get @baffled

If They Don’t Win It’s A Shame

If you ask many Americans they would tell you that they love baseball. There is some intangible quality to the game that casts it’s appeal across political, religious and economic boundaries. Republicans and Democrats, Catholics and Buddhists, truck drivers and neurosurgeons alike fill seats in ballparks around the country to cheer for their team. From Little League to the Majors, baseball has no shortage of devoted fans, even in times of steroid scandals and lockouts.

With perhaps a little hubris, many would describe baseball as the American game (even though it is played elsewhere with equally great passion). Isn’t that why the winners of the final playoff series between the American and National Leagues is called the “World Champion” and that playoff series the “World Series”?

Perhaps it is quintessentially American, and yet, there is something just a little mysterious about modern Major League Baseball. It isn’t the steroid scandals or whether there should be asterisks next to some statistics in the record books. It isn’t the multi-million dollar salaries paid to men who, although they do it rather well, get to play a game for a living. It isn’t even the fact that a team may know as early as June with a 30 game gap between them and first place in the division that the season is lost, which one might be forgiven for thinking of as a disincentive for fans to keep coming to the ballpark (and yet they will still come).

These are all mysteries, to be sure, but not the biggest mystery of all. The biggest mystery is the fact that this most American of games continues to operate successfully because of “revenue sharing”. The Commissioner’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics released a report in 2000 recommending significant revenue sharing among all Major League teams. During collective bargaining in 2002 a deal was struck in which all teams pay in 31 percent of their local revenues and that pot is split evenly among all 30 teams. In addition, some of MLB’s Central Fund, made up of revenues from sources such as national broadcast contracts, is disproportionately allocated to teams based on their relative revenues, so lower-revenue teams get a bigger piece of that pie.

This doesn’t get talked about a lot. Average baseball fans don’t go to the ballpark and strike up conversations about revenue sharing. Baseball is big (really big) business, and all teams benefit from revenue sharing. One of the key tenets of socialism is the co-operative management of the means of production and allocation of resources. Does that sound anything like how Major League baseball works under revenue sharing? How could this be? How could the most American of games, one of the biggest businesses in the land, share such important characteristics with socialism? Does anyone know about this? More importantly, has anyone told Rush Limbaugh?

I’m off to get a beer and a hot dog. I’ll be right back…