Sports Logic

I decided to create a series looking at things that really bug me in professional sports and ways to fix them. As I thought about it, it wasn't just professional sports…it includes the event that straddles the amateur-professional line: The Olympic Games. The most common theme I found was of course, money. Here is the first installment of the things I hate about sports…

Major League Baseball: This year I reached my breaking point with baseball after years of defending it. People would always say, "How can you watch that? It's sooo boring!" And I would always reply "it's not so boring when you understand what they're doing and why!" However, this year I found myself caring less and less about the grand old game. I think it was sometime in the middle of August when reality set in that all but one of the playoff races were essentially over with six weeks to go in the season. How the hell can anyone give a damn about watching all those meaningless games? If I wanted to waste my time, I'd go buy the "According To Jim" series on DVD and see how fast my brain can rot.

The reason behind the dearth of races is the massive money gap in baseball. Picture this…six of the eight teams to make the playoffs this year are in the top eight in payroll. The Minnesota Twins defied the odds and made it in with a paltry payroll of 68 million bucks…or 12 million more than the NHL salary cap. $68 million ranks the Twins in 26^th in baseball payroll. Of course, they play almost double the number of games as hockey and basketball, and ten times as many as the NFL, but come on. The Yankees pay $200 million or more strictly on player salaries…with Alex Rodriguez making roughly the same amount as the entire Florida Marlins team. So unless you cheer for teams in New York, Boston, Los Angeles (or Los Angeles of Anaheim…right Angels fans?), Chicago, Philadelphia and even Detroit, your team is pretty much screwed before Spring Training starts. Sure, there's the old Tampa Bay Rays or Milwaukee Brewers or Colorado Rockies or Minnesota Twins that make the postseason, but that's the exception, not the rule.

The solution is obvious. Follow the lead of the other leagues and install a salary cap. There is no way for teams in small markets to compete when they draft and develop players, then come contract time they are forced to either trade the player for prospect or let him walk into the welcoming vaults of the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, Phillies or Cubs. It's your prototypical rich get richer market and made the game unwatchable for me.

Guaranteed Contracts: I hope you weren't expecting me to be done with baseball just yet. It's lumped into this category too, along with the NHL and to a lesser extent, the NFL and NBA. There are 122 professional teams in the four major sports…and yes, I still have hockey in that conversation and not NASCAR. Each team hands out these ridiculously long contracts for massive dollars to players and don't have any guarantees that the players are going to perform to that standard or remain healthy. On top of that, you can't just fire the player for ineptitude in the NHL or MLB…you need to fork over the full value of the contract to get rid of him. Or if he gets hurt, you're paying top dollar to fill his wallet AND get him surgically repaired. It's a crazy, crazy system that doesn't exist anywhere many other places in the world.

On the flip side, look at sports like golf and tennis. I know they're individual sports so it's a tough comparison, but bear with me here. There is very little guaranteed money in golf and tennis…you want to make money, you have to play well. You get hurt? The governing body doesn't pay for it, your insurance does…and you can afford it because you make more than at least 95% of the public.

So what's the solution in team sports? First off, I know the players unions would never go for this because it means some players might not get overpaid and that means agents would not make nearly as much. For that, I apologize to Scott Boras…who can go fornicate himself. Team sports should implement a base salary every player, regardless of ability can make. For example, the base salary in the NHL is between $450,000 and $500,000. I don't know many people making that much money, let alone people who are at the bottom of their company's totem pole, so there should be no complaining about "having a family to feed" and all the BS jaded athletes love to feed us for why they need to make multiple millions.

After the base, the leagues should implement incentives for production. You hit 30 home runs, here's 4 million clams. Get 45 goals and 57 assists? Here's your check for 6.5 mil. Same goes for touchdowns, tackles, rebounds and points. Have incentives for every statistical category so players are still able to make their huge piles of cash. That way, guys that perform to the highest level get the highest pay and aren't paid for past performances. Setting up this kind of structure would be damn near impossible, but on the plus side, it would get rid of the thing all players and agents hate…salary caps.

It's crazy to think that Tiger Woods made $10.5 million on the golf course (excluding the goofy $10 million bonus for winning the FedEx Cup) while over 25 baseball players made more off their guaranteed contracts. By that token, does it mean that Vernon Wells and Jorge Posada dominated baseball more than Tiger dominated the PGA Tour? Not likely.

The final part of the solution deals with injuries. If most of us get hurt at work, we don't get our full paycheques while we rehab. We have to go through the pain in the ass that is Workers' Compensation…and need to prove we still aren't healthy while they try to get us off their books. On top of that, we get to wait until a doctor can see us to perform surgery to cure what ails us. I don't have an issue with the prompt surgeries in sports since they aren't part of the general health care system, but I take issue with Sami Salo of the Vancouver Canucks or former MLB player Juan Gonzalez getting paid millions of dollars while on the shelf. Salo just got injured for the 38^th time in 11 years. That's not a typo. Gonzalez made tens of millions of dollars rehabbing his broken (and steroid-juiced) body over his career.

The leagues need to have a standard injury pay. As a compromise, keep their minimum salary flowing and give the player a percentage of his average annual income divided over the amount of time injured. These guys make more in a year than the average person makes in at least ten years, so they obviously live well. And there is no rule against athletes getting jobs after they retire in their late thirties and forties, meaning there's no reason to treat them like lotto winners for playing a game better than the rest of us.

The solutions to these problems in sports aren't to send athletes to the poor house. All I ask for is more competition among athletes and their teams to improve the product we pay a lot of money to watch because we weren't nearly good enough to be in their cleats, running shoes or skates.