Tuesday, January 6, 2009

How To Create Parity In Baseball



In yesterday’s The Sporting News, there is an interesting article on how to fix Free Agency and to create parity in Major League Baseball. Simply don’t offer long-term deals. Here is the proposal:




No deal over 3 years for players under 30 years old
No deal over 2 years for players 30 - 35
And no deal over 1 year for players over 35.




This sounds just like what I’ve been saying. Players want long term deals, they sign a long term deal, the market changes after the first two or three years, and the player wants to re-negotiate because they are under-paid, but happened to have five years left on their deal.

The old Brooklyn Dodgers had it right; they only offered one-year deals to players, coaches, and managers. Walter Alston signed 26 consecutive one year deals as manager of the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers.

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