If baseball were a truly competitive market, you, David, and Jason could line up some investors, assemble a roster for an MLB team to compete with the product put out by Lincoln, et. al., and submit a competing offer to MLB and the Stadium Authority to provide MLB baseball in the Seattle market. Or you could create a second team in the Seattle market to compete with the Mariners.

That what would be a competitive marketplace.

In a competitive marketplace at least one team, if not two, would relocate to the Northeast to take advantage of the greater revenue and profit opportunities available there. The added competition would reduce the revenues available to the Mets, Yankees, and Red Sox, and force them to cut payroll.

There is (or shold be) competition in player signings, but other than that limited aspect, baseball teams in no way compete in economic terms.

One of my strategies for dealing with the Yankees if they ever get REALLY out of control is for the other 29 teams to say, “OK, we give up. You win.” Then they drop out of the league and form another one leaving the Yankees to win every year by default.

Because then every GM has to pay for one moron’s mistake, since they’ll spend the next several years battling with agents who insist that Player B deserves a Player A salary since their performance compares well – ignoring the fact that Player A was grossly overpaid in the first place.

I’m sorry, but just because something like this creates trouble for someone else doesn’t mean they should be able to stop it.

On

The baseball marketplace is not companies working against each other, really.

This is wrong. In your Intel v AMD example, there’s less direct competition between the companies than between teams in baseball. Both Intel and AMD have diverse product lines, many of which conflict with each other.

Every baseball team wins a game by giving another team a loss. Every player move can help or hurt one team, and in so doing it hurts or helps every other team. Intel and AMD can both grow sales while fighting for the desktop market, but every baseball team can’t get better next year.

Baseball is not an open market in some senses, certainly, but it is direct competition.

f someone wants to spend far too much money on a player, why not let them?

Because then every GM has to pay for one moron’s mistake, since they’ll spend the next several years battling with agents who insist that Player B deserves a Player A salary since their performance compares well — ignoring the fact that Player A was grossly overpaid in the first place.

In general, I don’t see what MLB is doing as out of bounds. The players want to make as much as possible, the teams want to pay them as little as possible. Player agents certainly use whatever means they can to inflate the bidding, and logically the league will do everything it can to keep the prices down. That’s just the way it goes; a free market cuts both ways. As the ESPN column pointed out, the league is now issuing a paper trail on the process that can be examined and, if necessary, introduced as evidence in court. If it’s collusion, the courts will act accordingly; until then, it’s just bargaining.

–Bud