Salary cap talk,
Spoils the party!

tanding in the lunchroom at the office the other day, I bumped into a discussion about the state of the Green Bay Packers’ salary cap. The participants, a friendly and knowledgeable lot, smartly pondered the chances of the Packers to take a swipe at a prospective free agent. Who can they get? How much room under the cap do they have? How much does so-and-so player – a player no longer with the team – count against the cap?

When I went back to my desk, my lunch was barely palatable. I have made it a personal, self-declarative policy not to entertain dialogue about sports in the context of salary caps. Why? Because talkin’ sports should be about skills, ability, desire, and preference; it shouldn’t be about credits, debits, and balance sheets. Leave that to the accountants and bookkeepers (ironically, one of the gentleman in the lunchroom is an accountant).

Currently, the NFL and NBA have salary caps. The MLB does not. The NFL version is more restrictive than the NBA’s, the details of which are relegated to your own research, as any discussion about salary cap numbers would render this column hypocritical. If you bound and gagged me, and held a pistol to my head to force me to pick one, it would definitely be the NBA’s. My life would be spared, but I still wouldn’t be sporting a frown.

The NFL’s recipe for salary cap nausea has contributed to an "everybody has a chance" mentality. Dynasties are all but extinct. The quest to beat down a Goliath are irrelevant. We’ll witness no more Packers of the 60’s, Steelers of the 70’s, 49ers of the 80’s, nor Cowboys of the 90’s. The aughts (00’s) will share and share alike. The Packers of the late 90’s fought tooth and nail to overcome their mighty nemesis, the Cowboys. When the Packers got better and the Cowboys a tad worse, the green & gold captured their first Super Bowl triumph in 30 years.

You see, you no longer need to climb the mountain towards eventual prosperity. A helicopter will hoist you up and drop you there with little or no effort. So much for the journey being more satisfying than the destination. In the salary cap world, the need for excellence is parlayed by the venture towards mediocrity. An 11-5 team this season could be a 5-11 team next season. That could happen in any sport, but in salary cap sports, it could be because a team is not allowed to pay a player at market value or award a raise to a player who contributed towards their success.

Several people are clamoring for a salary cap in baseball. While it is true that some owners and teams have deeper pockets than others do, simply having those pockets doesn’t guarantee success. The recent failures of the Milwaukee Brewers, Kansas City Royals, et al – the so-called poor saps of the league – have not been caused by poor cash flow. The culprits are poor player development, bad free agent signings, and a total lack of understanding of what it takes to win baseball games. I know the Brewers don’t have as much money as the New York Yankees. They can, however, match checkbooks with the Oakland A’s and Florida Marlins.

The NFL and NBA are like the game of Monopoly, except that the owners don’t start out with the same amount of money. Like Monopoly, however, they all have the same amount to spend. Gee, I can get all four railroads, but then I might not have enough to snatch Boardwalk and Park Place. At least with Monopoly, chance plays a huge part. Fairness, though, also plays a part.

Herein lies the problem. For some, fairness is a synonym for equality. I used to swallow such malarkey, but not anymore. This is the United States of America, not communist China. Pardon the nationalist metaphor, but believing that sports shouldn’t be about money is like saying that marriage shouldn’t be about love (well, at least outside of Hollywood). I agree that most of player development should be about smarts. But that’s true no matter how much money you have. Sure, the Yankees have spent a lot on free agents. They’ve also traded several of their own prospects – prospects they drafted and developed – to less fiscally viable teams for sagging, but serviceable, veterans.

Currently, the poster child for salary cap lunacy is Anthony Mason of the Miami Heat. Albeit controversial, Mason is one of the most productive forwards of our time. It’s not that nobody wants him. Nobody can fit him under their sweaty caps without relinquishing one of their own. Because too many teams are viced in the cap, a player who doesn’t want to play somewhere might end up playing for a team that doesn’t want him.

Most fans won’t admit why they like the cap. It’s because it gives their team a better chance for success. "The ends justify the means," they would say. Well, for this fan, the means spawn a lot of the fun when talking about how a team might do this season. Feed me chatter about draft picks, development, and shrewd trades – any day.

Anybody can surmise that spending $58 million out of the allowed $60 million yields $2 million in leftover room. Only the learned, or semi-learned, can ascertain that Dante’ Culpepper will be better than Donovan McNabb. At times, your guess is as good as mine.

That’s the fun of it, right?

Any comments, criticisms, or condemnations on this sports column or previous ones? Feel free to email me at tsdarath@milwpc.com