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In Reply to: Told my wife last night, Lasorda must have been appalled. posted by ghost of olddude55 on January 9, 2021 at 05:07:38:
Baseball is my favorite sport but I kind of wish the game had an NHL style salary cap.
My view of sports is like my view of chess. Each side gets the same quality of pieces. The way you utilize the pieces is up to you but both sides are dead even.
That is the idea of sports. No one would pay to see the best Yankees team play a team of 5-year-old girls because the mismatch is a joke. And when the Yankees play teams that are marginally better than a AAA team - the same problem sets in.
If my team spends $220,000,000 on a squad and I play a team that has 2 decent players and a bunch of scrubs - big deal. If my team wins the win is diminished because my team should always win that match-up. The only surprise or shock is if my team loses. There is little joy in beating the Baltimore Orioles.
In hockey, there is a hard cap and teams have to stay under it. So they have to make hard decisions - are they going to spend $9million a year on a goalie or a right-winger. You may stop some goals-against average if you sign the star goalie but you may also have trouble scoring. Some kind of thought has to go into it.
With LA and NY - they just sign all the top guys and because they have endless money - even if or when one of the free agents craps the bed - it makes no difference they can just replace the said player.
So when the big spending teams sign a $30m a year pitcher for 10 years - if that pitcher blows out his arm in year 2 - they can pay him $30m for the next 8 years and then immediately sign the next $30m a year pitcher. The financial mistakes have no impact on them.
Tampa meanwhile can't screw it up - one screw-up like that would mean disaster for 8 years. No recovering from it. So they head off disaster and Snell has just a tiny little arm issue and they just sell - just in case his arm goes. They need a constant farm system injection. Why would fans ever buy Jersey when you know your favorite player will be dumped? of they hint at becoming expensive (err good).
And it's no sour grapes - I just don't think it's great for the game or any sport similar. Even when my Blue Jays won 2 WS back to back - they also had the highest payroll in baseball. They won - but they should have won.
And teams like Tamp who make it to the WS are always massive underdogs - and they use every mathematical trick in the book to sneak out wins with openers and not allowing a pitcher to face a hitter for the third time and heavy shifts etc - but it's not a fun watch.
A fun watch was seeing Jack Morris sent out for a 10 inning in a 7th game and complete the shutout. I wasn't a Minnesota or Braves fan but I loved watching those teams play and that era of the game.
Now it's 4-5 pitchers per game, shifts that make the game look ridiculous.
I still like it - lesser baseball is still baseball.
I loved being a pitcher and making the all-star team for British Columbia. But moving up to the next level the arm gave out and so I shifted to sidearm delivery - Mark Eichorn and Dennis Eckersley were so great. I had a knee-buckling curveball and a pretty good sinker and I could hit the four quadrants. I had a write-up in the paper and scouts came to watch a few of us. But I could never throw hard enough sidearm. So I could get a righty batter to dive as it would come right at them and then the big break. But once they saw it a few times and realized my fastball wasn't fast - I was not long for it. Still I did pitch some nice games against the Coquitlam Reds - the team Larry Walker was drafted from and they were the best team at the time.
Sucks to get old. Now at best it's slow pitch softball.
Jack
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Follow Ups
- RE: Told my wife last night, Lasorda must have been appalled. - RGA 01/9/2106:03:46 01/9/21 (1)
- Tampa just traded away one of it's best pitchers. - ghost of olddude55 06:22:19 01/9/21 (0)
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