We could trot out more charts and bar graphs, but, hey, it’s the holiday season. Balancing the checkbook is enough math for anyone. So instead we’ll simply address baseball’s competitive-balance problem by referring to Game 4 of this year’s playoff series between Oakland and the Yankees.
No team has come closer to ending the Yankees’ stranglehold on the American League than the Athletics. But consider what happened to both teams during and since that game.
With Oakland leading the best-of-five first-round series two games to one, the A’s went for the kill with their No. 4 starter, Corey Lidle, whom they were paying $350,000. The Yankees answered with their No. 4 man, Orlando Hernandez, at $2.05 million.
Lidle got knocked out in the fourth inning, the Yankees won 9-2 to even the series and then beat 24-year-old Mark Mulder the following game to advance. Roger Clemens was on the mound for New York.
For the A’s, the finish was painfully familiar. A year before, the Yankees won a deciding Game 5 in the first round with Andy Pettitte facing Gil Heredia.
With total operating revenue of $75 million, Oakland general manager Billy Beane knew he couldn’t keep his team together long. This winter he has lost his three highest-paid players–Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen–to free agency. So while the Athletics are rightly proud of the homegrown pitching trio of Tim Hudson, Barry Zito and Thornwood’s Mulder, they might not have enough run production to get back to the playoffs.
While the Yankees appeared on their last legs in the World Series, they have used their total operating revenue of $242 million to restock the shelves. Free agents Giambi, Steve Karsay and Rondell White were added along with veterans Robin Ventura and John Vander Wal, who came in trades. New York’s payroll, $118 million at season’s end, will climb even higher. Ditto the odds of anyone overtaking the Yankees in 2002.
“That’s wrong,” Cleveland Indians owner Larry Dolan said of the Yankees’ skyrocketing payroll. “It’s wrong because it endangers the sport as we know it. But I was almost happy about it because the Yankees couldn’t have made the point any better. You don’t see any other teams spending like that. The problem is clear. The solution is not.”
Commissioner Bud Selig believes the solution lies in increasing the percentage of local revenue shared among the teams from about 20 percent to 50 percent while putting a 50 percent tax on all payrolls over a set amount. Selig’s blue-ribbon panel recommended that that threshold be $84 million.
Selig believes there’s so much support within the ranks of ownership for increased revenue sharing that even George Steinbrenner knows he is going to have to open his wallet to help teams on the other end of the economic spectrum, if only to help them reach the minimum payroll likely to be included in a new system.
“I’m telling you, I’ll produce a revenue-sharing vote from the owners anytime, anyplace,” Selig told the Kansas City Star last week. “I promise you. You can hold me to that. But we can’t do it without the players. And they don’t want it.”
The players association must sign off on such a dramatic overhaul, and the union has an appetite for only modest change. According to one management source, the union suggested an increase from 20 percent to 22.5 percent in a counterproposal it made on revenue sharing.
But you wonder how Oakland’s young stars–the Mulders, Zitos and Hudsons–would vote on efforts to improve competitive balance.
Seeing is believing: It was no coincidence that the Pirates insisted that Kip Wells and Sean Lowe be in any deal they made with the White Sox for Todd Ritchie. Wells and Lowe overmatched Pittsburgh in back-to-back games last July at Comiskey Park, allowing one unearned run between them in 16 1/3 innings.
“Wells’ upside is tremendous,” Pirates manager Lloyd McClendon said. “He throws 94 to 96 [m.p.h.] with great sink. He has a plus curveball and a decent changeup. His stuff is overpowering at times.”
Lowe, who made 143 of 159 appearances with the Sox as a reliever, and Josh Fogg will get a chance to join Wells in Pittsburgh’s thin rotation. Fogg, who led the Southern League in innings in 2000, has a 2.31 ERA this winter in Puerto Rico.
“All three of the guys we got in the trade are major-league pitchers with quality arms who can win for us right away,” McClendon said. “Lowe and Wells know how to win in the big leagues, and the reports on Fogg are good. It’s a good deal for us.”
Traveling man: Forgive Pokey Reese if his head is spinning. The man Cincinnati wouldn’t give up to get Ken Griffey Jr. two winters ago was with three teams in two days last week, then wound up unemployed.
Follow along with the bouncing Pokey. On Tuesday, Reese was traded from Cincinnati to Colorado, which then traded him to Boston on Thursday. But with Jose Offerman still owed $8.5 million, the Red Sox–who had just been sold to a group headed by the Florida Marlins’ John Henry–opted to non-tender Reese, making it easier to sign Damon.
The Red Sox may yet sign Reese, but as of now he’s free to go wherever he wants.
Thinking positive: Rangers GM John Hart describes himself as “an optimist” and has proved it by adding John Rocker and Carl Everett in the last two weeks. The next antisocial player on his list may be Hideki Irabu, whom the Rangers are scouting in Puerto Rico. Irabu is 4-2 with a 2.19 ERA for Santurce, including a 12-strikeout game last week.
Now that the Rangers, who non-tendered Opening Day starter Rick Helling, have signed Chan Ho Park to a five-year deal worth $65 million, they may find themselves with another bit of damage control to contend with.
Ivan Rodriguez, who is in the last year of a five-year, $42 million deal, won’t like being the team’s fourth-highest-paid player.
He’s more likely to be traded than re-signed.
