Baseball avoided any chance of a lockout with their new CBA, but they continue to neglact the problems that most hurt the sport

CHRIS KNEPLEY

In case you missed it, last week, MLB commissioner Bud Selig took time from his busy offseason schedule of kicking puppies and harvesting the organs of unborn children to announce that MLB and the players union have come to an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement.

The new agreement will ensure 20 consecutive (uninterrupted) years of labor peace in Major League Baseball (after the new deal expires). Pretty amazing when you consider how impossible that would have sounded during the 90’s when the relationship between the two sides were tumultuous to say the least.

This new collective bargaining agreement is highlighted by a few changes and tweaks to the game of professional baseball.

- There will now be two wild cards in each league instead of just one. The two wild card teams will play at the end of the regular season in a one game, winner take all steel caged death match to decide which team is going to get their asses handed to them by the Yankees and Phillies, respectively.

Other highlights to the CBA include:
-  new blood testing measures for human growth hormone
-  the elimination of smokeless tobacco from player interviews
-  the expansion of instant replay to include trapped balls (and I’m not talking about what happens to Big Papi when he slides into 2^nd base, because nobody wants to see that).

The biggest issue, however that Major League Baseball has again, and continues to fail to address is the problem of competitive balance between the big market “haves” and the small market “have not’s.”

Year after year it seems like the big market clubs snatch up on the premium free agents while the small market teams are left to wallow in mediocrity until they can develop their own talent, and make a run at the playoffs for 3-4 seasons (until they are forced to let their home grown talent walk away as a free agents and join the big market teams that can afford to pay for premium talent).

Take Prince Fielder of the Milwaukee Brewers, for example. The small market Brewers can’t afford to pay what it will cost to keep Fielder and it has been speculated that he could end up in a large market like Chicago or Texas while the Brewers are left with nothing but a draft pick as compensation.

MLB seemingly tried to help fix this issue a few seasons back when it instituted a luxury ax on the teams that would spend over a certain salary threshold.  However to date, the only teams that have ever had to pay into the luxury tax are the Yankees and the Red Sox, who can more than afford to throw some extra cash down the toilet to ensure a winning team.

This new collective bargaining agreement does nothing at all to help small market teams and has actually hindered their abilities to be competitive by placing new restrictions on signing players out of the draft. The new rule states that teams will be penalized for paying a drafted player more than 15 percent over MLB’s recommended bonus for their particular slot. Any team who happens to pay more than the 15 percent barrier not only will have to pay the slot difference in the form of a luxury tax, but they will also lose their top two picks in the next year’s draft.

On the surface, this rule seems like it would hurt the big market teams that spend much ore all around than small market teams.  However, over the past decade or so, the smaller market teams are actually the one who are investing more in the draft and internationally than the big market teams are. Small market teams have found that it is more cost effective in the long-term to take the 3-5 million dollars a season they would be paying to a mediocre veteran outfielder hitting .260 with 15-20 home runs and instead use that money to lure a top draft pick to sign with their organization.

Now, with this penalty that teams will incur, small market teams may be less willing to draft top amateur talent if they know it is going to cost them double the difference in the slot and their top two picks the next season. Large market teams like the Yankees or Red Sox, who normally draft late in the 1^st round, could see top talent fall in their laps and take a player who they would normally lose out on at the cost of a little more cash and a late first and second round pick next year.

The penalty for this rule hurts small market teams like Rays, Pirates, and Royals much, much, more than it does the medium to large market teams. Teams that already had to play the draft to perfection for 3-5 years just to make a run at the playoffs now will have a much harder time putting everything in place in order to be semi-competitive.

Until baseball takes a note from the NFL and NBA and decides to actually institute a salary cap that will benefit all teams equally, then there’s no hope for small market teams to ever be competitive for more than 5 years at a time. Time and time again will you see franchise caliber players like Prince Fielder walking away to a Chicago or Texas in order to cash in, while teams like the Brewers dig through the bargain bins of the free agent market to try to fill 300 pound production holes in the middle of their lineups. It’s time for Bud Selig and the players association to wake up and finally realize that what’s good for the Yankees, isn’t always what’s good for Major League Baseball as a whole.

Photo: Getty

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