America’s Past Pastime?

The boys of summer, America’s professional baseball players, have a rough schedule of 162 regular season games every year. For some, they get additional games in the playoffs. But baseball players can make a whole lot of money these days, because there is no salary cap per se in Major League Baseball. Instead, there is a luxury tax assessed against the offending team – a fine that is paid to the league for various purposes – to the extent that the payroll goes over a certain limit – $178 million per team in 2011. “A team that goes over the luxury tax cap for the first time in a five-year period pays a penalty of 22.5% of the amount they were over the cap, second-time violators pay a 30% penalty, and teams that exceed the limit three or more times pay a 40% penalty.” Wikipedia.

For all practical purposes, this luxury assessment appears to be really a tax on the New York Yankees, who have such a lucrative television contract (better than any other team in the MLB by far) that they don’t care. “As of the 2009 season, only the Boston Red Sox, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, the Detroit Tigers, and the New York Yankees have paid any luxury tax; the Yankees have contributed to over 95% ($164.1 million) of tax payments, and have been subject to six of the eleven occasions the tax has been implemented.” Wikipedia.

If you don’t have a fat payroll, the odds of moving into the playoffs, vying for a Pennant or the World Series, drop like a stone. If you have the bucks to buy the stars, the odds skyrocket. Although the last team to win the Series, the 2010 San Francisco Giants, held their payroll to under $100 million in the year of their victory, a “team with a $100 million plus payroll has won the World Series three times: the 2009 Yankees, and the 2004 and 2007 Red Sox; however, $100 million plus payrolls have only existed since 2000… [T]he New York Yankees having consistently the highest salary in baseball and have won approximately a quarter of all world series… The highest paid player in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the 2010 season was New York Yankees' third baseman Alex Rodriguez with an annual salary of $33,000,000, nearly $9 million more than the second-highest paid player, his teammate CC Sabathia.” Wikipedia. Wow!

Hmmm…. Must mean that baseball must be increasingly popular to support all those soaring salaries… Not exactly. Attendance is falling in many arenas, and once great teams are struggling for a litany of reasons. The Los Angeles Dodgers, mired in debt, are watching their payroll being slashed and ticket prices soaring (with huge issues from a recent near-fatal beating of an SF Giants fan) as owners Frank and Jamie McCourt battle in divorce court. Fans are angry, and many are boycotting Chavez Ravine because they believe McCourt needs to go. Apparently, MLB commissioner Bud Selig agrees: on April 20^th, the league took over the team.

If you’re winning, attendance doesn’t suffer that much. But while the Yankees seem to have purchased their attendance in the playoffs virtually every year, things aren’t so rosy for the neighboring Mets who came off of a losing season in 2010… and saw attendance fall over 17% last season. They dropped their average ticket price 14% for the 2011 season to spur attendance at a time when the vestiges of the recession linger seemingly interminably.

Things are even worse in some of the stadia in the rust belt. The Cleveland Indians started this season like gangbusters… well… if winning games is your measure of success. The rows and rows of empty seats tell a different story. Yeah, we can laugh at the Pittsburgh Pirates– never willing to spend on players – with a concomitant perpetual empty (and new!) stadium (pictured above), but the malaise that seems to be Pittsburgh’s permanent resident is beginning to infect MLB teams all over the United States: “USA Today reports that six teams have already had the worst single-game attendance in their stadiums’ history. It was 13,000 in Atlanta, 12,000 in Seattle, fewer than 9,000 in Pittsburgh. The Yankees and Cubs have had uncharacteristically huge expanses of empty seats. And in Cleveland, where the team has been surprisingly hot and hopeful, six games have already drawn fewer than 10,000 fans.” AOL.sportingnews.com, April 15^th.

While the national statistics show a decline of about 4% this year over last, the numbers are moving in the wrong direction for a sport where payrolls are definitely on the rise. Many folks are just plain angry at the level of pay accorded to the top players… no longer the squeaky-clean athlete heroes of the recent past. Was it the Barry Bonds trial, which placed the pervasive use of steroids before the American public even though the conviction was for obstruction of justice? Slugger Manny Ramirez’s “retirement” from the sport rather than face league discipline for a purported steroid violation? Is it just too many games? Too many other choices? Lingering memories from a lost season in the 232-day strike during the 1994-95 season? What?

I’m Peter Dekom, and as a baseball fan, the money thang does indeed seem to be intruding on the sportsmanlike competition thang.