Most of it was regurgitated from TH’s article on the same subjects. While I’ve seen it quoted elsewhere, the thoughts of John Henry are still worth noting for baseball fans located outside of NY, Boston, Chicago and LA:

“Change is needed and that is reflected by the fact that over a billion dollars has been paid to seven chronically uncompetitive teams, five of whom have had baseball’s highest operating profits,” Henry wrote in an e-mail to the Boston Globe in December. “Who, except these teams, can think this is a good idea?”

MLB has historically been slow on the uptake regarding the purposes and limitations of revenue sharing. It still seems to me that at least half the owners really don’t get why they’re doing it at all, which would be mind-boggling enough by itself, but when you throw in the fact that the big markets have been paying in all that money without forcing the receiving teams to accept some kind of salary floor it becomes difficult to comprehend how folks good enough at business to end up owning an MLB franchise could be that short-sighted.

Maybe they find the whole concept so alien and offensive that they didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about it. Henry’s got a point, though he buries it by dragging in the fact that some of the recipients of that money aren’t competitive. There are always going to be bad teams in the MLB, and while 30 million per year is a lot of money, it’s not enough to convert a bad team into a good one through the magic of free agency, and he’s a smart enough guy to know it. If you cut through the asshattery in his rhetorical question and ignore the “uncompetitive” adjective, you get to the point that should concern everyone: the fact that several teams are essentially stealing the money.

That pisses me off. Baseball economics are completely fucked up, with the big market owners genuinely believing that they deserve to have 10 times the resources as the bulk of their competitors and that the league is best off if every year the Yankees and the Red Sox play in the ALCS and the Dodgers/Cubs/Phillies play in the NLCS. The fact that ESPN spends 90% of their MLB coverage fellating the Yankees and Red Sox doesn’t help things. But after being brow beaten by Bud for nearly 20 years, they finally bought the idea that the rest of the league should be a little better than the Washington Generals, at least, and they agreed to kick in some cash (though not enough to upset the large market oligarchy more than once a decade or so) in support of that idea. And now they’re a little pissed at the teams that are pocketing the money, which puts the Brewers share of that money at risk, regardless of the fact that (lately at least) they’ve been using that money to help them put a pretty good ball club on the field.

I’m quite certain they’ll use the Brewers to beat the hell out of the Royals and Pirates of the world, and I’m also quite certain that, when faced with the prospect of losing that cash, they’ll choose to spend a little more in the years to come. They might even tie a minimum salary floor to the money in the future. But without a cap and broader revenue sharing, it’ll all be pretty meaningless. I don’t really doubt that extra cash has helped the Brewers be a better organization (or at least made it easier to take advantage of the resources and talent it had ). But it’ll give the John Henry’s and the Wannabe My Big Daddy Steinbrenners of the world the chance to: continue to limit revenue sharing at every opportunity; kick in enough money towards the small market clubs to give them some political cover with the commissioners office, the players union, and congress, and beat up their small market counterparts in the press for (GASP!) not finding a way to win with 10-50% of the resources they enjoy.

Just like Jose Canseco, John Henry’s right.

But he’s still a dick.