Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig paid a visit to Nationals Park for Opening Day on Monday and took a few minutes to talk about his sport’s biggest issues.
Selig touched on the state of the Nationals and baseball in Washington: “Clearly with a good, competitive club this will be a great major-league market.” An HGH test for major leaguers: “Everybody knows how anxious I am to find a test.” And the economics of the game: “The sport has never been more popular.”
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All boilerplate stuff. The most interesting thing Selig said, though, was on the competitive balance of baseball. There he touched a nerve.
“We have more competitive balance than we’ve ever had before,” Selig claimed. “Is it perfect? No. Is there some work to be done? Yes. But given where we are as opposed to where we were a decade ago — wow, it has been remarkable.”
While it’s true that eight different teams won a World Series in the last decade, Selig’s premise rings hollow. It isn’t the actual number of small and mid-market teams in contention at the end of the season that matters. Eventually — through sheer luck or plain old hard work and competence — the Pittsburgh Pirates are going to develop a winning team again. But it is the ability of those smaller teams to keep their talent and extend their championship window that matters.
Selig noted with pride that a number of industry experts think the Tampa Bay Rays can beat both the Yankees and Red Sox in the American League East. That’s great. But the window for the Rays is small and everyone knows it. If they don’t trade Carl Crawford or Carlos Pena this summer they could lose both. And guess which teams would be in the mix to sign two of the Rays’ better players, if they choose?
Yes, the Rays can still compete because they have an elite farm system. That still doesn’t make for balanced competition.
