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| Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press |
I am not going to write an article about why you should like Bob Nutting. I would never. For a long time I did defend how the Pirates operate based on the financial structure of Major League Baseball, but even that seems fruitless anymore.
However, don’t side with the players in the current CBA negotiations because you are blinded by your hatred for the Pittsburgh Pirates owner.
As Pirate fans, what the players are fighting against is not in
your best interest. The best interest of
a Pirate fan is for the league our Buccos compete in to be structured in
the same way as the leagues that our beloved, and much more successful,
Penguins and Steelers get to participate in.
That structure includes a salary cap and a salary floor. In fact, they don’t just include them, they
are reliant upon them.
A salary cap allows for teams that generate less revenue to pursue
the best talent of the sport on an even playing field with teams that generate more
revenue. This eliminates advantages simply because a team plays home games and are televised in a more populated area. The salary floor then forces those teams that generate less
revenue to allocate more of it to team payroll. A real win-win honestly.
This is where I think most of the confusion around Major
League Baseball is generated. Most fans seemingly believe that having a rich owner allows
for teams to pay more to players. With
the idea also being that all owners are billionaires so why can’t they just
afford $100 million+ payrolls. However, understand that no owners are investing
their own money into their teams after they purchase them. They
are simply allowing more of the teams' generated annual revenue to go toward payroll.
So while, yes, Bob Nutting is at fault in this regard for
not allowing the teams’ revenue to be allocated more to player payroll, the Steinbrenners
are not investing their own personal savings into the New York Yankees. They are simply allowing more of the Yankees’
generated revenue to be spent on payroll.
Unfortunately, the money generated by the Yankees, Los Angeles
Dodgers, and other larger market teams is exponentially larger than the money
generated by the Pirates. In fact, the Dodgers local television contract is estimated to generate ~$240 million, while the Pirates is estimated to generate ~$40 million annually. That is why
there needs to be a mechanism in place that levels the playing field. That mechanism being a salary cap and floor.
Since we do, in fact, live in a football town, I will put the lack of a salary cap in Steeler terms. The Pittsburgh Steelers will be searching for their next franchise quarterback for this upcoming season. One route they may take is signing a free agent.
Without
the mechanism of a salary cap in the NFL, the Steelers would stand no chance at signing
the best, or even the fifth best, free agent quarterback on the market. Instead, the New York Giants, Chicago Bears, New
York Jets, Dallas Cowboys, or either Los Angeles team would snatch them yet. I know some of those teams don’t need a
quarterback, but it’s just an analogy.
The Rooneys, as beloved as they are in this town,
don’t even like to spend the league average on coaches, so they certainly wouldn’t
be in the upper echelon of player payrolls if the salary cap was not in place to
keep guys like Jerry Jones in check.
So then maybe the Steelers would draft their next franchise quarterback,
right? Good luck keeping him passed his
rookie contract. If this rookie succeeds
in his first few years, and the Miami Dolphins or the San Francisco 49ers want to
sign him to a massive unrestricted free agent contract, bye bye franchise
QB. Pittsburgh doesn’t generate the
television revenue to keep a guy like that passed a rookie contract.
Wait, the television revenue is equal in the NFL? Must be nice. Not so much in baseball. But the television revenue isn’t equal in the NHL, so why can the Penguins compete?
The salary cap. Period.
The mechanism in place so that the Toronto
Maple Leafs and New York Rangers cannot use their gigantic metropolis area to dominate teams like the
Penguins or the Columbus Blue Jackets, among other smaller market teams.
Without the salary cap/floor system, there is no mechanism in
place to level the playing field of the diverse locations that professional
sports team compete in, or keep the average salary of players at a fair
level. The players are the ones fighting
against such mechanism in Major League Baseball. Therefore, just because you hate Bob Nutting,
don’t automatically side with the players.
It is not in your best interest.