Last week, Bud Selig finally shelved all the contraction nonsense for the time being. Good news, Expos fan. Oh, how wonderful it will be to spend the upcoming season watching those magical marvels of baseball majesty … the Montreal Expos?
No, the Expos probably won’t excite many this season, but I’m glad that the contraction plan didn’t go through. Eliminating teams would eliminate players, in turn upsetting players and the players union and, most likely, igniting a labor stoppage. That would be bad. Almost as bad as the Montreal Expos.
So what’s the sport to do? A salary cap to even out the free agent market? Revenue sharing? A luxury tax? A complete conversion to Baseball socialism? These systems would crash harder than Soviet Russia. Just like with huge-scale communism, the redirection of money would give the teams no incentive to compete and thus no reason to attempt to put together the best and most marketable baseball team. Baseball thrives, and has always thrived, on competition, whether on the field with unforgettable players, rotations and lineups or off the field with unforgettable promotions, gimmicks and the like. The obvious and easiest way to make a product competitive is to make it the best, and thus, general managers are driven to create the best unit they can.
However, the main problem with baseball’s current economy is that some teams just aren’t in large enough markets to make the money needed to compete with the big market monsters like the Yankees, Dodgers, Rangers and Mets. Logically, the owner of a team like the Expos or the Tampa Bay Devil Rays would, if he or she were interested in making money, benefit from moving his or her team to a bigger market. If the Devil Rays brass attempted such a move, however, they would not only have to clear it with Major League Baseball, but they would also only be permitted to move to the cities that Major League Baseball saw fit.
What I’m suggesting for baseball is a true capitalist system. With a laissez-faire system, teams would move about as they saw fit. Eventually the markets would be spread out enough that all the teams could compete. Naysayers like to argue that this means “neglecting” fans in places like Montreal, Tampa Bay, Minnesota and Pittsburgh that might no longer be able to support a team. This argument makes no sense, though. If the Pirates wanted to move to Washington, D.C., it would be a sign that there were more baseball fans in the D.C. area than in the Pittsburgh area. In other words, there would be more “neglected” fans currently in D.C. than there would be in the vacated Pittsburgh.
As far as I know, a free market baseball economy has never been officially suggested by anyone involved in baseball’s chronic labor disputes. Long late-night debates with my economics-major roommate have proven, however, that it’s just common sense. Baseball has long billed itself as America’s pastime or America’s national sport, and it’s about time it starts embracing America’s economic ideals. I’m not sure that I support an Ayn Randian conservative capitalist system for my country, but I am sure about what’s best for my sport.
