It's Thursday August 14, 2014. A huge day for MLB. Today the owners will pick a new Commissioner of Baseball, and the reign of Bud Selig will be over in January. So Yinzers, what do you think? Any advice for the new guy?
I was never a Selig fan myself. In my opinion, he was to easy going when it came to discipline (Anyone remember the Roberto Alomar spitting incident?) and he turned a blind eye to performance enhancing drugs until the media and the public made him take action. He always seemed to want to make everyone happy if he could, not the trait of a good leader. The current war between the Washington Nationals and the Baltimore Orioles over television fees is a perfect example. Selig has been useless throughout the entire mess.
On the other side of the coin, people argue that Selig was a huge asset to baseball. He instituted inter-league play, revenue sharing, the Division Series, Wild Card play, and drug testing. He also led the league out of a devastating strike.
But was he a friend of the small market team even though he owned one? I'm not sure. The Yankees and Red Sox always seems to get what they wanted. While teams like Pittsburgh had to struggle.
This is part of the reason why I don't want Tom Werner, Chairman of the Red Sox, to be the new Commish. And Bud never came close to even trying to institute a salary cap program similar to the one that benefited the NFL and NHL.
So what's your opinion? Any advice? How will this affect our Buccos? And who should be the new commish?
I actually think Werner would be a more favorable choice for the Pirates than Manfred who appears to be the heavy favorite. Selig wasn't a terrible commissioner he has his some major faults and while he didn't push for a salary cap the league has seen an increase of revenue sharing and a luxury tax under his watch and that is something. Those two things have greatly helped the Pirates. I'm actually hoping for a stalemate today so the owners have to go out and find someone else. The Red Sox are a big market team but they seem to grasp the small market approach as well. They were big spenders in the draft before the limits were placed and they work on having a high ranking farm system.
One other point you mention is the NFL's salary cap and while that is a fair point I think its safe to say what helps that league the most is that a large portion of its revenue comes via its national television contract. That is evenly split amongst all teams just like it is in the MLB. In order to achieve the same levels in baseball a salary cap would be a far less important aspect than having teams evenly distribute their LOCAL TV contracts which in a lot of cases dwarfs what some team gets from the national deal. I mean what good would a 150 million dollar cap be if only 10-12 teams could reach it?
You make some valid points. As you could probably tell from my post, I was always lukewarm on Selig. It is mainly due to his lack of effort on the salary cap. In my comparison to the NFL, I was thinking more towards the even distribution of talent to which it led. It made the league much more fun to watch and forced teams to build more from scratch than from free agency. You can't go out and buy a team anymore, no matter how hard Dan Snyder tries.
Your point of splitting the local contracts may achieve the same result. But I feel it would still require some sort of cap regulation.
And I may be misjudging Werner,with emphasis on may be.I am always cautious when a large market team has a chance to take control of a league.
