Seven of the 11 poorest teams have yet to spend a penny since the season ended, which further exaggerates their disadvantage. Fiscal inequity has been with the game as long as the bases, but it has never been so pronounced as it is today. And it has never seemed so confounding, with the answers as insufficient as the questions are incessant. The two most frequently proposed solutions are to either make the most solvent teams pay for the inadequacies of their competitors or to simply restrict the amount any team can spend to improve itself. But there are problems with both of those suggestions.
Revenue sharing is just too socialistic a concept to be applied to an American pasttime.
And the players' union will never agree to a salary cap. If Commissioner Bud Selig has any brilliant plans, he has not revealed them to the fans or the Senate subcommittee he appeared before last month to discuss the self-destructive path baseball is sprinting down. In fact, all he has done about the growing economic crisis is lament it. The best way to overcome the financial chasm is to not fight it, but to go with it, to use it as a tool for competition. Everybody is looking for ways to redistribute the wealth these days when they should be thinking about redistributing the teams.