Don't get upset; it's for the good of the game

Maybe Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa did save baseball last season. Maybe all baseball needed was a few months of intense interest in home runs--which, of course, was supplied by the McGwire-Sosa battle--to get back the fans. But some folks claim there's no reason to believe the game is back, because it remains dominated by the teams with the most money and small-revenue teams don't have a chance to compete.

To protest the discrepancies between the rich teams and the poor ones, more than 2,500 Royals fans staged a walkout during their team's game with the Yankees last Friday. They littered the warning track in left field with fake dollar bills and then left in the top of the fourth inning, taping paper skull and crossbones that read "Small markets are dying" to their seats.

Well, then, please, somebody pull the plug. This high-brow league doesn't have time to worry about the finances of its poverty-stricken members. I hear the Southern League is looking for a new team to capture the Kansas City market. So, make do with what you have, find a way to spend more money or get out.

Baseball in the '90s has been lambasted by the false proclamation that an unbalanced playing field is destroying the game. That's not tree. This overblown concern about competitive balance is hurting the game more than the balance issue.

Sure, it would be great to see the balance that was displayed in the '80s, when nine different teams won the World Series (the Dodgers won twice) and all but five teams made the playoffs. But that was a fluke. That was the first full decade of free agency, so it's amazing there was any balance.

Besides, baseball always has had its so-called problems with competitive balance. The Golden Age of baseball, when men were men, the game was grand and Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle played together in the same outfield, run from 1947 to '57 and often is referred to as the game's zenith. In those 11 years, the Yankees won the World Series eight times and participated in every Series but 1947.

Hardly a balance of power.

But if folks are convinced the major leagues need to become more balanced, that there shouldn't be such a large gap between the haves and have-nots, there appear to be two viable options.

The first would be to downsize, by dropping six teams. Of all the things that are said to be hurting baseball, the overpopulation of Class AAA talent at the major league level is one of the main offenders. These are players who would have been stuck in Class AA in the '70s and never would have set foot on a minor league field in the '50s.

The major leagues easily could trim to 24 teams, allowing them to go back to four divisions and four playoff berths and putting an end to the dreadful wild card.

Combine the A's and Giants, White Sox and Cubs and Devil Rays and Marlins. Chicago and southern California rarely have shown they deserve two teams, and Florida hasn't given much evidence it ever will. Next, get rid of the Royals, Twins and Expos, all of whom are in a perpetual rebuilding phase and looking for new homes.

The second solution would involve the owners and players reaching an agreement that would be good for baseball. In a perfect world, the players union and ownership would devise a scheme where the players would agree to a salary cap and the owners to revenue sharing. This would limit how much a player could make and cut back on the big-money teams' profits, much like the system in the NBA.

But because that's a long shot similar to the Expos and Royals meeting in this year's World Series, the best way to achieve a "competitive balance" appears to be addition by subtraction.

Blue men in blue

Umpires union chief Richie Phillips loves the limelight, but his latest attempts to garner sympathy for the plight of the umpires have accomplished just the opposite.

Phillips is on a one-man crusade to portray baseball ownership as unreasonable for trying to get the umpires to call a higher, more uniform strike zone, and went off again last week when he found out club officials have been asked to monitor the performance of strike/ball calls at their stadiums.

He likened the directive to "Big Brother" staring down at the umpires, attempting to put a totalitarian spin on the desire of the owners to streamline the rules and speed up the games.

Instead, he again portrayed the umpires as petty and unreasonable. The umpires aren't paid to make the rules. They are paid to enforce them.

Prediction: The owners will lock out the umpires during the upcoming collective bargaining period, and--if Phillips isn't careful--no one will care. -PS.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Sporting News Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning