socialism and baseball – USA Gov Policy

The question of “Tanking” has arisen. “Tanking” is the practice of a team intentionally taking steps that almost guarantee a losing season, under the premise that he owners are actually saving up cash or acquiring higher draft picks for the future. CBS Sports, in a 2018 analysis, noted that “It’s time to reassess the practice of tanking… and recognize it for what it is: cover for profit-hungry owners to line their pockets, at the expense of their own fans’ entertainment.” Those owners don’t have to worry about depriving their fanbase of a competitive team, discouraging them from attending games; revenue sharing dollars will come in anyway.

How bad was tanking in 2018? Last August, Baseball America’s Kyle Glaser reported: “ How bad can a tank job get in 2018? The answer, apparently, is historically bad. After an offseason where “tanking” was the word on everyone’s mind, Major League Baseball is on track to see a nearly unprecedented amount of losing. Since adopting a 162-game schedule in 1961, MLB has never had more than two 110-loss teams in a season. It is currently on pace to tie that record. In that same time, MLB has never had more than four 100-loss teams in a season. It is currently on pace to tie that record as well.”

2018 wasn’t the first time revenue sharing was sharply questioned. In 2010, The New York Times’s J.C. Bradbury reported: “Despite the good intentions behind revenue sharing, doling out money to baseball’s have-nots has the unintended consequence of creating a disincentive to win. Though the correlation is not perfect, winning tends to attract fans, which increases local revenue. But a healthier bottom line means drawing less from the revenue-sharing pool. The quandary faced by poor-and-losing teams is that using the added wealth to improve their clubs increases local earnings, but these gains may be offset by reducing revenue-sharing payments.

“In my book on valuing baseball players, I estimated the relationship between winning and revenue for M.L.B. teams. The revenue function shows disparate responses to winning at various levels of success, which support the notion that revenue sharing discourages improvement. The function shows that improving from a mid-60s-win team to a mid-70s-win team generates financial losses. The observed revenue bump from losing is consistent with the hypothesized disincentive to win when teams face a cut in revenue sharing. I refer to this region as the loss trap, because improving your team over this range of wins can cost you money.

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“Also, strong returns to winning do not kick in until a team hits the mid-80s in wins. Losing teams might improve their financial standing somewhat if they improved drastically, but transforming a loser to a winner does not happen overnight and cannot be willed into existence. Thus, the safety net offered by revenue sharing encourages teams to remain perpetually bad.”

There are lessons far beyond the sports world in why the equal outcomes idea, and other socialism and “socialism light” ideas fail.

Mark J. Perry, writing for the American Enterprise Institute explains:

“Socialism does not work because it is not consistent with fundamental principles of human behavior. The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical defect: it is a system that ignores incentives. In a capitalist economy, incentives are of the utmost importance. Market prices, the profit-and-loss system of accounting, and private property rights provide an efficient, interrelated system of incentives to guide and direct economic behavior. Capitalism is based on the theory that incentives matter! Under socialism, incentives either play a minimal role or are ignored totally…By failing to emphasize incentives, socialism is a theory inconsistent with human nature and is therefore doomed to fail. Socialism is based on the theory that incentives don’t matter!”

Photo: Pixabay

America’s long tradition as “The Land of Opportunity” is being replaced by the new philosophy of “equal outcomes,” regardless of the effort put in. The attempt to implement this idea, akin to the growing popularity of socialism, has already found a home in one of the nation’s most beloved institutions: Major League Baseball (MLB).

The results have not been good.

MLB’s luxury tax and revenue sharing practices are also known as a “competitive balance tax.” Proponents of the concept allege that it was necessary to allow teams in smaller cities to play more competitively against big-city teams. Hal Steinbrenner, a co-owner of one of those big-city teams, The New York Yankees, disagrees with the idea. The National Review quotes him as stating “At some point, if you don’t want to worry about teams in minor markets, don’t put teams in minor markets, or don’t leave teams in minor markets if they’re truly minor…Socialism, communism, whatever you want to call it, is never the answer.”

Whatever label is placed on the concept, it has not achieved the results it was supposed to, and has in fact produced a whole new set of problems.

William Ryan Colby, in a paper presented to the e Department of Economics at Amherst College noted that “In 1996, Major League Baseball introduced its first system of comprehensive revenue sharing with the goal of creating more competitive balance in the league. the marginal tax rates created by MLB’s revenue sharing systems have actually worsened balance in the league. Although the most recent sharing system begins to realign incentives, it still risks “turning a ‘good’ imbalance into a ‘bad one” by subsidizing poorly managed teams at the expense of well run teams… the incentive structures created by MLB revenue sharing had the anticipated negative effects on competitive balance.

How the system has worked in practice is described by NBC sports “MLB teams participate in revenue sharing, a system that redistributes income from the richest franchises to their less profitable partners in an attempt to improve competitive balance. Under the 2012–2016 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), each team contributes 34 percent of its net local revenue into a pool that gets divided equally among every team. Higher-earning clubs put in more than they get back while lower-earning clubs receive more than they put in…Over the past four years the Marlins, Rays, Royals, Padres and A’s among other teams received a combined $642 million dollars. The franchises that keep on giving to them are the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies and San Francisco Giants. The mountain of cash deposited since 2012 i[reached] a staggering $1.15 billion [by 2016]”

A list of World Series winners since 1996 clearly demonstrates that the revenue-sharing scheme has not achieved its goals. Instead, it has ushered in a whole new set of problems.

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There have been complaints that the organization that have received the revenue sharing have pocketed the money rather than invest in building more competitive teams. Indeed, it appears that some small market teams apparently no longer worry about trying to effectively compete, because even if attendance falls off due to poor play, revenue will still flow to them from revenue sharing.

Russ Roberts, writing for CafeHayek explains: “Even if the Yankees [a big-market, big spending team] share their revenue equally with other teams, the beneficiaries of that subsidy may decide to simply pocket it rather than making their teams more competitive. Revenue sharing does reward mediocrity and punish excellence and as the amount of sharing grows, the potential harm from that perverse incentive gets worse.”

According to some, that diminished devotion to meaningful competition means that teams, both in large markets and small, feel free to be less generous with player salaries.

A 2018 CBS Sports report reported that “According to the Associated Press, the average MLB salary decreased from 2017-18. It’s only the fourth time in the last half-century the average salary decreased from one year to the next…The [MLB Players Association (MLBPA)] said…its final [2018] average was $4,095,686, down $1,436 from $4,097,122 last year. Since the union started keeping track in 1967, the only previous declines had been by $66 in 1987, when owners were found to have conspired to hold down salaries among free agents; a 4 percent decline in 1995 following a 7½-month strike that wiped out the World Series for the first time since 1904; and by 2.5 percent in 2004.”

The MLBPA voiced concern that several organizations, including at least one that received up to $160 million, were pocketing the cash and not using it to enhance their team.

The Report concludes tomorrow.

Photo: Pixabay

Quick Analysis

Putin’s Saber Rattling

Earlier this week, President Biden reversed his 2022 decision, authorizing the provision of antipersonnel land mines to the Ukrainian government. It follows an earlier Administration authorization to allow the use of an advanced American missile system capable of striking as deep as 100 miles inside Russian territory. The US election season may be ending, but both Russia and the West show no indication of stepping down the conflict. Russian propaganda continues to swell as the Kremlin increases its threats to use nuclear weapons against the West. Last week Andrey Sushentsov, program director of the pro-Kremlin think tank Valdai Discussion Club (VDC), published an article on growing nuclear tensions in the region. Official Russian language in the last few years has been threatening. Since the US election, rhetoric like that in the Sushentsov article, has approached the level of nuclear blackmail. The VDC article’s main theme centers on Russia’s intent to directly confront the West militarily if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) becomes involved in Russia’s conflict with Ukraine. “On the one hand, these threats are intended to frighten the West, but on the other, Russian propagandists themselves are starting to believe in the inevitability of escalation,” according to Ksenia Kirillova of the Jamestown Foundation. On November 11, Sushentsov wrote that “The conflict will reach a completely new level, with unpredictable consequences for Europe and the entire world.” Kirillova points out that Putin’s distorted image of the world is divorced from reality and is causing the Kremlin to issue demands that are impossible to fulfill. Financial and other Russian resources needed to support Putin’s war are growing scarcer at the same time. This week the Kremlin announced a reduction of payments to its soldiers. Recently North Korea acknowledged it was sending soldiers to fight in Ukraine as Putin is running out of bodies to use as cannon fire. The war is not going well for Russia. One question floating around the Washington intelligence community is whether Putin will act out of desperation before President-elect Trump assumes office. In recent months the Russian propaganda machine is spewing out materials from fairly reputable analytical platforms inside the country. Kirillova says that “Kremlin ‘experts’ do not conceal that such threats are only intended to break the West psychologically, as they themselves are not prepared for full-scale nuclear war.” Despite Russia’s lack of preparation for an all-out war with the West, the expanding nuclear rhetoric carries with it an increase in the threat of a full-scale war in multiple theaters of operation. In June 2023 a founder of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Sergey Karaganov, called for “delivering a pre-emptive strike of retaliation” on Poland to force the West to surrender. In the previous month, Dmitry Suslov, a direct of research programs at the policy center proposed organizing “a demonstration nuclear explosion” aimed at intimidating the West. In September, President Putin announced a reappraisal of Russian nuclear doctrine after speaking earlier in the year at the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and jokingly calling Suslov a “scary person.” Pavel Baev, writing in the European Daily Monitor, says “Putin intends his announcement to mark an escalation of nuclear brinkmanship and influence the proceedings of future Ukrainian peace efforts.” Putin is expanding the list of environmental conditions that are acceptable for using a nuclear weapon and incorporating it into Russian military doctrine. Baev adds that “The ups and downs of Russian brinkmanship are disconnected from the kinetic battles of the war, correlating instead with Ukrainian peace offensives, such as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s first peace summit in Bürgenstock, Switzerland.” Despite the increase in vitriolic language, in a You Tube video published a week before the US presidential election, Karaganov openly assured the West the primary goal of the escalation is to break the American spirit and that of the West, not outright nuclear war. By Election Day in the US, with political prognosticators predicting a win for former president Trump, Karaganov changed his tune and called for an increased role in nuclear deterrence. Kirillova points out that Western concessions to Russia are unlikely to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation. The distorted reality inside the Kremlin continues to push that President-elect Trump is an adherent of “world government,” that Ukraine will create a nuclear weapon, and Russia must prepare for a nuclear conflagration to achieve its ambitions for a new world order. President-elect Trump has indicated he will not agree to concessions that destabilize Europe, the Middle East or other regions. Going forward a strong US foreign policy may be the most stabilizing course the West can count on to restrain Putin and his intent to rebuild the Russian empire. Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept. Illustration: Pixabay

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