Who wants a beige rainbow?
Rob James
Parity in sport leagues should be an emergent not engineered feature.
Baseball, as Renaissance literature professor and MLB Commissioner Bart Giamatti (Paul’s pop) wrote, is “designed to break your heart.” What is more, it is statistically certain to do so. For twenty-nine out of thirty major league teams, with that thirtieth squad changing almost every year, the final day of the season is a quiet one, bereft of confetti.
Throughout my life I have watched the big market clubs, or owners with limitless budgets or adjacent businesses, scarf up the best ballplayers. I idly started to pine for some idyllic league in which every team, including my beloved Giants or your beloved whoever, has its aliquot prorated share of All-Stars and Cy Youngs.
Then I watched Game 1 of last year’s World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees. I had zero rooting interest in either squad, shedding no tears for any loser in this bracket. But I beheld Los Angeles bat three MVPs 1-2-3 against the Gothams sporting Judge, Stanton and Soto. It was the most compelling heavyweight boxing match I had seen in years. I still watch the condensed video. Even the scoreless innings were chess matches, not weak strikeouts or soft 6-3 groundouts.
So I asked myself and my friends: What good is parity anyway? Who wants to look at a beige rainbow, not one with vibrant colors elevating the vista?
Rarely do my sports companions and I concur with such a thunderous consensus. My posse concludes that all of us are better off with decade-ish dynasties—accumulations of talent that exhibit any sport at its best.
You know them. The 1920s or 1950s Yankees, the 1970s Reds, the 1980s Athletics, through to the present. As long as upsets are plausible in those periods, dynasties of a limited duration actually strengthen a sport.
Who would control for parity in any event? Many factors contribute to the presence (or absence) of the spread of inherent talent and the actual results. More generally, as between a league and a team, which is the economic entity, and what is the product? (See the Bibliography for some of the economic literature on this subject.)
a. The league itself has plenty of knobs. It sets the rules, hires umps, shares revenue, negotiates certain media rights, runs minor leagues and national and international drafts, deals with international exhibitions and expansion, addresses franchise relocations and expansions, negotiates collective bargaining agreements, markets the game, disciplines rules violations, runs marquee events like the World Series and All-Star Games, and preserves the legacy of the game in the Hall of Fame and otherwise.
For example, take the playoff structure, which allows a team that gets hot late to cruise in from a low seed to the title. The 1995 introduction of the wild card began the run on the bank. The playoffs expanded, even perhaps absurdly in 2022, so now more than half the league is more or less in the hunt for an October spot in the final couple of weeks of the regular season. There is revenue sharing, perhaps the greatest socialist movement in America—an astounding 48% revenue sharing across all sources of income.
Then, working at cross currents, the absence of a salary cap or salary floor inevitably shifts free agent signings toward the largest markets and hungriest ownerships. If there is one area in which I would attempt to level the collective playing field, it would be for the league and owners to negotiate with the players’ union for a combination salary cap and salary floor—hard limits not soft taxes. Part of owning a franchise should be the commitment, to its fans, not to use low payrolls as a means to tanking.
b. Teams decide how much to spend, depending on their respective markets and ownership wallets and appetites, after taking into account the net incentives after revenue sharing.
c. Players can decide they want to play only on the West Coast, or to avoid certain teams, or (increasingly) to decide whom they want to play with. The desire to play for a winner is in tension with the ambition to make a mark on one’s own, and the former seems to prevail.
d. Fans vote with their feet, their eyeballs, and their dollars. Some will tolerate a “tank to rank,” while others expect to be in the thick of the races year after year.
When all is said and done, 16 different teams have won since 1990—only the Yankees appear frequently during that time, and plenty of upsets get through, especially in the shorter early playoff rounds. That is a pretty good spread of results, while also allowing mini-dynasties to accumulate for some duration.
Other sports validate this idea. What memories do fans treasure regardless of “home team”? A bunch of .500 clubs? No. Lombardi’s Packers. Wooden’s Bruins. The Montreal Canadiens. The 1960s Celtics. Later times too: What if Robert Parrish had stayed with Golden State, and Kevin McHale had been drafted by New York or LA? All of us would have been impoverished by the counterfactual nonexistence of the Larry Bird 1980s Celtics, even Warriors, Knicks or Lakers fans.
When you look back at a lifetime of participating in or alongside sports, the arts, or any other human endeavor, I believe that what you will remember the most are the times when the performance most fully embodies the purpose of the field in question. Not just in freaky All-Star exhibitions, but over the course of a regular season (or at least a playoff season). Here in baseball, that means a couple of teams (or, better yet, maybe four to eight teams) that have 25-person rosters brimming with talent and strategy and that realize the game at its highest level of conception.
Who mourns for Ozymandias? History teaches us that empires eventually overstretch and fall (Edward Gibbon, Oswald Spengler, Jared Diamond, Isaac Asimov, George Lucas)—in sport, often by holding on to aging stars way past their shelf life, or by missing when the nature of the game changes (West Coast offense in football, three-point shot in basketball, three true outcomes in baseball perhaps).
My conclusion is that parity is not an independent virtue. It is not something that should be engineered to happen. Rather, the spread of talents and outcomes may or may not emerge from paying fair value for talent and by structuring rules to facilitate the health of the game. Maybe parity will spring forth, maybe it won’t and dynasties will bubble and pop. That is as it should be.
This emergence concept is studied in science, where the individual collisions of atoms lead to wind patterns and movements of galaxies! Emergence amid complexity is a hot theory now, and it applies throughout our world—in mundane, cosmic, and even spiritual ways.
Giamatti concluded, “I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.” Thus, the World Series victory of either a swaggering dynasty or an outrageous upstart, emanating from countless factors that no one actor could possibly control, is but one of the many mysteries in the states of our own being.
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Bibliography
Helmut Dietl, Egon Franck, Tariq Hasan & Markus Lang, Governance of Professional Sports Leagues—Cooperatives versus Contracts, University of Zurich working paper No. 59 (2007).
A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind,” in A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti (1998).
Nathaniel Grow, Regulating Professional Sports Leagues, 72 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 573 (2015).
Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (2002).
Gregory J. Pelnar, Competition and Cooperation Between Professional Sports Franchises: The Impact on Ticket Prices (Compass Lexecon, 2009).
Daniel A. Rascher, Ph.D., & Andrew D. Schwarz, Competitive Balance in Sports: “Peculiar Economics” Over the Last Thirty Years, 29 Competition 57 (California Lawyers Association Antitrust and Unfair Competition Law Section) (2019).
Daniel A. Rascher, Ph.D., Competitive Balance: On the Field and In the Courts, Sports Advisory Group (n.d.).