North Shore Nine

Imagine the year is 2010 once more, and NBA superstar Lebron James has just hit free agency after numerous failures at a championship in Cleveland. The best basketball player on the planet is currently available for every single team to sign. And instead of “The Decision” where Lebron is choosing from about 16-17 teams, only the Miami Heat, New York Knicks, and Los Angeles Lakers even bother putting in a bid for his services. Every NBA fan would be scratching their heads and yelling that their favorite team should be ashamed of themselves. Yet, this just happened in baseball and nobody even batted an eye. Even when you take out the media circus, the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes were an embarrassing indictment of Major League Baseball. The best player you or I are going to see in our lifetimes was available, a literal cash dispenser that can help propel anyone into World Series contention. Every team knows this, there were 2, maybe 3 teams even remotely interested in acquiring him. This is not healthy, but this is the way MLB wants baseball to be.

Shohei Ohtani is not to blame here, he wanted to be where he had a chance to always compete for the title and to be paid like the best player of the 21st century and he accomplished this goal. Instead, my words are directed toward the owners of MLB teams who have let baseball get this imbalanced because of personal financial gain. Ohtani is set to make 70 million a year for the next decade, which is an obscene amount of wealth. So obscene that he is currently making more money than 6 entire MLB teams spend on their entire payroll, with 2 others barely over the 70 million threshold. The Athletics, Orioles, Pirates, Reds, Brewers, Marlins, Royals, and Guardians all insist that they simply cannot spend large sums of money and that baseball is unfair.

No one believes these owners of course. While no one will ever open their books to the public, you can simply see with your own two eyes that these owners see their team as nothing but a cash cow to milk. TV deals are reaching record highs, revenue sharing is over $100 million, attendance is up league-wide for basically everyone besides Oakland who actively pushed fans out the door, and MLB reports record levels of revenue every single year. There has never been more cash to throw around in the history of baseball.

One argument you will see thrown around is that baseball is completely unfair and that baseball needs a salary cap because the Dodgers can spend more on one player than a bunch of teams can spend in general. Now, is there some real financial inequality between baseball teams? Without a doubt, the Pirates will never get the TV deal the Dodgers get. Pittsburgh cannot generate the attendance or money that the Yankees can. And unlike the NFL, the money made from viewership deals is not equally distributed league-wide. But baseball, as it stands, is currently designed so that these owners can sit back and collect tens of millions off of these teams while hard-working people pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a year to support said team. We should not and cannot give these owners a pass just because there are financial disparities in baseball. Could it be more fair? Of course. Even as things stand there is zero reason that every team cannot run a $140 million payroll every single season. Every time you yell at the league for not having a salary cap, you are giving owners like Bob Nutting and John Fisher excuses that they do not deserve and that they can hide behind. It would do well to remember that these owners have actively opposed any salary cap and floor because the current system lets them cut corners and pocket as much cash as possible. The lack of a cap is not the reason that the Pirates might view Carlos Santana as too expensive this offseason, Bob Nutting is the reason. MLB actively encourages teams to act like this, because the league is not looking out for the well-being of the league. It is looking out for the interests of all owners.

There is a bit of a symbiotic relationship going on with the MLB owners, as the current system benefits everyone within the boys’ club. With no salary cap and floor system there is absolutely 0 incentive for owners to spend if they don’t want to. No one will stop them or even care if a team like the Orioles wants to run a $40 million payroll. No one cares that Ohtani’s contract equals what the Pirates have spent in payroll over the last decade. There’s good reason for this, as many of the spending owners like that they have access to a free playoff berth in many years simply because they extend their good players and pay big bucks in free agency for others. You occasionally run into an owner like new Mets owner Steve Cohen or the late Peter Seidler who actively despised having to write checks to teams crying poor, but for the most part the owners who care are extremely happy with this arrangement. Why wouldn’t they be? These owners understand that investment into their club brings in playoff revenue, increased fan interest, better TV deals, and ultimately more money. They get to do this practically unopposed by 1/3 of the league who thinks spending any money is beneath them. You’ll occasionally get a quote from Hal Steinbrenner calling for a cap and floor but ultimately the interests of every owner are protected, so we will not see the change we all deserve. This all comes from a lack of caring, and the Ohtani saga showed that no one actually cares about 90% of the league.

