Competitive Balance

Baseball Digest, May, 2000 by George Vass

Still only a dream in majors

Long history of the game indicates that parity among teams has never really been achieved

TO EMPLOY CONTEMPORARY jargon, "C'mon Bud Selig, get real!" Competitive balance? Who's kidding whom?

Not that Selig, now armed with virtually unlimited power as baseball commissioner, isn't serious about yearning for a contending team in each city. His heartfelt longing, however, is reminiscent of President Herbert Hoover's dream of a "chicken in every pot." What Hoover got instead was the turkey of the Great Depression.

Competitive balance indeed! It's like trying to square the circle.

On hearing the phrase "competitive balance," a romantic might hum the tune of the hit song "The Impossible Dream" from the Broadway musical Man of LaMancha, which is still bouncing around dinner theaters. Selig runs the risk of resembling its hero, Don Quixote, who set forth to slay dragons and ended up tilting at windmills.

A more scientifically minded skeptic might refer to the eternal quest for a perpetual motion machine. The U.S. Patent Office has been deluged for two centuries with countless patent applications for such a device. Sadly, none of a myriad of ingenious contraptions, despite inventors' claims, puts forth more energy than it absorbs. The basic laws of the universe render such a result unachieveable.

Immutable scientific laws have nothing to do with any attempt by Selig to construct a level playing field for the game he loves and governs, but if history is a reliable guide--and it often is--such a commendable goal is doomed to failure.

Still, you have to admire Selig's ambition and convictions, which he set out eloquently in an interview by Chicago Tribune baseball writer Phil Rogers.

Among Selig's statements: "I was a fan for many years. I ran a club (Milwaukee Brewers), and one thing I've known, I've been convinced of, is that every fan has to have hope and faith. If you remove hope and faith from the mind of a fan, you destroy the fabric of the sport. It's my job to restore it."

Hope and faith. You can't knock either the sentiment or Selig's aspiration to bring relief to benighted fans of perennially underachieving teams. Unfortunately, however, neither hope nor faith has been universal for fans in every major league city at any time in the game's history. Or ever will be.

To quote the Bible, with all due respect: "Ye have the poor always with you." Substitute "also-rans" for "poor" and you're talking baseball.

These days, of course, the term "small market" seems to have replaced "also-ran" as if a team's destiny were always governed by the size of its economic base. Selig touched on this in commenting that "the game does have serious problems. Fans in cities like Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee (all small market) know it."

But then so do fans in Chicago (large market), though their grievances may be different--such as never being able to enjoy having their team play in a World Series. Or. almost never, considering that man's lifespan is limited. The Cubs last gratified them in 1945, and the White Sox haven't raised an American League pennant since 1959.

(From 1940 through 1966, the Cubs finished over .500 in only three of 27 seasons, including the pennant-winning year of 1945. They've finished over .500 in merely 14 of the last 60 seasons, including the division-title years of 1984 and 1989),

Another large market team, the Anaheim Angels, is now competing in the 40th season of its existence. During the first 39, the Angels have achieved an unblemished, if also uneviable, record in World Series competition. They've never been involved in one.

It seems that despite what the bean-counters may say, baseball success is not directly linked to whether a team is "large market" or "small market." It's not a hard and fast rule that money teams win (witness the Baltimore Orioles and Los Angeles Dodgers of 1999) and impecunious ones lose.

After all, each of the four cities--Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee--mentioned in Selig's preceding statement has relished World Series play during the decades in which Chicago and Anaheim have languished without pennants.

To be fair, Selig recognizes that more than merely spreading the wealth is needed to assure fans that every team has a reasonable' chance of meeting high expectations. He stresses the need for competence on the part of the personnel running the teams.

"If you do a good job, you have a good team," he said. "It's not necessarily about money."

He continued: "When you study history, you understand the importance of doing a good job. People talk about the Dodgers and Yankees as always having spent money but (the Brooklyn Dodgers under) Branch Rickey and (Yankees under) Ed Barrow and George Weiss (also) had brilliant organizations."

True enough. The Yankees won 29 A.L. pennants and 20 World Series in a period of 43 years from 1922 through 1964 under Barrow and Weiss. Rickey, revered by many as the predominant front office "genius" of the game, built the famous "Boys of Summer" Dodger teams of the late 1940s and 1950s, winners of six N.L. pennants.