In light of the Torii Hunter/Mike Sweeney champagne payoff, I wanted to ramble a little about how a different sport handles this kind of thing. Baseball, with an eye to the extremely corrupt era before the post-1921 cleanup of the sport, has extremely harsh rules about transactions between players — technically, the punishment for Hunter and Sweeney was a three year suspension — but other sports take a radically different approach.
Take pro bicycling. Bicycling’s a much more complicated team sport, with many teams of differing strengths and weaknesses competing against each other at once. Every day stage is like a game, every race like a season.
There, payoffs are entirely normal, and it doesn’t undermine competition at all. A small, underfunded team might be employed by one of the stronger teams to perform a certain task: to attack at a certain point, or to take the lead and buy the stronger teams’ riders an easier day to recover, and so on. It means that the smaller teams make money, helping their long-term fortunes, and the stronger teams end up spreading the wealth while adding an additional layer of strategy and competition.
I think there’s a perfect baseball parallel: September games. When teams get to carry 40 players on their active roster, the game changes. Teams out of contention field lineups that are intentionally, knowingly not the best present-day competitive squads, because they want to see what some 20-year-old outfielder has, and armed with twenty pitchers, they can afford to burn two every inning playing petty matchup games if they want.
You’ll hear about it if a competitive team faces a squad way out of any race: if the out-of-it manager is old school enough, he’ll put his veterans out there and try and put up a good fight to “preserve the integrity of the game” while other franchises will argue it’s in their best long-term competitive interests to field younger squads and screw around to see what their prospects have.
This can affect playoff races. Say a week into September, the wild card teams in the AL are Detroit, Chicago, and Oakland, and they’re separated by a game or two. The White Sox face the Twins, the Indians the Angels, and Oakland the Rangers.
What lineups those teams face could determine who goes to the playoffs and who doesn’t. If the Rangers try out some fresh-faced starters and get socked around by the A’s, if the Twins hand out playing time to prospects up from their deep farm system and the White Sox score at will on their way to a series sweep, or if the Tigers face a Mariners team eager to get on with rebuilding, well, any of those teams could swing the race.
Why not, then, allow teams to openly pay off a team to beat their opponent, even to – to borrow more directly from pro cycling – to hire them to play the team that has the best chance to be competitive?
It would provide a way for the A’s to ensure that if they lose the wild card, it won’t be because the Tigers rolled over a half-asleep Mariners team.
You’d have to work out a way to make it above-board and if not public, at least disclosed within baseball. You could file, for instance, with MLB, and say “We agree to pay the Twins $1,000,000 per win against the White Sox, with an additional $500,000 if they sweep the series.”
The downside, of course, is that a team like Kansas City might use that as blackmail, setting a price per game and threatening to run out some AAAA-level pitcher if their price isn’t met. You could simply prohibit any offer except by paying teams, though that wouldn’t stop the kind of negotiation-through-media we see in other situations.
And moreover, the other problem is that it could be (as it is in cycling) a larger advantage for rich teams in races against poorer teams: New York could easily afford to spend the money to make sure a wild card opponent faced stiff competition through the end of the season, but Minnesota doesn’t have the kind of budgets to pay teams off to play hard against New York in the same way.
Besides, I don’t think it’s that huge a deal: the difference between giving the Royals an incentive to run out a lineup with a better chance to win that day and saving the money wouldn’t be all huge a difference. It’s certainly a lot less than the interleague draw, for instance.
There’s no chance that anything like this happens, but what turns out to be really interesting is bicycling’s approach to another one of baseball’s deadly ills: performance-enhancing drug use. It’s even weirder, and I think it’s the direction baseball will end up having to head.
3 comments ↓
Occasionally I’ve toyed with a different variation of this: suppose that after the July trading deadline (or 81 games, or the allstar break, or whatever) all teams that are under .500 can have their rosters expanded to 30 players — and the rosters remain expanded until everyone gets enlarged in September, even if they climb above .500
Now, I suppose a team that is just bumping along at .500 might deliberately lose a game at the deadline just to get the free roster spave, but I don’t think that would be too much of a problem. And it would be a rare season where such a team ended up in the postseason. But it would give teams where the season is already a lost cause a chance to get started early on rebuilding, trying out kids from the minors, etc.
You wrote: “You’d have to work out a way to make it above-board and if not public, at least disclosed within baseball. You could file, for instance, with MLB, and say “We agree to pay the Twins $1,000,000 per win against the White Sox, with an additional $500,000 if they sweep the series.”
That wouldn’t work, because the obverse of paying a team to win is paying the other team to lose. That’s exactly how Baseball’s gambling problem started. This couldn’t work and would destroy the integrity of the game.
I disagree – here, it’s offering to pay the Royals to play their veterans, say, instead of testing their kids.
If you don’t pay them, they go about their business.
You only allow pro-win incentives, essentially, that have to be public. The Yankees can’t say “play the rookies against us, or against another team with some wacky playoff implications, and we’ll pay you if you lose.”
I think the real danger there is that the Royals threaten to lay down if they’re not paid: they manage to say that they’re going to put out a horrible team each time and the going rate for using their good players is $500k/game.
In the end, though, I don’t bring this up because I think it’s workable, much less acceptable, but it’s an interesting way to think about the problem: there’s a whole other sport that deals with this issue in an entirely different way, and it works.
That’s fascintating to me.