“Yet somehow, when the Yankees do it, you object to it. Your team does it too.”
At the end of 2016, when the amounts were finalized for the season, the Yankees were one of six teams that broke the numbers and over spent. Dodgers, Giants, Red Sox, Tigers and the Cubs were the other five. And two of them are first time offenders. The Yankees were 14 time offenders.
And according to Yankee Editorials and Reactions, they ran out of money trying to acquire a second pen operative in Brad Zeigler.
But what I’m trying to get across is that all this talk about who they trade for and acquire through different means is not home grown. And you’re telling me that this huge amount of players they acquire they just let go with a payoff or buyout. Can other teams do that with their small market in those amounts. I don’t think so. This just makes the Yankees a big bully not caring what happens to the league. I don’t like people like this.
And the reason I dislike it is because they are aware why the league set up this system to be a deterrent to the teams with the money to do damage to the small market teams who can’t afford to throw out the huge sums to make themselves competitive with the large market teams. And teams like the Dodgers, and Red Sox, and Giants are very aware of what they are doing. They are the repeaters. And the Yankees are the worst of the group. They are literally telling MLB that they don’t care if they are punished and they will do what they want, right or wrong.
It’s like a person ignoring a law because they don’t care about anyone else or how much damage they will do. The others are bad enough. The Yankees are horrible for it. Oh, I don’t have a particular team I root for. I just enjoy the game. I’ve been in it all my life in one way or another, about 60 years. But I dislike a group who doesn’t care how much damage they do to other people, knowingly.
rwood
They already had acquired relievers. They have a lockdown bullpen as it is. The Yankees are NOT out of money.
BTW, the Nationals are also over the threshold now.
What I’m trying to tell you, which you refuse to understand, is that 11 of the 25-man roster and 18 of the 40-man roster are products of the Yankees’ farm system. That’s about as high as any other team. They’re not some collection of big-name free agents. Three of the 25 and four of the 40 are major league free agents.
IOW, the Yankees are a largely homegrown team, and will almost certainly be getting more so over the next two or three years. I know you don’t want to hear that, but that is the fact of the matter.
WHEN they get under the payroll tax threshold, people like you will complain about that.
You don’t seem to understand. They let most of those guys go. They’re the kind of players who move in and out of every organization. They don’t require buyouts. Most of them have moved on to the very same small market teams you say are being damaged.
The fact is that the more the Yankees and the Dodgers and the others spend, the more of their money the small-market teams get. It’s called revenue sharing.
When was the last time the Yankees won the World Series? 2009. Since then, teams such as the Royals, Cardinals, and others have won it, and teams like the Indians have been there but lost. Other then the Giants, nobody has won more than once since then. The competitive balance has been excellent.
And there is no violation here — just a tax. It’s sort of like buying beer. Nothing wrong, but you’re getting hit with a tax for it. There is no salary cap, just a “wealth tax” for going over a certain amount — and the loss of draft picks — as well as limits on international bonus spending. If you exceed those, you’re limited to $300,000 in international bonus spending for two years.
The big market teams aren’t breaking any rules, and it doesn’t look like they’re doing any real harm to competitive balance.