By: Drew Pelto
Another season, another trade deadline, another glimpse into just how messed up Major League Baseball’s financial landscape truly is.
This year’s big buyer: the Texas Rangers, selling off a chunk of their future for a win-now approach after throwing close to a billion dollars at free agents in the past two off-season’s– netting only a 94-loss season in 2022, injuries to big signings Jacob deGrom, Corey Seager, and Nathan Eovaldi, and a razor-thin one-game lead in the West on Monday morning. But is it worth it to give up three of your top ten prospects for a rental of a mid-rotation starter and middle-inning bullpen arm with very average numbers, and a former great who currently has his worst ERA in over a decade? Frankly, they may have to.
Baseball’s solution to losing is simple: throw money at it and hope it will go away. Whereas other sports’ salary caps encourage smart spending and creates systems that allow smaller-market teams to have the ability to compete most years, baseball tends to limit itself to where a few teams will contend nearly every year, while the rest will get a five-year window every two decades.
On Opening Day of 2023, the Mets had the league’s highest payroll, close to eight times that of the lowest in Oakland. No other professional sports league in North America has this problem: the gap between high and low in the NHL and NBA last season was less than two-fold. And in the NFL, the highest spender in Jacksonville only spent 25% more than the lowest in Cleveland in 2022. While spending doesn’t guarantee success as the fourth and fifth place Yankees and Red Sox prove, it certainly makes it much easier to compete. I’m sure Orioles fans are enjoying their current first place seat, but for how long can they keep that together before those bottom two bounce back to the top?
When critics of the game bring up the idea that baseball seems to be dying when compared to the other sports, money seems to be the element that no one wants to touch. They bring up shifts, fun policing, lack of offense, pitch clocks, failure to market its big names. But if you’re a kid in Kansas City, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh, whose team can only compete in a short window every decade or two, what’s there to keep you interested when that window closes?
I grew up a Cleveland Indians fan in the 1990s. The years of 1994 to 1999 were great, making the playoffs every year. And then in 2000 I turned 16: the Indians missed the playoffs and despite not having an NHL team, hockey got the majority of my attention for the next decade-plus. The Indians’ saw homegrown talents like Albert Belle, Manny Ramirez, and Jim Thome chase bigger paydays elsewhere. The minor league system was depleted of the likes of future All-Stars Sean Casey and Richie Sexson in an attempt to bolster the team around those stars. And in an effort to win before those stars left, they overpaid to pull in the likes of Roberto Alomar, Chuck Finley, and Jack McDowell. Alomar, Finley, and the homegrown Bartolo Colon were all shipped out in cost-cutting measures.
It wasn’t until 2007 that the team got my attention again. It was homegrown talent that built it, and its departure quickly lost me again. Back-to-back Cy Young winners– one drafted and developed, one acquired in a trade for a drafted-and-developed player– and a three-time All-Star catcher, all traded away for almost nothing because yet again, they couldn’t afford to keep them. The returns never panned out and again, my attention moved elsewhere for the remainder of the decade.
As the Rangers seem to have discovered now after fifty years of futility, there is no benefit to growing your own talent. Players will always chase the big payday and teams have to overpay to keep those players. It’s easy for the Mets, Yankees, and Dodgers to throw $15 million dollars a year at multiple players each. The Diamondbacks, Pirates, and Mariners lack the ability to do it with even one.
Think back to 2008: it was clear the Indians would be unable to re-sign reigning Cy Young Award winner C.C. Sabathia. The Milwaukee Brewers were looking for that push to get them through a crowded N.L. Central and traded their future to get him. Ultimately, three of the four prospects didn’t pan out for the Tribe, Sabathia pushed the Brew Crew to the playoffs but only a first-round exit before they too were unable to re-sign him. The Brewers would only make the playoffs one more time in the ensuing nine seasons, the Indians got in once in the next seven, and as usual the big-market Yankees ended up the winners, swooping in to give Sabathia over $200M over the next decade, getting a 2009 World Series victory in the process.
And so, you now have a Rangers’ team that has thrown out close to a billion dollars and three of their top prospects just to have a chance. What happens if it doesn’t pan out? How long until the fire sale? Even if they win it all in 2023, will it be worth it? Outside of their 2003 anomaly, how have the Marlins looked since they made similar moves in 1997?
Meanwhile, Cleveland scooped up a reclamation project, is talking about trading yet another top player in Shane Bieber in the coming winter and hasn’t been in the market for a significant free agent in years aside from paying too much for Josh Bell’s .711 OPS. So far, they trail by half a game in a division whose leader would trail the cellar dwellers of the East and only be above Oakland in the West.
I find myself asking why: why have a 30-team league when only ten have the ability to compete and spend year in and year out and the other 20 have to hope like hell things pan out from drafted-and-developed players and scrap-heap free agent plugins for a short window of potential? Why bother growing talent in the minors when you won’t be able to keep it inside this broken system? Why repeatedly struggle to meaningless third-place mediocrity, instead of tanking for top prospects– thus restarting the cycle of draft, develop, and watch them leave?
And why are so many small-market fans willing to just shrug, accept it, even defend it, when this problem of inequity doesn’t seem to plague the other three major sports?
Smile and eat the manure, fellow peasants. You know you’ll keep watching. Maybe we’ll get our turn next year (fat chance).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Drew Pelto has seen more bad baseball than almost anyone as a fan of the Cleveland Guardians/Indians and Montreal Expos who lives within shouting distance of the Texas Rangers. His writing has been featured in numerous online and print publications in addition to contributing to Nine-Inning Know-It-All. At press time, he was trying not to melt living in North Texas with his wife and two cats.