CBA Science Fiction: MLB Y3K

With the collective bargaining agreement scheduled to expire on December 19th this year, we can expect to start hearing some restructuring proposals for the league. Everything from contraction to salary caps, arbitration to all-star games to the post season will be on the table, and in the end the face of the game for the next 5+ years will be determined. So this is the time to think about changes that could make this great game even better (or in the owners case, more profitable), and I’ve come up with a few possibilities.

Think of this as baseball science fiction, and remember what seems crazy today is ho hum tomorrow.

Divisions based on team salary

It’s safe to say that with the current set up, the Devil Rays will never make the playoffs, ever. To me, something’s wrong with the system if you can say that with any assurance whatsoever, and one way to change that would be to shake up the divisions each year based on each team's starting salary. Each league would still have three divisions and a wild card, but the divisions would be low salary, mid salary, and high salary, rather than based loosely on region.

Benefit: with the unbalanced schedule already in place, teams would get to play more even competition throughout the year, more teams would get to fight for the playoffs, and no one would be out of it before the season started because of market size. The playoffs then will be even more fun, just like the NCAA basketball tournament, because every year you’d have the chance for a serious underdog from the low salary division.

Drawbacks: the first thing that people will think of is travel, but with a little fore thought I don’t think it would be that much worse than travel used to be in the old days. A flight from Boston to Chicago today is no longer than a flight to Tampa Bay, and neither are as bad as a train ride from Boston to D.C. and ballplayers used to do that all the time. The biggest issue to me would be the loss of some rivalries (though I think it’s safe to say that NY and Boston would still be in the same division) and generally a lack of consistency year to year in the game.

Other considerations: Some teams would maneuver to be in the lowest division possible, and that could affect free agent signings and salary structures, but that would mostly just be another thing for bloggers to talk about, I don’t think it would really make that much of a difference.

The Divisions this year would look like this:

All incentive contracts and variable ticket prices

Hopefully you didn’t think that last idea was too crazy, ‘cause this one gets a lot hairier. It’s really two ideas that are sort of complimentary as you’ll see. The first part is that all players earn a fixed starting salary based on nothing but service time. A range of something like $.3 mil for rookies to $2 mil for 10 year vets. Players would then negotiate the value and type of incentives with the team. Because final team salary would not be determined until the end of the season, ticket prices would fluctuate based on what percentage of incentives a team’s players were getting. Underperforming teams' ticket prices would go down, and vice versa.

Benefit: this one is really for the fans. It sucks when the guy you’re paying $10 mil tanks it or gets hurt, and it sucks when you’re team tanks and they still want lots of money to see the games, which leads to low attendance and lack of fan interest and loyalty. With this structure, a player who kicks butt gets paid for it (maybe an “incentive” to kick more butt) and a player who has a bad season doesn’t (unless you think making hundreds of thousands+ to suck at baseball isn’t that bad of a deal, like me).

Fans then feel like they’re getting their money’s worth, and that there is some sort of accountability on their team. Also, if someone budgeted to make $15 mil goes down in spring training, they'd still get they're base salary, but the team could try to acquire someone at the deadline with the saved money.

The players would get taken care of, because really this wouldn’t be that big of a change in 90% of the cases. Pujols’ agent could negotiate so if his client has a normal MVP type year, he’d make his normal $10+ mil. A lesser player wouldn’t be able to negotiate rates like that because Pujols is bonafide, where as guys like Chris Shelton are not. Shelton might make a few mil with an amazing rookie season rather than half a mil, but nowhere close to what the stars would get. Free agents would be swayed by the value and structure of incentives rather than overall salary.

If the whole team is doing well, then ticket prices might go up some to cover all of their incentives, but people love to see their team win, and wouldn’t feel bad paying a few bucks more as a reward for great baseball. If a team isn’t coming close to reaching most of it’s incentives, the team could lower prices to keep fans coming to the ballpark despite a bad season. So the owners would do fine as well.

Drawbacks: an arrangement like this has a few obvious problems that I can see. First it’s confusing, and generally, the more complex things are the easier they are to poke holes in. Maybe some team offers it’s incentives for the first three games played: you get a third of your salary for the first game, a third for the second, etc. Basically a guaranteed contract like we have now. Then other teams might have to start offering that too to compete and the whole thing goes to hell.

The other problem is that it might bring money into the game too much. Players like to get their contract signed and move on, concentrate on playing. If each HR was a check, they might change their approach, and take themselves out of the zone.

Additional considerations: this is really the ultimate infusion of a market economy into the sport, where players are paid for performance and fans pay more for a better product. As such, it opens up the possibility of an actual baseball ticket futures market, where people could buy a team’s tickets for a future date on an exchange at a certain price, with the hope that the ticket prices would be higher by the time that date rolled around and they’d be able to sell them for a profit, like a commodity. Just a thought for you financial professionals out there.

So those are a few of my thoughts. Comment away on those, and add more of your own, you never know what the next wild card is going to be.