Rick's Cafe Americain

I should be miserable. I am a hockey fan and - for the second time in a week - the National Hockey League has cancelled the season. A friend went from pissing bile to cautiously ecstatic and then back to the bile-pissing. I’m not upset, though. I’m proud that the NHLPA stood strong and refused to have a shitty deal shoved down their throats. 

As long as you like the British football league system…

I can’t tell what aspect of Premiership soccer you are referring to.

The fact that there are only a few teams that can realistically compete for a title, which is where baseball is headed—and, to some degree, is there already.

I believe sports are a lot more interesting when the starting “playing” field is somewhat close to level.  They are a lot less interesting when a certain segment of teams have to hope for “miracle” seasons.

The NFL is by far the best and most successful of the leagues and has the best economic equality of all the leagues—NBA is second.

It isn’t true in baseball. Oakland (despite their embarrassing playoff collapses) and Minnesota have shown that savvy roster management can allow you to build a competitive team on a budget.

And the NFL is where it is not because of the salary cap but because of the revenue sharing arrangement. The solution to the disparity of incomes in hockey and baseball is to have the teams share more, not to bind the wallets of the richest teams to the amount that the poorest can pay. All that does is reward bad owners for their incompetence and line the pockets of the successful clubs with extra profit.

It is true in baseball.

Yes, sometimes the teams with the most money will still suck because of crappy management decisions (see Mets, Dodgers).  And sometimes innovative and good management will find a way to moderately succeed with not much money (see Oakland, Minnesota).  But that does not mean that the game is not fundamentally imbalanced. 

It is not (yet) as bad as premiership soccer, but there are certain teams, including your Pirates, who have no hope of competing other than maybe getting lucky and hitting lightening for a year or two—until their emerging stars contracts come up for renewal and they have to get rid of them.

Sports leagues should be, in my opinion, roughly equal.  You can’t ever balance the fact that New York is more exciting than Kansas City, but having a system where certain teams can always outspend other teams by factors of 2, 3, 4 is not a level playing field and makes the game less interesting.

A pure free market is not healthy for sports leagues.  I do agree with your last paragraph.