as a way of bringing back what was once America’s game.  Getting back to the Mets, it looks like they are finally ready to step up and start printing money like the Yankees.  Unfortunately for them this year may be their last chance to take advantage of the system until a salary cap forces teams into shedding some of their bigger contracts.  Hope for a World Series in 2006 Mets fans, because once the current labor contract expires, the days of trying to buy a spot in the World Series may be over.