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In my last blog post you read about how salary caps limit the income of NHL players. If there was no cap then these players would be making millions of dollars more. The salary caps existence has been debated for many years now on whether all sports should have it or not. Currently, in the U.S. only the MLB has no salary cap, and you see players like Miguel Cabrera making 29.2 million dollars a year. I think Cabrera is one of the best MLB players, but I think he’s getting a pretty generous deal. After doing all the research I believe that all the sports around the world should have a salary cap.
Whenever people think of MLB teams, usually the first team thought of is the Yankees. The reason is because they win championships and play in the biggest media market in the world. Since they play in such a big market it allows them to pay big money for superstar players. The Yankees outspend every team in the MLB by a landslide. They win year after year and always have a shot at a World Series. You know who always doesn’t have a shot at a World Series? Small market teams. These small market teams can’t afford superstar players and as a result they lose games and don’t make the playoffs. If there was a salary cap, “They would give poorer, small-market teams a chance to compete, and this competitive balance draws in fans and benefits the league as a whole.” This happens a lot in baseball, fans know their team won’t make the playoffs, and once they fall out of contention people stop watching and going to games. When the outcome is already known before the game, it ruins the fun of watching the game. This happens a lot in the MLB and it’s even worse in the EPL (English Premier League). In the EPL, “The wealthiest clubs buy up the best players and dominate; only four teams (Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, and Arsenal) have won the league since 1995.” It must be fun being a fan of those four teams, but any other team it probably isn’t. When teams dominate this badly it ruins the excitement of watching the games. Everyone knows in the pre-season who is going to the championship, so why bother watch? The domination of a couple teams has ruined leagues in the past, and the EPL is lucky that the English love soccer so much.
A perfect example of the salary cap is the NHL. The NHL has a hard cap salary cap meaning you can’t go over the cap, only the NFL and the NHL have hard caps. When you watch a NHL game you don’t know who will win. The worst team can beat the best team on any given night. It gets even better in the playoffs too. When you look at the past the NHL has had many 7 and 8 seeds (the 8 seed is the last spot) move on and beat the top ranked teams. There are two conferences, so these 7 and 8 seeds finish about 15 out of 30 and they beat top 5 teams in the playoffs. A couple of years ago the LA Kings won the Stanley Cup as an 8 seed. The playoff format has changed now with the NHL into a bracket format, but what it used to be the lowest seed plays the top seed, no matter what round. This means that the Kings knocked off the best team left in their conference every single round until they were champs. Also, every series in the NHL playoff is close. There are numerous game 7’s and pretty much every game is a one goal game coming down to the wire. There was only one sweep last year in the NHL playoffs. The Ducks beat the Jets in 4 games, but 3 of those games were decided by 1 goal and some of the games went to overtime. The NHL players don’t make as much, but the sport has the best competitive balance that will make the players more money in the future because the viewer ratings are strong. All NHL players make good money for the skills they bring to the table, except for the rookies who are locked into rookie contracts. Whether that’s ethical or not is questionable and I’ll break it down in my next post.
I agree that all professional sports should have a salary cap but do you think introducing a salary cap in the MLB would change it too much or effect baseball negatively in any way?
ReplyDeleteI think that your topic is very interesting. I really liked how you finished your post by saying ill answer this question in my next post. It made me interested to read your next blog post.
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