But it’s guys like Torii Hunter and Raul Ibanez and Michael Young that have deals that make no sense — these players are good, but not GREAT. We completely replaced Hunter’s defense (his main good attribute) immediately, and our offense scored more runs once he was gone. $90M is too much to pay for someone who can be replaced that easily.

And A-Rod and Tex, for all their insane talent, increase their value with their consistency. I know people don’t like to hear that A-Rod is consistently the best player in baseball (because they think he’s not “clutch”), the numbers bear out that he performs almost as consistently, over the seasons, as Pujols. Some years it comes in innings 1-3, sometimes in inning 7-9, but the run creation is always there. That’s worth a lot. Mauer seems really consistent, but he’s had 2 great seasons and 2 okay seasons.

When players prove that kind of durability and sustainability over a few years, THEN they become worth the megadeals from the big-market teams. The problem is that GMs never realized that the gap between those elite players and the second tier is HUGE — and that they difference in pay should be also. They seem to be slowly catching on to that.

I think it’s more than the uncertain economy- so many free agents are still unsigned because teams don’t absolutely need them. Guys might start accepting arbitration now to guarantee a job. And if salaries start going down because demand (and leverage) simply isn’t there, small- and medium-market teams will actually be able to sign their good players because those players can’t automatically look forward to a huge payday. The Yanks grossly overpaid for Mark Texeiria (sp?), and they’ll regret it in a few years when younger guys with approximate talent are going for pennies on the dollar.

What people often don’t realize, because they only look at the top spenders like the Yankees and Red Sox, is that whenever there’s a salary CAP, there’s also a salary FLOOR. As in, YOU CANNOT SPEND LESS THAN THIS AMOUNT OF MONEY ON YOUR TEAM. And it’s not that low.

I saw another article that looked at the cap situation. Since the average payroll is around $90M, they’d probably set the cap at around $120M and the floor at around $60-70M.

The problem is that there are a lot of teams who spend less than that not because they’re cheap, but because they just don’t bring in that much money. The Pirates, for example, would be screwed by this plan. They’d have to ditch their “rebuilding” plan and spend money for no reason — subsequently LOSING MONEY. This just gives a bigger advantage to teams in large markets. It will also inflate the salaries of mediocre players while depressing the salaries of great players. Are ANY of these things desirable?

It works for the NFL because most of the revenue is national — they have TV deals and they dole out games to whatever regional networks they want. In the MLB, it’s local; each team has their own deals with TV networks. Does it make sense for the Yankees to cancel their deal with the YES Network and rewrite it so they get less revenue from it, and the balance goes to teams like the Marlins and Royals so they can be forced to overpay for below-average talent?

Skip the salary cap. Fix the draft system — either ditch the slotting system or enforce it. Force all drafted players to take a minor league contract. If the signing bonus is above some threshold, both the player and the team have to pay a penalty (like the team loses its pick in that round the next year, and the player has to endure one extra year of service time in the majors before he reaches arbitration, if he ever even makes it to the majors).

Mostly, people just have to stop complaining about the dollars. The dollars are not what makes a team. It’s nice to have them, sure, but I don’t know why the Brewers are complaining — they built their team without any big free agent signings, and the ones they did sign actually hurt the team (notably Gagne). Just stick to developing Fielder/Braun/Weeks/Hardy/etc, and you’ll be fine.