almagest

Like I said, good QBs have rarely if ever move teams. It just doesn't happen, with or without a cap. For a long time I would've agreed that a great QB is the most important thing to have and you can figure the rest out. After watching the Bears and Jags this year, seeing what Darnold and Mayfield were able to do with KOC and Cohen after essentially being written off, and noticing that pretty much every Super Bowl team had a good to great coaching staff I changed my opinion. I think a great coach can elevate an average QB, or at least work around him. I don't think a great QB can drag an average coaching staff to contention - in fact, I'm not even sure you can be a great QB with anything less than a good coach unless you're a ridiculous outlier. IMO coaching is the most important piece of the puzzle in the NFL. QB is probably second, though the offensive line play is pretty close (and that is also incredibly dependent on coaching). It is admittedly hard to say because the NBA was a very different league 40+ years ago, but I'm just not seeing much difference in who was good then vs now when looking at larger market size. The Lakers and Celtics have always been good. The Bulls were solid at inception and have been pretty bad the rest of the time minus the 90s. The Knicks had some solid teams and 1 or 2 championships, but have been a joke the rest of the time. The Nets and Clippers have almost always been a joke. The 76ers have been a joke for a long time. The Raptors have one year. The Warriors were good in the 60s/70s and weren't very good after that until they drafted Steph and built around him. You basically have two paths to success in the current NBA - keep trying to find stars in the draft until you do then build around them, or get your current stars to recruit other good players to take less money and build a super team. I don't see how their soft cap impacts any of this. My argument is less that the MLB has "better" parity, and more that the salary cap A) doesn't seem to make much of a difference in the other leagues, and B) MLB would barely change with one in place unless it was WAY more restrictive than any of the teams or players would allow for. I covered the reasons why in my last post. Ray Ray brought up revenue sharing + league wide tv rights and I think that's a much better idea to help with parity in the MLB.

NFL teams with great coaches are the only ones who are successful, and coaches are not subject to the salary cap. Stud QBs have never been bought by the highest bidder. They've always been zealously guarded by whoever drafted/originally signed them, to the point where a big part of the NFL's stance against free agency until relatively recently was due to "protecting" QBs from poaching. NFL team spending has always been in a rough parity as well. There's just not a lot to indicate that the salary cap has been the driving force in any change to the competitive landscape there. OKC is not a dynasty yet, and this is really their first glimpse of sustained success in franchise history, even going back to the Seattle days. If we're talking NBA market size, four of the seven dynasties (Lakers, Bulls, Warriors, Celtics) since the cap started are large markets and account for 66.7% of dynasty championships and 55% of overall championships. I don't see how four teams accounting for 55% of championships in the last 40 years shows a salary cap win. I've also already outlined why I think a cap and floor won't work in MLB in a previous post, but it really breaks down to A) The cap isn't going to be below the current highest spend, B) The high spenders will still spend the most, and C) Floors are only going to enforce bad decisions from the poorly run teams at the bottom, and you can't force them to pay more than they are able to. A better revenue sharing model and standardized TV rights are much better ideas.

Yeah, I blew that one. I don't know what I was looking at last night.

I don't follow hockey except to bandwagon the Hawks, and I don't follow the NBA that closely because the Bulls are a dumpster fire, but enough to keep track of the league. I do follow the NFL. I know the NFL has revenue sharing. If you want to argue that MLB needs a similar revenue sharing model (or at least a standardized TV deal), that's definitely worth considering. I just don't think a salary cap is going to accomplish anything. The A's were in the same market as the Giants and have had multiple dynasties and years of dominance. Their recent incompetence has little to do with their market size.

The markets are different in the NFL. You can't 1:1 compare them. Look at revenue by team for both leagues and compare where each team is ranked.

Salary spend ABSOLUTELY correlates to wins in MLB. I'm not arguing against that. It does in the NBA as well. The NFL always had rough spending parity + coaching matters SO MUCH in football, so it's hard to say the cap changed much there. Some MLB teams (Brewers, Rays) buck that trend, but it's really hard. The playoffs are the equalizer there, as you pointed out, which is why I used the WS champ comparison. You're also not changing the landscape of the best regular season teams in MLB by implementing a salary cap. The cap is going to come in at the top of the current team salary spend. They're not going to make the top 5-10 teams shed a ton of salary from guaranteed contracts. So you'll still have the exact same situation you have now, and even if the cap never goes up you're still going to have the same teams at the top. Smart teams will also figure out how to skirt the rules and continue to sign the players they want even if they're at the top of the cap. If you raise the floor too then maybe you'll see some change, but you'd have to make it pretty tight to make a difference, and there aren't enough good players to go around to change much here. You're also still competing against existing market size and team revenue - you're not going to force the Pirates or A's or White Sox to spend to a point they can't afford.

The Packers haven't been a dynasty since the 60s. Them consistently having a hall of fame quarterback and being a well coached and well run organization since the early 90s has nothing to do with the salary cap. Even with these advantages they still only have two championships in 30 years and they haven't won in 15 years. KC has a hall of fame coach and a great QB. There's no salary cap for coaches, so anyone could have hired Andy Reid at any time, and no star QB has ever been poached in the history of the NFL because of the ridiculous free agency rules until the 90s. Even since then you haven't seen it because teams know the value of a franchise QB. "People who disagree with me regularly have a disease" is certainly a take. I'll keep it respectful.

