Major League Baseball’s Small Market Issue
Major League Baseball is unlike any of the other three major North American sports leagues.
It’s no secret that large markets like New York and Los Angeles attract the biggest star names in sports, but nowhere is it worse than in baseball. With teams not restricted to a salary cap, owners can get greedy and pay star free agents ridiculous sums of money every offseason with no true repercussions.
In a vacuum this should be a huge concern for the competitive nature of the game. How is a team like the Miami Marlins, worth less than a billion dollars according to Forbes, able to prevent losing star players when teams like the New York Yankees are worth six times that and can sign anyone they want? It’s not like most players are going to take a huge discount, even if they’re as loyal as can be.
Even with teams profiting every year, the larger, more valuable teams always win out in the end.
“Anyone who quotes profits of a baseball club is missing the point,” said Paul Beeston, MLB president, according to CBSSports. “Under generally accepted accounting principles, I can turn a $4 million profit into a $2 million loss, and I can get every national accounting firm to agree with me.”
It’s worth noting that just because a team is in a small market doesn’t mean they’re not worth a lot of money. A lot of a team’s value comes from success and historical impact, which is why the St. Louis Cardinals are in the 19th biggest U.S. market but are the seventh most valuable franchise in the league.
With all that being said, to suggest that small-market teams simply have no chance of competing is a victim’s mindset to have. A perfect example of a team working within their boundaries is the 2002 Oakland Athletics, the subject of the 2011 film Moneyball. In the movie, general manager Billy Beane, portrayed by Brad Pitt, took a different approach at player evaluations and valued characteristics like on-base percentage aside from the eye-test.
The team shocked everyone and won 103 games and setting an American League record winning 20 straight games, but Beane believed that it would be all for naught had the Athletics not won the World Series.
“If we don’t win the last game of the series, they’ll dismiss us,” Beane told assistant GM Peter Brand, portrayed by Jonah Hill. “Any other team wins the world series, good for them… But if we win, on our budget with this team, we’ll change the game. And that’s what I want, I want it to mean something.”
While the Athletics ultimately lost to the Minnesota Twins in the ALDS, Beane was wrong. Teams did start to take his approach to finding the best value players. In fact, everyone did, including the big teams.
All of a sudden it was the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees of the world that were making the smart value signing while still outbidding smaller clubs. Moneyball was being used by the teams with the most money to burn, defeating its purpose.
“The problem with sabermetrics is that it still favors big budget teams,” wrote John Brocklebank of Samford University. “Three of the most prominent teams that have adopted the “Moneyball” approach are the Cubs, the Astros and the Red Sox. Since these teams have much bigger budgets, they are able to buy the statistics that they want.”
The trend started to get out of hand in the 2010s, as small teams would develop stars with this mentality, only for them to get swooped up by the rich clubs. That’s how Giancarlo Stanton goes from the Marlins to the Yankees, Eric Hosmer goes from a beloved Kansas City Royal to a enormous contract on the San Diego Padres and Evan Longoria switches from the best Tampa Bay Ray ever to just another guy on the San Francisco Giants. It seemed like poor teams were resigned to their fate.
Why else would Derek Jeter take over the Marlins just to trade away three young stars? Within one offseason, he traded Stanton, who had just won NL MVP, to the Yankees for an unimpressive haul. He then flipped Marcell Ozuna, who had hit 43 home runs, to the Cardinals for Sandy Alcantara, which ended up being a good trade. After that, Christian Yelich was flipped to Milwaukee where he’d win 2018 NL MVP and likely would’ve repeated in 2019 if not for a fractured knee cap.
Tanking hasn’t stopped, as the Baltimore Orioles, Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies, Oakland Athletics and Cincinnati Reds have all underwent firesales in the past half-decade. Four of these five teams had home-grown stars that were traded away with no plan of resigning. The most egregious of these would be the Rockies, who had a superstar in 3B Nolan Arenado that they signed to a 8-year, $260 million deal with a player opt-out after 2021. One would think that a player would negotiate for the opt-out, but it was Rockies GM Jeff Bridich who called for it. Why is that?
They never fully intended to have Arenado for a full eight years, just three. This was a way to look competitive by signing a deal, only to have an excuse for when Arenado inevitably left. Instead, the process was sped up to where the Rockies traded Arenado and a ludicrous $50 million to St. Louis.
“Just half a decade after Colorado executed essentially the same move with Troy Tulowitzki — albeit for a better prospect package — this is all the more shameful because of what it means for the club’s fans,” wrote Zach Kram of the Ringer. “The Rockies have been in the top 10 in annual attendance in the past three seasons attendance was allowed, and it wasn’t too long ago that their fans thought they might cheer for Arenado for the rest of his potentially Hall of Fame career.”
It’s moves like these that put a damning black eye over the sport itself. With labor disputes getting resolved with no salary cap being implemented, who’s to say that we won’t continue seeing more of this in the future? For the betterment, something has to be done.
