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Washington Post

The golden age of baseball is now

By GEORGE WILL
Published October 16, 2006

WASHINGTON - Sins can be such fun. Of the seven deadly ones, only envy does not give the sinner at least momentary pleasure. And an eighth, schadenfreude - enjoyment of other persons' misfortunes - is almost the national pastime.

Speaking of baseball, two Saturdays ago old Dodger Stadium was reverberating with fans' excitement. It might seem odd to call "old" a ballpark that opened in 1962, but it is tied with the Nationals' RFK Stadium as the National League's second-oldest, behind only the Cubs' 1914 Wrigley Field. Anyway, shortly before their Dodgers were beaten by the Mets in the National League Division Series, Angelenos emitted animal roars of approval as they watched, on the giant screen in left-center field, the Tigers defeat the Yankees in the ALDS.

Some Dodgers fans still nurse a grudge they inherited from Brooklynites when the Dodgers decamped for California after the 1957 season. But rooting against the Yankees is as American as apple pie. There also is resentment of the Yankees' financial advantage that has been inimical to baseball's competitive balance.

That, however, is a diminishing problem, for two reasons: Major League Baseball has implemented more redistribution of resources, and a new breed of general managers are using new player-evaluation metrics to wring more baseball value from fewer dollars.

The Yankees' payroll of $206.4-million is 2.4 times the Tigers' payroll. The Yankees' third baseman earns 68.7 times the salary of the Mets' all-star third baseman Alex Rodriguez, $25.7-million; David Wright, $374,000. The shortstop makes approximately what the Marlins' team makes (Derek Jeter, $20.6-million; Marlins, $20.68-million). But the 2006 Yankees did baseball the favor of demonstrating the steeply declining utility of the last $100-million of payroll.

New York, the world's financial capital, takes money very seriously. And New York has been the intellectual epicenter of political liberalism, which has consistently preached, and has consistently disproved, the efficacy of pitching large sums of money at social problems. In the city where America's welfare state was first imagined and implemented, the entitlement mentality bred by the welfare state includes the assumption that the Yankees are entitled to be in the World Series, which they have not been since - gasp - 2003.

There still are disparities between baseball teams that are impossible between NFL and NBA teams because those leagues have salary caps and more centralized revenue sources. Nevertheless, when the Tigers dispatched the Yankees that Saturday, baseball was guaranteed its seventh different World Series winner in seven years. There never have been seven consecutive Super Bowls, or NBA championships, won by seven different teams.

Baseball's supposed "golden age" of the 1940s and 1950s was not so golden outside New York. In 1947 the Yankees won the American League pennant and beat the Dodgers in the World Series. In 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952 and 1953 the Yankees were World Series winners over the Dodgers, Phillies, Giants, Dodgers and Dodgers, respectively. If the Phillies had not beaten the Dodgers in the 10th inning of the last game of the 1950 season, every World Series game for five years would have been played in New York. And if 103 wins, which usually are enough to win the pennant, had sufficed in 1954 (the Indians won 111), the Yankees would have won 10 pennants in a row, because they also won in 1955, 1956, 1957 and 1958.

Great Yankee teams have been good for baseball. In the 1930s, one of every four tickets sold to an American League game was for a game involving the Yankees. And this year, when the Yankees were drawing 4,200,518 fans to Yankee Stadium, they also played in front of 3,080,290 on the road. But improved competitive balance is one reason why, for the third consecutive year, MLB set an attendance record (76,043,902), and why today is MLB's golden age, even west of the Hudson River.

[Last modified October 16, 2006, 09:05:33]