Dean Juipe: Baseball errs as rich teams buy success

Wednesday, Oct. 23, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

IT HAS TAKEN 21 years for conclusive proof and this year's World Series may be it. Two decades after the birth of free agency it's apparent that money -- above all else -- determines which teams will be successful.

What was once a trend is now a fact of baseball life. The more a team can spend, the more it wins.

The wealthiest teams have become the dominant teams.

While the National Football League has absolute revenue sharing that levels the playing field between the have and have-not owners, there's a wide discrepancy among Major League Baseball teams. Those with money -- derived from rich cable deals and large-market audiences -- are overpowering their financially impaired brethren with inescapable regularity.

This unfortunate turn of events is precisely what critical fans feared and were predicting as early as New Year's Eve, 1974. That night, Cy Young Award-winning pitcher Catfish Hunter became the first beneficiary of free agency, leaving the Oakland A's and signing with the New York Yankees for the then-ungodly figure of $3.75 million for five years.

Shortly after, an arbitrator ruled pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally were free agents and the bidding wars were on. (Baseball's never-ending labor discontent starts to snowball here, too, as the owners react to the arbitrator's ruling by locking the players out of spring training in 1975.)

Initially, the spendthrift teams weren't necessarily the most successful, although the Yankees were division champs four years out of the first six that free agency existed. But they would occasionally stumble come playoff time, and for many years an underprivileged team or two would emerge as a World Series participant (or, at least, candidate).

But not any more.

The easiest way of handicapping the 1996 season (and playoffs) was to take the team with the highest payroll. Not coincidentally, in both the American and National leagues, the final teams alive were the teams that ranked Nos. 1 and 2 in payroll; New York, $66.6 million, and Baltimore, $61.4 million, in the AL, and Atlanta, $54.3 million, and St. Louis, $49.8 million, in the NL.

A further comparison: Atlanta is paying its top three starting pitchers (Greg Maddux, John Smoltz and Tom Glavine) $16.25 million this season and that's almost $1 million more than the cost-conscious Montreal Expos paid their entire 25-man roster. Perhaps it's no surprise then that the Braves are closing in on a second straight World Series title while the Expos, admirable overachievers or not, have long since dispersed for the winter.

Money begets money, as the wealthy teams are showcased on cable TV, have new stadiums and, as a result, increased access to free-agent players. Meanwhile, teams on the lower end of the pay scale struggle to get by.

This is precisely what was forecast 21 years ago when free agency -- which was inevitable -- arrived. Where baseball has erred, however, is in its failure to adopt revenue sharing, the mechanism that helped bring parity to the National Football League.