No, No, NO!

It's BAAAACK.

I refer, of course, to the most irritating bit of incorrect conventional wisdom out there,that baseball is hopelessly competitively unbalanced, and that the only way to fix it is to impose some sort of salary cap. The idea, as far as I can understand it, is that in the good old days before free agency, lots of different teams could win the World Series, but now because the mean ol' Yankees buy up the best players, the same teams win every year and it's horrible and awful and why can't the greedy players accept a salary cap for the good of the game?

Or something like that.

It's hard to overstate the degree to which salary cap proposals for baseball drive me nuts. For one thing, it's my absolutely unshakeable belief that the problem a salary cap would purport to solve, a serious competitive balance problem, doesn't exist. Free Agency came to baseball in 1976. Here's a list, in chronological order, of World Series winners since: Cincinnati, the New York Yankees, the Yanks again, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Kansas City, the New York Mets, Minnesota, Los Angeles again, Oakland, Cincinnati again, Minnesota again, Toronto (huzzah!), Toronto again (huzzah and hurray!), no one (Montreal in a just world), Atlanta, the evil Yankees, Florida, the evil Yankees again, and again, and again, Arizona, Anaheim, Florida again, Boston and the Chicago White Sox.

So. We have nineteen different franchises winning the whole shebang in thirty years, with one year in which noone won. Of the five teams with more than one championship, two (Cincinnati and Los Angeles) won their titles with teams that were more or less completely different the second time around (Cincy had no holdovers from 1976 on the 1990 team, while the Dodgers had two starters from 1981 on their 1988 champions), so it seems fair to rule them out as example of grossly unfair competition. Minnesota is cited by precisely no one as an example of an out-of-control behemoth of spending. Which leaves two "dynasties" to be accounted for: Toronto (ulp!) and those damn Yankees.

The Blue Jays, in the early nineties, had a very good team composed mostly of players either grown through the farm system or traded for with players from that farm system. While they were a high spending team, and while their high-priced free agents like Dave Winfield and Paul Molitor were essential to their championship, the core of the team was homegrown. When the farm system collapsed in the mid-90s, so did the team. It's simply not accurate to refer to the Jays of the glory days as a team of "bought" players.

And now, for the Evil Empire its ownself. Looking at their most recent dynasty, that four-championships-in-five-years run that scarred the psyches of honest baseball fans across North America, it's clear that the core of that dynasty, far from being the high priced gang of mercenaries that everyone thinks they know the Yankees were, was is fact either home-grown or traded for with products of the Yankees' system. The egregious Derek Jeter, drafted in 1992. The loathsome Jorge Posada, drafted in 1990. Bernie Williams, who even I can't curse at, signed as an amateur in 1985. Andy Pettitte, drafted in 1990. The incomparable Mariano Rivera, signed out of Panama in 1990. All of these guys were available to any team at all, but the Yankees got them, and developed them and reaped the benefits. I honestly don't think there's a single player who you could possibly put in the top five players of that Yankees dynasty other than these guys, and every single one of them was a Yankee from the minute he started playing pro ball to the end of the dynasty.

A fair objection at this point would be to point out that the current iteration of the Yanks, notwithstanding the presence of Jeter, Rivera, Posada and the death throes of Bernie Williams' career, is, in fact, a collection of high-priced mercenaries picked up on the free agent market. To which I say, they haven't won the Series in five years, and their team is so old that it's a matter of when, rather than if, they collapse embarrassingly into fourth in the division.

That's not to say they can't win it all this year-but the window's getting short, and without young talent from somewhere soon, it's going to close completely on George's boys. And there will be much rejoicing.

In baseball, you get to keep a player under your contractual control for the first six years of his career, a period sufficiently long to cover the entire careers of the majority of ballplayers. It's true that the in last three years of this period an arbitrator will set a player's salary if he and the team can't agree to a contract, a process that has inflated salaries, but these players are still significantly cheaper than they would be if they were free agents. This is why a good farm system can keep a team competitive, almost regardless of payroll, into perpetuity, because a good farm system is the only source of good young players.

The final reason that wholesale "buying" of free agents tends to be a self-defeating strategy is that most players hit free agency as or just after their careers begin to decline in terms of baseball productivity. There are exceptions, and the very best free agents are starting their decline from a high enough level that they can still be good players. Generally speaking, though, teams that have gone out to buy a champion like the Baltimore Orioles and New York Mets of recent years have ended up as smoking wrecks.

So there's no reason, in my view, to worry about competitive balance in the first place. The other reason I don't want to see a salary cap in baseball is that, in my view, a cap would ruin the experience of being a long-term fan.

There are two kinds of cap. One, a hard cap, is an absolute prohibition on player spending above a given level. It's what the NFL uses, and it doesn't work with guaranteed player contracts, which every league except the NFL has. It leads, inevitably, to the routine blowing-up of successful teams purely for cap reasons. Continuity in the NFL is nonexistent, and player movement (which is something a lot of cap-favouring reactionaries moan incessantly about) is absolutely bewildering.

The other kind of cap, which cap moderates always favour, is a soft cap. In a soft cap, a level is set, and teams can't spend over it without paying a penalty into league coffers. The NBA is the best-known example of a soft cap league. The effects of a soft cap are less pernicious than those of a hard cap-players can still sign guaranteed contracts, and wholesale demolition jobs are a lot rarer-but they are still, on the whole, bad. The existence of a cap, coupled with guaranteed contracts, can have the effect of tying teams into knots, and in the most extreme cases, like that of the current New York Knicks, it can more or less preclude the possibility of a successful rebuilding job.

One other thing about soft caps: BASEBALL ALREADY HAS ONE! Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money points out that the current luxury tax model functions like a slightly more liberal version of the NBA's system, and just as in the NBA, a team from New York is the biggest spender in the league, cap or no cap.

If people want to argue for more revenue sharing in baseball, I'm right there with them. But, as Scott says, the "only a salary cap can save baseball" line is disingenous management-side crap that has somehow become received wisdom. What's perhaps most surprising is, as he says, how many ordinarily pro-labour people have rushed to the side of the billionaires in what is an admittedly atypical labour dispute.

Also, Malcolm Gladwell's stance as an ultra-hawk on the cap issue surprises me. Scott quotes him as actively rooting for a work stoppage, which strikes me as one of the more zealously ideological reactions one could have: "damn it, no baseball at all is better than this uncapped monstrosity!" Finally, it strikes me as bizarre that a guy who's made an entire career out of writing articles and books challenging conventional wisdom should be such an advocate for the received wisdom.

Matt says that he imagines the "uncapped" state of baseball must be particularly frustrating for...Blue Jays fans! I'll admit that any time the Yankees or Red Sox are successful it galls me as a Jays fan. But that's just the reaction any right-thinking person would have, not an endorsement of a stupid, destructive alteration of the best spectator sport there is.