Seriously, what costs more: one good scouting person or five good players?
No one, but no one, gets this better than the Tampa Bay Rays (please let someone be smart enough to get that team a stadium in Westshore or Channelside). Draft, groom, bring them up, sign the best ones, and trade the rest for more players who they can…groom, bring them up, sign if they’re good enough, and so on. That’s how you compete with a low payroll….which could be higher if owners weren’t greedy.
Let’s get back to this greed thing for a second. Many small-market owners like to complain about losing money on their teams. First and most obvious: if it’s that bad, sell the team. If it’s not, shut up. Second and almost as obvious, didn’t you all get enough money to buy the teams by…um…making it? You can figure out how to make enough money to buy a team, but you can’t figure out how to turn a profit on one? Get out of here with that. Okay, now the next point about keeping players.
Most players want two things: they want to make money and/or they want to win. It is an owner’s responsibility to provide an environment in which a player can meet one or both of those goals (I have a feeling I’m going to have to talk about the NBA difference in a minute). Some players will want to play for a team close to their hometown or for some other personal reason, but the majority want financial and competitive success.
Instead of maximizing players’ opportunities for those two things - and in turn, the fans’ entertainment from the on-field product - small-market owners want to line their pockets and then come up with every excuse in the book as to why they won’t compete. Note that I didn’t say “can’t”. “We’re broke”…no, fools: the people who clean the arenas are broke. The parking attendants are broke. The ushers are broke. You all go home to…one of your homes. “We can’t give Player Y this five million dollars”…no, but you can let him earn that while he increases your profit margin by a larger amount.
It’s dumb stuff like that which allows small-market owners to ruin sports. They write really great narratives, which the media - and fans, in turn - buy. I’ve never been able to understand how. The owners are the “common men” but the players are crazy? It’s like Chris Rock said: Shaq is rich. The white man (that’s how Chris said it: don’t take exception with me) that signs Shaq’s checks is wealthy. Many fans still take the owners’ side - and I’ll avoid the reason for that because the word count is almost at 1700 right now.
Let’s take the financial aspect out of this for a second. These small-market owners are turning fans against players, which is the absolute dumbest thing they could possibly do. Why is that? The players are the product. They are the recognizable faces of sports. No fan in their right mind is going to say “NBA players are all greedy, but I’ll watch the game because I sure like how Dan Gilbert runs a franchise and writes checks - in Comic Sans MS”. Preserve your product, small-market owners. You are not the product. If fans turn against the players, they turn against the sport (once again: if you’re an NBA fan, you know this). Shoot, MLB fans know it too: MLB owners - NFL owners too, to an extent - were just smart enough to frame their grievances in a manner that didn’t hurt the game. They blamed large-market owners…which isn’t much better, but is much more palatable…because it doesn’t hurt the product.
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