Official Yankees/MLB Bashfest

[OmahaBound]

If a poster creates a baseball thread with the hopes of having a quality discussion, is it so much to ask not to hijack it and turn it into a baseball or Yankees bashing frenzy? I would like to think not but perhaps I'm wrong. :brick::brick:

If you have to vent, here's the place for you! Have a ball!

[WayzUp]

You probably don't care, but I hope you realize that literally the only people you're hurting are your Pirates. Baseball is financially stronger than ever. The luxury tax obviously has done nothing to curb spending what it has done is put more money into the pockets of the small market teams. I don't care enough to look it up, but I'm pretty sure every team (or at least almost all) teams pulled a profit last year...in part thanks to the luxury tax. Blame the owners of these teams for not putting the money towards better players.

Let's not pretend these teams that can spend money but refuse to are making some kind of political statement. They're simply cheap. The Twins could easily afford to pay Tori Hunter and Johan Santana, but the odds are good they won't. You have business men running baseball teams strictly like businesses. That's all well and good but when your primary concern is not losing money (when lord knows you could afford to lose a few million while you build the team up) the outcomes are not going to be good. I hate that Steinbrenner and Tom Hicks have created this current market of player salaries, but at least with Steinbrenner you know he would gladly lose millions of dollars every year if would get the Yankees a championship.

As for your last point...football will always be king even if the problems you mentioned are fixed, because people now have the attention spans of a Jack Russell terrier. Literally a full season of football is played in under three weeks in MLB, and the baseball regular season lasts a full 6 months.

In the shadows? Sure. Floundering? Hardly.

C'mon Omaha, baseball has become an afterthought to most people because they know that if their favorite team isn't one of those in the top 10-11 or so in salary, they have about a 10% chance of competing every year & it's the same teams with the same storylines year in and year out. It's why fans go into every season hoping this'll be the year, see their team fall 5 games back in April and know the season is already over. Why waste months and months watching what you've seen just about every year for the last 20?

As for these smaller-market teams being able to pay and just not doing it...OKIE DOKIE. Don't be so naive...how many people live in NY? Boston? Atlanta? LA? Chicago? Those fans buy hats and jerseys and other crap that their team gets a cut of...merchandising is where these bigger market (and thus, higher payroll) teams have the advantage over say, a Pittsburgh team or a Tampa Bay team. You think every MLB city has a bored billionaire baseball fan who's willing to buy any free agent on the market at any price every single year? The Florida Marlins had one of those in Wayne Huizenga, remember? They bought themselves a World Series. He started hemorraging money faster than Marion Jones on roids, held a firesale, sold the team and they're back to their small-market, small payroll, suck-arse ways again. You think that's coincidence? Please.

MLB Salaries - by team, 2007 (http://asp.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/salaries/totalpayroll.aspx?year=2007)

And don't give me this 'luxury tax puts money in the pockets of small market teams' crap either. That's like telling me to go to Green's to get tailgating supplies with a $20 bill, you're spending over our established limit of $100 by getting $200 worth, seeing me all sad and being forced by the Commissioner of Green's to give me another $10 for the luxury tax. Yay, another 12-pack which in baseball free agent pool would be akin to our being able to sign Joe Randa. It's not good business....it's forced business. How many people could I get to come to my tailgate instead of yours if you had over 10x the beers?

Put a salary cap in place, let NY & Steinbrenner and all those other high-payroll teams keep their merchandising money. They can put it toward building outlandish new stadiums so they'll have the edge in wooing free agents to come play for them.

Lastly...yes, baseball is floundering. The owners might not be but when Game 1's of League Championship Games aren't selling out and there are games where less than 500 people show up and the tv ratings look like this:
http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/4715/mlbplayoffstvratingsnj4.gif
...you're floundering.

Now that the Yankees are out of the playoffs, no one will watch. No one cares. It's football season! Every TV ratings index will show that....every year, fewer and fewer people give 2 sh...cents what happens in MLB playoffs if the Yankees aren't in it. Or the Cubs cuz they have that goat curse streak thing going & people wanna see them break it.

Football starts in August...finishes in January. That's about 6 months of football. Baseball runs from April to October. That's 7 months. The games for each are about 3 to 3 1/2 hours long....the attention span thing doesn't fly, IMO. Baseball is a boring sport and is incredibly unfair to the ridiculous and most intelligent fans realize that and respond by not paying attention anymore. It's really as simple as that.

[OmahaBound]

I really don't have time to give all those points a valid counterargument right now but I will do it in installments starting later.

Quit calling me naive though. I know what I'm talking about...you're reading INTO what I'm saying rather than reading my words. Understandable, but rather than making for an interesting conversation worth having you're starting to get my irish up with the little personal barbs.:laugh: Perhaps it's just been a long day, hehe.

[Gator2753]

http://www.doingitwrong.com/wrong/20070311-122701.jpg
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/2006/07/whattagirl.jpg

[D^3]

One of my favorites... make sure your sound is on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQepTdyRKk