Born in Cincinnati, been a Reds fan all if my life.
Free agency WITHOUT a salary cap and revenue sharing has killed small market teams. There is no real hope for a team like the Reds. If they get a great player, they have two options.
Lose him when the salary gets too big (Elly de la Cruz will be the next after losing pitchers and other players for the last 50 years) or pay one guy and have a crap team around him of bargain basement contracts (think the teams around Joey Votto or Ken Griffey Jr).
You might get a lucky year and make the playoffs. But you cannot sustain it.
Not when the Dodgers can literally spend a billion dollars a year on free agents.
In the NBA, the cap, luxury tax, and aprons would force the Dodgers, Yankees, etc to blow up their teams.
In the NFL, the league would have vetoed the contract the Dodgers wrote with 90 percent of the pay deferred and likely fined the team for violating the CBA (union contract)S. Every team would have a salary floor and a salary cap. There would be no way for the Dodgers to give out all those contracts.
But in MLB, the handful of bottomless pits of cash in the large markets can treat the small market clubs like glorified farm teams.
The best players from places like Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh will find their way to New York or LA or Chicago.
Someone will likely say, the Yankees haven't won a world series in over a decade, so the system isn't broken. But in the last 25 years, the dodgers and yankees have made the playoffs 33 out of 50 chances. An unbalanced schedule that forces the Yankees to play extra games against the Red Sox contributed to some of their misses. But the playoffs to quote Moneyball "are a crap shoot". Getting in is money and roster. Winning the playoffs is health, hot streaks, and cold streaks.
If MLB played a balanced schedule the disparities would be even more obvious as the big money teams would play more against the farm teams in small markets.
Free agency is better for the players. With a salary cap, it is better for competition. But without a cap, it is just a way to make a two tier MLB.
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