I said MID market, not large. Go look at their revenue. Right in the bottom middle of NFL teams. You are just wrong if you think the Royals and Chiefs have the same reach and revenue % compared to the rest of their leagues. Saints I was wrong. They're at the bottom of revenue too. Packers are also mid market.

I'm trying to factor in popularity, revenue and neighboring captured markets (beyond just physical market size, which is why the Royals are still a small market to me), but sure. We can call them small as an example. That makes it two teams and four total championships since 2006 for small markets in the NFL. Hell, add the Saints too if you want. Three teams, five championships. Doesn't change the point. If I go back through the MLB list and just rank them by pure market size, then the Rangers move to mid market.

Big market teams have won 13 of 20 NBA championships since 2006. Only four of them were small market teams. In the NFL, only one small market team has won (Packers in 2010). Eight won by large market teams and eleven by mid market (KC counts as a mid market for the NFL). So yes, you DO see this in other sports.

You can value profit, but understand that you can still build a good team and be profitable. Profit and quality are not inversely proportional. If you want to grow team revenue you basically have to be good, especially if you don't have a major market to rely on. Maybe MLB needs to have stricter approval processes for team purchases, but it's going to be hard to do that, because there are only a few people in the world rich enough to afford an MLB team, and who have the desire to do so. Unfortunately you're kind of stuck with the luck of the draw as a fan. I agree about revenue sharing. It's a terrible idea and it's pretty clear it doesn't lead to a better product.

They're two of the other major sport examples we have in the US, so feel free to find ones you think are more applicable. Baseball does not have a significant parity problem compared to the other sports. Of the three sports I referenced: The NBA has had 13 different teams win the championship since their soft cap began in 1985 (32.5%). There are seven teams with more than 2 championships during that time (Lakers 9, Bulls 6, Spurs 5, Warriors 4, Celtics 3, Pistons 3, Heat 3), which account for 82.5% of the total championships. The NFL has had 15 teams win the Super Bowl since the salary cap began in 1994 (48.4%). There are three teams with more than 2 championships during that time (Patriots 6, Chiefs 3, Broncos 3), which account for 38.7% of the total championships. MLB has had 14 different teams win the World Series since the luxury tax began in 1997 (50%). There are four teams with more than 2 championships during that time (Red Sox 4, Yankees 3, Giants 3, Dodgers 3), accounting for 46.4% of the total championships. MLB has the the largest % of different teams win, and is in the middle of the three for 3+ championships won by a team. If anything it seems like more restrictive salary caps are harmful to parity, or at best don't make a difference.

Yes, no one is doing anything against the bylaws of MLB going into an under-the-table agreement for analytics because those bylaws don't exist yet, so the only examples we have are in other areas, like sign stealing. Sign stealing is ubiquitous in MLB, and there were two big scandals about it that were particularly egregious. If teams are bending MLB's rules with this then they're for sure going to try to bend them in other areas. Also, you brought up enterprises treating governance as sacrosanct, not me. You're flat out wrong about that, and there's no reason to assume baseball teams would act any differently. If you don't think someone with interesting data or a new way of measuring things is going to take a bunch of money to provide that info or tool to an MLB team under the table as a "trial" or whatever nonsense phrasing they invent to justify it then BOY do I have a crypto deal that's perfect for you!

Sports with a salary cap still have a collection of consistently hopeless teams and a collection of consistently good teams. You don't solve for parity by restricting spending. Teams hire cap wizards and test all sorts of other tactics to navigate those restrictions. The salary cap is seldom an issue for good NFL teams if they want to keep a player or sign one. The NBA has been a super team league for most of the years since the mid 80s when they instituted a soft cap - if teams want to sign or trade for someone, they will. I think only one trade was ever vetoed by the commissioner's office. Baseball has the luxury tax, but smart teams are deferring money to work around that. All a hard cap would do is change how the Dodgers structure contracts to sign or trade for whoever they want.

Teams cheat with organizational backing all the time - we saw two huge scandals with the Astros and Red Sox in the last 7-8 years, and there have been rumors about a bunch of others. You've also said it yourself - advantages are often small and very difficult to come by, so there's a ton of pressure to seek them wherever you can, even if it's in an area that's technically "cheating" (like relatively sophisticated sign stealing). If someone out there is doing something interesting with data or analytics but they're not approved by MLB, I guarantee a team is still going to talk to them and figure out a way to leverage that data to see if it's useful. I'm sure they're doing it in other sports, too, though we don't ever hear about it - you can't wear unapproved wearables during a game in the NBA, for example, but who knows what they're doing at practice during simulated games. That data over the course of a full season's worth of practices is going to have some value. This is well beyond the scope of this discussion, but governance and controls for "back alley deals" and other similar violations fail ALL THE TIME in enterprise organizations. It's so common that questions about what to do if you find yourself in this situation are part of every security and compliance training.