As the Yankees closed out the Phillies last Wednesday night with an emphatic 7-3 victory and the 27th World Series championship in this acclaimed franchise’s history, attention quickly turned from the accomplishments of this team and settled instead on the broader implications of the result.  Doom and gloom, fire and pestilence were the words of the day.  Listening to the talking heads from everywhere except New York would lead an observer to believe that baseball’s Armageddon was nigh.  It could survive a lockout, an earthquake-shortened World Series, a Pete Rose-betting scandal, the steroid era, the complete indifference of every human under the age of 30 and even Bud Selig, but the Yankees winning with an outrageously bloated payroll was what was putting the game on the mat and it was about to be counted out.

Sadly, in the aftermath of this win, amazingly little was said about the quality of this team, about the remarkable durability of their “Core Four” –Jeter, Pettitte, Posada and Rivera- or the performance of the newcomers Texeira, Sabathia, Burnett and Swisher.  All anyone could talk about was the fact that the Evil Empire had “bought” another championship and probably ruined the National Pastime. Now, don’t get me wrong, baseball has clearly become a game involving the “haves” and the “have-nots” and the overall competitive balance has slipped below most other professional sports leagues.  Jerry Springer, with his shockingly immobile hips and spastic, seizure-like movements had a better chance of winning Dancing With the Stars than the Kansas City Royals had of taking home hardware this year. The reality is that at the start of any season, at least 20 teams have no least shot of competing on the frozen tundra fields that is November baseball.  But let’s find the right guy with his hands around baseball’s throat and inexorably squeezing the life out of it. Blaming the Yankees for collecting free-agents, out-spending everyone and winning their second title of the decade would be like parents going on vacation, leaving their teenagers at home with a fully stocked bar and wads of cash and then blaming the kids for turning their domicile into a scene from a  Khloe Kardashian pre-intervention home video. “Isn’t that what you wanted us to do while you were away”?? 

The Yankees are making money at a rate unimagined by baseball’s hierarchy as recently as 20 years ago. They have local revenues to the tune of about $290M and that doesn’t include undeclared revenues from subscriber fees for their own YES Network that is estimated to be another $150-200M per year. With no salary cap to limit their spending they are doing exactly what their fans expect them to do, buying the best players available.  It’s deliciously ironic (and in many ways beautifully symmetrical) that all of this outrage comes just a few months after the architect of this madness announced his retirement.  Donald Fehr, Executive Director of the MLB Players Association, announced in June that he would be leaving his post after nearly 25 years of bullying baseball’s owners into creating a system that was guaranteed to drive salaries into the stratosphere.  Having seen his grand plan come to a fruition that even he couldn’t have envisioned, Mr. Fehr is walking away while the Golden Goose is still technically alive, but definitely on life-support.  If you want a villain, the moon-faced Fehr is Darth Vader and Lex Luther rolled into one doughy package.  He cajoled an often leaderless pack of themselves-greedy owners into believing that almost unfettered free agency and effectively-uncapped payrolls was the way to go and the result is what we have today. The argument could be made that the NBA thrived with a similar system in the 80’s and 90’s when four teams –Lakers, Celtics, Bulls and Pistons- dominated and the bad teams stayed bad.  But basketball was always about national audiences and derived most of its income from Network TV revenues which thrived on titanic matchups.  With the exception of the national followings of the mighty Yankees and the continent-crossing Dodgers, baseball has conversely mainly been a regional game where loyal followers supported each local market and the revenue streams worked accordingly. In that sense it is similar to the National Hockey League, which woke up to the reality of its own impending self-immolation and instituted a salary-cap just in time.  Major League Baseball must do the same and do it quickly.

In eras of radically different financial realities, the Yankees have always been able to put together dominant teams.  This time, through no fault of their own, few are extolling the virtues of the team that dismantled the Twins, Angels and Phillies on their way to their latest championship. A team that is not dissimilar to their Murderer’s Row outfit of the 20’s, Dimaggio’s dynasty in the 40’s and 50’s and the Bronx Bombers of the late 70’s, it would be no surprise if 5 or 6 members of this team found themselves in Cooperstown in a few years.  Yankee teams have always engendered envy and been the target of much vituperation, but the difference this time is they’re being unfairly blamed for the overall condition of the game itself.  To find that culprit the owners must look in the mirror and at the departing back of the original Dr. Evil.