Baseball’s big bucks: Large-market teams open their wallets, and have plenty to show for it

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Large-market teams dominate baseball this year

PHILADELPHIA — Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio thought about the teams in baseball’s final four this year — large-market clubs all — and wondered whether there would room for his franchise anytime soon.

“We don’t know if that’s a trend or just an aberration,” he said. “The disparity among the clubs appears to be widening.”

Baseball’s four league championship series teams were all among the top nine in opening-day payroll this year, led by the top-spending New York Yankees at $201 million. They were joined by the No. 6 Los Angeles Angels ($114 million), No. 7 Philadelphia ($113 million) and the No. 9 Los Angeles Dodgers ($100 million).

No room this year for the little guys.

“It’s certainly trending in the direction,” Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane said. “The big markets are always going to be there. Whether or not they’re the only ones there I guess remains to be seen.”

Just last year, the Tampa Bay Rays won the AL pennant with a $51 million payroll, 28th among the 30 major league clubs. And parity has increased throughout the sport under the 1996-01 and 2002-06 labor contracts along with the current deal, which runs until December 2011.

Since the end of the Yankees’ run of four World Series titles in five years, 23 of the 30 major league teams have made the playoffs from 2001-09, with only Baltimore, Kansas City, Texas and Toronto missing out in the American League, and Cincinnati, Montreal-Washington and Pittsburgh failing to make it in the National. Seven teams have won the World Series in the last eight years, with only the Boston Red Sox taking the title twice.

Increased revenue sharing has helped the small and middle markets, and the luxury tax has slowed spending by the Yankees to some degree.

“We’ve had very good success over the last several years,” said Bob DuPuy, Major League Baseball’s president and chief operating officer. “While it has attracted people’s attention that this year the higher-payroll teams and the higher-revenue teams made the playoffs, it is just one year and not enough to declare a trend.”

Among the top 15 spenders as of the start of the season, just four had losing records this year: the No. 2 New York Mets (70-92), No. 8 Houston (74-88), the No. 12 Chicago White Sox (79-83) and No 15 Cleveland (65-97).

And just five of the bottom 15 finished with winning records: No. 18 Colorado (92-70), No. 22 Texas (87-75), No. 24 Minnesota (87-76), No. 25 Tampa Bay (84-78) and No. 30 Florida (87-75).

There’s no absolute correlation between spending and winning. But having lots of bucks helps.

“We do not ever in this organization use payroll as an excuse for a lack of performance,” Florida Marlins president David Samson said. “We expect to make the playoffs every year, and our players when they take the field don’t get intimidated by other teams’ salaries.”

“You still have to win games,” he added. “I don’t really focus on it the way frankly the media does as far as big payroll/small payroll. What we focus on is how teams are composed, the players they have and the way they build themselves and the way they perform.”

After CC Sabathia left the Brewers last offseason to sign a $161 million, eight-year contract with the Yankees, Attanasio said maybe it was time for baseball to consider a salary cap.

Now, having had nearly a year to examine and reflect, he realizes proposing an absolute ceiling might provoke a confrontation with the players’ union, which struck for 7½ months and wiped out the World Series after owners tried to get one in 1994.

“There are better ways to address to competitive balance than salary caps,” he said. “There are other things we can maybe fix before you get into that very difficult conversation.”

A consensus has emerged among the major league clubs to propose two major changes to the amateur draft. One would extend it beyond the United States — players outside the 50 states currently are free agents who may sign with any team.

Another would be to eliminate negotiations for amateur players and replace them with a fixed slotting system. That could shift money from amateurs to veterans and would decrease the commissions for the advisers who represent top high school, college and international players.

There could be tinkering with the formulas for revenue sharing and the luxury tax — currently set at 40 percent on the amount of payrolls above a set threshold, using average annual values of 40-man rosters. Management could ask that the tax be a dollar-for-dollar penalty.

And there could be changes to the system in which teams losing better free agents receive amateur draft picks as compensation. For losing Sabathia, Milwaukee the No. 39 pick overall and the Yankees’ second-round selection, No. 73. New York’s top pick, No. 25 overall, went to the Angels as compensation for Mark Teixeira.

“The draft was intended to allow the weaker teams to draft the best players and thereby improve competitively,” DuPuy said. “And as long as you’ve got the rest of the world essentially not subject to the draft, or a great portion of the world not subject to the draft, and where you have a system where the best players are not necessarily going to weakest teams, it seems that that is a place that ought to be looked at very hard.”

So for now, middle- and large-market teams realize they need to win when they have a group of young players close to the same amount of service time. They try to keep them together and go for titles before they near free agency — and the lure of big-market money.

“Everyone looks at everyone else’s payrolls, so you start sort of seeing where can they go,” Beane said. “And you realize they’re in a very short window of opportunity right now.”

And an absolute limit on spending may not be the solution. And the luxury tax thus far has affected pretty much only the Yankees.

“A salary cap is one arrow in the quiver, one tool we could look at to try to address competitive balance, but it may or may not be the most effective tool,” Attanasio said. “In my opinion anyway, this isn’t the Yankees vs. the rest of the sport. It’s are we going to have a sport where every year the only teams in the final are large-market teams?”