competitiveness

so anything I say is very preliminary. I do think your suggestions make a lot of sense.

I also think there is a mythology about the purity or honesty of early baseball that contradicts the facts. Early owners were often on the fringes of reputable society; the game was rife with gamblers who plied their trade right on the field. Although much of that was limited some after the Black Sox, the notion that these teams were simply the property of the individual owners did not change, and many of them remained unsavory characters.

As a result, many were not really interested in winning. There is ample evidence that some teams, I think the Phillies, Browns and As among others, saw their role as developing young talent so they could sell it to richer teams and make a small profit. That was far simpler than really developing the talent until they could compete, and then having to pay it a bit more. I do remember, and have since read confirmation, that in the 1950s there was a rather unholy relationship between the KC As and Yankees (I think the KC owner was a part investor in Yankee Stadium) which led to KC becoming in essence a Yankee farm club.

There is also a lot of amnesia about the fact that there has always been payroll disparity and that richer teams routinely plundered poorer ones, again with the willing complicity of those owners who could not have stayed in business otherwise. True, the disparity may appear less because the reserve clause kept salaries artificially low, but the impact may have been even greater then than now. Whereas now there are other avenues to building competitive teams than simply throwing money at free agents, in an earlier era the pickings were much more slim.

I am sure there is a lot more to be researched and considered, and my own hypotheses may be flawed or flat wrong, but whatever the reasons it remains true, I think, that the hullabaloo over payroll discrepancies is based on insubstantial reasoning and more a matter of emotional responses to perceived rather than real problems.

For all the hand wringing over the long ineptitude of the Orioles and Pirates, which in the Orioles case is clearly not a budget problem and in both cases is far more attributable to front office malpractice than money, it is nothing compared to the extended horrors Phillies, Braves, As, Cubs, Browns, Reds and even White Sox endured. And for that matter, there were similar if not quite as extended periods of total failure for the Senators (“1st in war, 1st in peace and last in the American League”), Pirates & Red Sox while other teams like the Yankees, Dodgers, Giants (do you see a pattern there?) & Cards rarely had long losing streaks and dominated the post-season year after year.

Incidentally, it is interesting listening to Goose Goslin’s interview with Ritter for “The Glory of Their Times” where he points out that his Senator’s owner told him he was dealing him to the Tigers because he could not pay Goslin. This was after the 1933 season when the Senators won the AL pennant. The next year, the Senators came in seventh and got above .500 three times in the next 15 years and five times over the next 28 years. They also had winning %s under .400 six times in those 28 years.