Miami Marlins: Proof Positive Revenue Sharing Should Stop in Major League Baseball

 

The Miami Marlins are the embodiment of what is wrong with Major League Baseball.  The Marlins and owner Jeffrey Loria spent money like drunken sailors this past off-season splurging to lure Jose Reyes, Heath Bell, and Mark Buehrle to Miami’s new stadium.  Now, all three are gone along with Josh Johnson and Hanley Ramirez and most likely soon to be joined by Ricky Nolasco and possibly Giancarlo Stanton.

The Marlins did this on their own choosing.  However, now, they will receive money from the revenue sharing pool which was set up to close the gap between large and small market teams.  This is where Major League Baseball is off.

Teams like the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and New York Mets are forced to share their revenue with teams that are considered small markets and basically unable to support themselves.  However, these teams that pay into revenue sharing then watch as a team like the Marlins dump millions into free agents and then trade them off.

The Marlins are a disgrace to baseball and owner Jeffrey Loria is a major part of the problem. MLB has been complicit in this current dismantling of the team because it allowed Loria, after a failed experience in Montreal with the Expos that resulted in the Expos becoming property of baseball, to come back into the league.

Now, it is worse because Loria somehow managed to extort the city of Miami into building his team a new stadium with taxpayers on the hook for millions upon millions of dollars.  The Marlins have not changed from the 1990’s and early 2000’s when they essentially traded away their World Series teams.

Major League Baseball owners should go to Bud Selig during the owners meetings next week and demand changes to the system.  Why should other teams support teams like the Marlins who aren’t committed to actually getting better or sustaining that success?  The answer is,  they shouldn’t.

We live in a capitalist society where business is basically a dog-eat-dog world.  Only the strong survive in the world of business as baseball owners know since many of them made their fortunes elsewhere before buying teams.  Nothing is more pathetic than millionaires propping up other millionaires.  If teams want to succeed they need to invest.  If they don’t have the money or resources to invest then perhaps they should have gone into another business.

Now, the Marlins will receive charity from the rest of the league while their rich owner sits in his taxpayer-funded stadium and watches what is essentially a minor league team, take the field while he counts his millions.  It just doesn’t make sense.