As Pirates fans, we already know that the league doesn’t really care about us. To the ghouls in the MLB offices, teams like the Pirates are simply organizations that exist so that the Dodgers, Cubs, and Yankees of the world have someone to play. If they actually cared about teams like the Pirates or Athletics, these cheap owners would’ve been shown the door years ago by force. But with the Shohei Ohtani free agency decision over, it has become crystal clear that the league doesn’t even care about some of their big market teams. The Toronto Blue Jays play in one of the biggest markets in the league and have the backing of an entire country. Despite this, we had not one but two articles written by national baseball writers Ken Rosenthal and Jon Heyman; trying to explain why it’s better that Ohtani went to a perennial powerhouse instead of letting a new exciting team rise up to baseball’s higher echelons. Again, Ohtani is completely free to have wanted to play for the Dodgers, but the treatment of even the second-tier large-market teams should wake everyone up about how MLB feels about the vast majority of the league. Unless you are the Dodgers, Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Braves, Cubs, or Astros, MLB doesn’t care about your team. Let’s look at some of the quotes in these articles to prove my point. First up, Jon Heyman from an op-ed in the New York Post.

No offense to the Toronto Blue Jays, rumored in the final days to be making progress, but this is much better for Major League Baseball. I know I will be accused of being an American but the Dodgers are a storied franchise, the franchise of Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax and Vin Scully. Baseball will be better for it.

Next up, Ken Rosenthal writing in The Athletic. (Note that The Athletic requires a paid subscription to read the entire article.)

Fans of the losing bidders — the Cubs, Giants and most of all, the Blue Jays — will not want to hear this. Fans of teams in the game’s smallest markets will want to hear it even less. But Ohtani’s choice of the Dodgers, who play in the nation’s second-largest media market, only enhances his stature, and that of his sport.

He now owns the richest deal in sports, even if the massive deferrals reduce the present-day value of his contract. He will be playing for the game’s most successful regular-season franchise over the past decade, but one that has not won a World Series in a full season since 1988. All eyes will be on him, even those of casual fans.

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but this is not a coincidence that these 2 articles were released within 24 hours of each other. MLB wants you to believe that the large market teams getting all the good players is what baseball needs. If you happened to commit the mortal sin of being born outside of LA, New York, Boston, or Houston, MLB and its people would like you to go away because you’re simply not important to them. They will gaslight you to protect this system, and the most offensive part of all is that they will try to convince you that the same teams being the best all the time is what makes for good storylines. Ken Rosenthal says as much later in his Athletic article.

Another thing: Ohtani’s choice will only enhance the David and Goliath aspect of the sport, and that is not a bad outcome. Again, fans in smaller markets will not want to hear it. But few things should be more satisfying to those fans than seeing their teams knock off one of the big-money behemoths. And it happens.

This line filled me with rage when I first read it. I think I can confidently say that not a single solitary soul in Pittsburgh or any of the similar markets would rather be the plucky underdog Pirates over the dominating dynasties of the 2000s Penguins and Steelers. The sheer disconnect from reality that is on display is staggering. No one enjoys watching the Pirates fail to sign anyone to a long-term free-agent deal since 2017. No one enjoys sitting through countless rebuilds and tanking so that Nutting can pocket money. No one enjoys watching Josh VanMeter play baseball. The underdog story that Ken is promoting has completely destroyed the trust and enjoyment that Pittsburgh used to have in the Pirates. This long and storied franchise has been reduced to rubble under the weight of the current system that tells them they’re not important and they should tank until the end of time. PNC Park is empty most nights because ownership is bleeding people dry of the baseball franchise I have spent 21 years rooting for. It makes it even worse to know that this is how the league wants it to be and knows it will still make money off of us poor saps who just love the Pirates.

There will be no fundamental change to baseball because everyone in charge of the league thinks the way it’s chugging along is fine. The Athletics leaving Oakland? Who cares. Now we have a new Las Vegas market. The Pirates having 4 winning seasons since 1993? Who cares. Just keep pocketing the money, Bob. The worst part is that they keep being justified with their actions, as the money in baseball continues to grow every single year. The way this is continuing there’s a genuine possibility that the Pittsburgh Pirates won’t exist in the upcoming decades. And when the blame is thrown on the fans for not supporting a terrible product, just remember that MLB thinks you’re worth nothing and that you should start cheering for the Dodgers.