Just To Add

…to the points Drezner makes about this silly column, let’s start with this argument from Sherdian:

What’s wrong here is obvious. It’s also not really new. Unlike the NFL, NBA and NHL, baseball has no salary cap. Those leagues do not have caps for the sheer, unbridled joy of finding loopholes and exceptions. They have them as part of an effort to maintain some kind of competitive balance among teams from different-size markets in disparate parts of the country.

Ah, yes, like most sportswriters, Sheridan would seem to be a puke funnel for the extremely wealthy people who own professional sports teams. At this point, let us summarize the central reasons for salary caps in pro sports:

• To increase the amount of money owners get to keep.
• There is no #2.

If the policy objective is to ensure competitive balance, then the key is to equalize revenues, not salary expenses. The NFL, in fairness, does a lot of this, but this makes its salary cap largely superfluous for reasons other than suppressing player salaries (and given the short careers of NFL players and the effects of playing on their bodies, this suppression is an absolute disgrace any rational person should be embarrassed to defend.)

On a related point, Sherdian’s whining about high-salaried baseball players because we’re in a recession is a transparent (though beloved by many sportswriters and fans) non-sequitur. If I may be permitted to state the obvious, capping player salaries doesn’t affect the total revenue earned by professional sports one iota. The only question here is how much money goes to the players and how much goes to the owners. How the Steinbrenner family keeping more money and C.C. Sabathia keeping less would help laid off autoworkers or underpaid teachers or whatever other group you care to name I can’t tell you.