It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how quickly the draft order can become irrelevant. If I’m afraid to sign Player X because he might ask too much, I’ll pass on him and the team after me with more money to burn is going to draft him and sign him. The rich get richer and the poor are left playing moneyball…I could be the least cost-conscious guy in the world and simply be unable to sign a player due to my financial bottom line.

Sorry. I’m nowhere close to being a rocket scientist so your argument hasn’t presuaded me. If a signing bonus is prohibitively costly then you, as a GM, make adjustments. But if the resources aren’t there (to sign a draft pick) as a GM of a big league club, you’ve mismanaged your resources [by either diappointing your paying fanbase or by squandering money on players who disappointed that fanbase]. Consider the bonus money as a way to offset the ability of a team to artificially cost-control a player for six years after making his MLB debut and cost it out over the six to nine years that drafted player plays for the organization if he’s good enough. Of course, then there’s the drafted players who receive bonuses who never make it this far; oh well, it’s part of the game.

So, the rights to a drafted player, the draft itself, and the revenue-sharing are all institutional gimmiks that have been adopted to level the playing field. Why punish teams and players who are willing to come together on a negotiated bonus?

Personally, I tend to cringe when this free market ideology runs amok and puts millions of people in the poor house, or maybe I should say, no house at all

I’d really enjoy speaking to this but I’ve been reminded all too often that this isn’t the place for that; the free-market ideology will not be running amok here!

This argument is a another red herring. It is possible to control spending without controlling spending on micro, player-to-player level (salary cap, revenue sharing, etc.).

Red herring? What Selig is proposing isn’t on a micro, player-to-player level. And with that established, you damed-near just answered my red herring question: that it is possible to cost-control with a salary cap. So, do you support a salary cap? Because that’s what my question was getting at: a macro level cost-control mechanism not a player-by-player decision.

With teams on a more even playing field, organizational success will become more dependent on things like savviness, ingenuity, and smart risk-taking rather than built in, structural market inequalities.

You just complained about this earlier didn’t you: “The rich get richer and the poor are left playing moneyball.” Or is that not what you meant by ‘moneyball’.

rather than built in, structural market inequalities.

Like the pesky consumption habits of the fans themselves and how they fit into all this?

But under the current rules/policy arrangement, I’m simply advocating “no more meddling with the way things are”. Personally, I’d be okay with doing away with the draft, territorial rights, revenue sharing, anti-trust exemption, etc.

Why should a player have to work for slave wages for six years.

Boy, I sure as hell wouldn’t mind making 400,000+ grand a year for six years until I earned emancipation from slave wages….

:0

with regard to baseball, the entire argument is stupid because too many people on both sides of the argument take it for granted that since the teams are in competition with each other on the field they must be in competition economically, too.

But they aren’t. If the Red Sox, Orioles and Rays all went bankrupt, leaving the Yankees alone to dominate the market, that wouldn’t benefit the Yankees bottom line at all. What if all other 29 teams were driven out of business entirely? Woo hoo! They’d have a monopoly. But who would they play against? The product they sell is baseball games, and they are incapable of creating that product without at least one other “competitor”.

The reality is that economically the league is a single unit. (That’s why we call the teams “franchises”.) It’s fallacious to treat the teams as if they are competing economically with one another. They are competing against other sports and other forms of entertainment, not other teams in the same league.

I bet there are at least 1,000,000 business men/women who could have done a better job than Bud Selig has done for the past 20 years. He’s a bumbling idiot who watched over a 100+ year old monopolized business, during a very prosperous time to be a “Baseball Man”.