Word: off-season
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...playoffs? Hardly. I’m talking about Major League Baseball’s off-season...
Major League Baseball’s off-season has evolved into the fifth major American sport. (Sorry, check that, the fourth—I nearly forgot that the NHL has ceased to exist.) For baseball fans, it’s also the second best. And this year’s off-season hasn’t disappointed—it’s been the wildest and most exciting shopping period since the advent of free agency in the 1970s...
Both New York baseball franchises realize the growing influence baseball off-season has on sports fans and the media alike. The Mets scheduled their official introduction of Beltran for the same day, last Tuesday, that the Yankees unveiled the pinstriped, 6’10 Johnson, in a successful attempt to steal the back pages away from the Yanks and increase their public exposure. Such media coups are growing more and more commonplace as every off-season becomes an extension of on-field rivalries and teams compete for the attention and money of fans by throwing enormous chunks of cash...
...tempting as it is to bemoan exactly the type of huge contracts that were handed out in the Bronx and Queens last weekend, baseball’s current economic situation is the reason the game generates so much energy in the off-season. Free agency and the absence of a salary cap create as close to a free market for players as exists in professional sports, leaving teams open to sign and trade players as they see fit—an exercise that is extremely curtailed in the NBA and NFL due to the presence of restrictive salary caps...
Thanks, but I’ll take the “competitive imbalance” of baseball over football’s salary cap-driven parity. Baseball’s off-season is too much fun. You can watch the 8-8 Vikings and the 8-8 Rams battle it out this weekend in a showcase of football’s finest—I’ve got some Sammy Sosa trade rumors to read about...