Just a thought

Ok, I'm back in Pittsburgh, away from crazy Los Angeles..which is a lot dirty than from what I remember by the way, so I'm back doing my usual business of working the Pirate games.

Aside from the fact that Ray Zapporoni is going to lose his $20 bet with Joe Hale for the, roughly 6th year in a row (for the Pirates again not finishing at .500 for their season), it makes me wonder, is there really a point to sports when you don't have any parity?

ESPN's Scott Van Pelt said today on his radio show, that when it comes to ESPN putting teams on television, and the fact that it is usually the Redsox or the Yankees, it comes down to the fact that ESPN is in the business of "printing money."

I take two things from this,
1) What happened to ESPN being the break-through sports programming network it was in 1977, finding a way to give as much coverage to everyones teams out there (I guess money will change things)

2) Wouldn't the MLB be more successful financially if each team in the league were more competitive? Van Pelt's example of why ESPN runs with the Redsox and Yanks match up over other teams is the fact that they carry a rating of 2.7 per game, which is double any other MLB game that ESPN airs.

There are Redsoxs and Yankee fans out there for two main reasons, 1) both those areas are rather large, thus larger audience locally 2) Both teams have had a stories franchise that wins consistently, thus broadening their audience due to their success.

Some people may then look and say, oh ok, I know where you're going with this..and I am, salary cap for MLB. It's ridiculous to think that the Pittsburgh Pirates, who will set the record for most losing seasons in sports (18) at the end of this year, still profit at the end of a year, due to the revenue sharing in baseball. If there is no salary cap, and revenue sharing that keeps teams afloat, what is the incentive for an owner who bought the team as a business venture? The Pirates are sadly a profiting organization, they may not be growing, but they aren't losing money, it's just sad.

If the MLB would institute a salary cap, revenue sharing could either cease to exist or go down, by creating a more level playing field in the free agent market. Just look at the NHL, before the salary cap was put in place, we lost a league. There is already a threat of this happening in the NFL, again, and who is to say that it couldn't happen in baseball.