Last week, I did a post on baseball's competitive balance and explained that high payroll simply does not equal success. Well, I was delighted to read George Will's Op-Ed column in the Washington Post this past weekend (Baseball's Real 'Golden Age'). George Will is one of my all-time favorite commentators on the business of baseball. I don't think I've ever disagreed with anything he has said about baseball. He makes some excellent points to demonstrate "the steeply declining utility of the last $100 million of payroll" (as he puts it) and that baseball's competitive balance is a diminishing problem:
- There still are revenue and spending disparities between baseball teams that are impossible between NFL and NBA teams because those leagues have salary caps and more centralized revenue sources. Nevertheless, when the Tigers dispatched the Yankees Oct. 7, baseball was guaranteed its seventh different World Series winner in seven years. There never have been seven consecutive Super Bowls, or seven consecutive NBA championships, won by seven different teams.
- Baseball's supposed "golden age" of the 1940s and 1950s was not so golden outside New York. In 1947 the Yankees won the American League pennant and beat the Dodgers in the World Series. In 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952 and 1953 the Yankees were World Series winners over the Dodgers, Phillies, Giants, Dodgers and Dodgers, respectively. If the Phillies had not beaten the Dodgers in the 10th inning of the last game of the 1950 season, every World Series game for five years would have been played in New York. And if 103 wins, which usually are enough to win the pennant, had sufficed in 1954 (the Indians won 111, an American League record for a 154-game season), the Yankees would have won 10 pennants in a row, because they also won in 1955, 1956, 1957 and 1958.
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