This is a further example of how clueless the commissioner of Major League Baseball really is–he should be embarrassed that he and his office made the decision in the first place. And he should be even more embarrassed that the hats they wore in pregame were physically taken away from the players, after it was heard that they may conspire to wear them anyway–the players had given the league an out (tell the players they can’t, players do it anyway, fine the players, donate the money to a charity supporting first responders).

And he shouldn’t be surprised–especially in today’s modern world, where players are constantly tweeting and actually interacting with fans–that the players would go public about the situation.

MLB dropped the ball on this one–multiple times now.  And if Selig was smart, he would look in the mirror, and figure out a way to fix the situation.

Why do I not think that’s going to happen?

Thus Major League Baseball will take one more step toward becoming another league that waters down its regular season in favor of a playoff format that invites too many teams to take a shot at the championship.

I initially didn’t like the expansion to four playoff teams with a wild card included but it was a necessity when each league was split into three divisions. And I grudgingly will admit that it has created some fantastic races, this year included when San Francisco, San Diego and Atlanta fought tooth and nail to the season’s final weekend over the last two playoff spots.

But this year’s race is but one reason why expansion is a bad idea. Add another series – supposedly expected to be a wild card play-in series to determine which team really gets to advance to each league’s final four – and the final weekend wouldn’t have mattered. All three teams would already have been in the playoffs.

Furthermore, in the American League, it would have added an 89-73 Boston team ravaged by injuries all season. They would have taken on a 95 win Yankees team for the right to play in the real playoffs.

Why should a team clearly inferior to New York during the season, even one that managed to somehow split 18 games with the Bronx Bombers, have yet another opportunity to then keep that rival from being among the American League’s final four?

Why, money, of course.

So even though it’ll often result in average teams making the playoffs, even though it could stretch the season in to mid-November, even though it will dilute the regular season and even though the season is long enough already, Bud Selig likes the idea for “fairness” reasons, according to the Sporting News. So the playoffs are likely to expand.

Fairness my butt. Win your division and don’t leave it to chance. If you don’t, you have no right to complain about not making the playoffs.

This playoff expansion is nothing more than another money grab for a league that is full of them during an era in which money grabs are the norm and not the exception.

Fans, be damned. Players, be damned, as the NFL embarks on its latest grab, the attempt to cram an 18 game regular season schedule down its players’ throats during the collective bargaining negotiations.

I’m sure the networks would love it. Tired of watching the Yankees play the Red Sox on ESPN 46 times per season? Get used to it if this playoff expansion takes place. Go back the last nine years. Five of those seasons, the Yankees and the Red Sox both bought, err, played their way into the playoffs, with one winning the American League East and the other claiming the Wild Card.

During four seasons, one or the other made it. In three of those four, had the five-team playoff scenario been in place, whichever of the two hadn’t already made the playoffs would have been the additional wild card team.

Go figure.

And sure, you can argue that adding another wild card team gives a different team a chance in those years when Boston and New York both already make the playoffs. It’s true, but it’s more like an argument a Boston or New York fan would make in defending a big-market-based economic structure that is still more broken than fixed than an argument for expanding the playoffs.

Woo hoo! Let’s further reward mediocrity. We’re number five! We get to go the playoffs too.

I haven’t seen a lot of study of fan reaction to the proposed playoff expansion. But just searching the net for blog reaction or informal poll results leads me to believe the fans, by and large, are not in favor of the plan.

This is just further proof that the opinions of those who buy the tickets and the merchandise and who foot the bill in many ways for the salaries players make and the profits teams generate for their owners have little say in what actually happens in sports that are ostensibly supposed to be about them.

Once again, it’s all about the money.

Major league journeyman Matt Walbeck spent two years at the helm for the Altoona Curve, the Double-A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 2009 the team finished in sixth place in the Eastern League. In 2010, the team captured the first Eastern League championship in its 12 year history.

On Sept. 29, Pittsburgh told Walbeck his services were no longer needed.

I’m not going to pretend I followed the Curve during their championship run, nor am I going to say I recognize even one of the names of the players on the team’s roster during the 2010 season. I can’t say I know anything about Walbeck as a manager or much about his background – other than I watched him play catcher for the Minnesota Twins back during the team’s dark years in the early 2000s.

But when a guy wins a championship, even in the minor leagues, it would seem he is doing something right.

The Pirates, who last had anything resembling a competitive team in the major leagues in 1992, only released a one sentence statement: “We appreciate Matt’s efforts and wish him the best in his future endeavors but felt that it was best that we allow him to pursue other opportunities,” according to general manager Neal Huntington via the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Dejan Kovacevic, the Post-Gazette’s Pirates beat writer, updated the story later with a comment from an unidentified source indicating that the move came from concerns about Walbeck’s communication with staff and players.

Okay, maybe he was a bad communicator. He won a championship at the Double-A level for an organization that, for two decades in the major leagues, has had virtually nothing to be excited about at all.And he was 312-224 in four seasons managing in the Detroit Tigers’ system.

Granted, there is more to managing in the minors than winning. But the Pirates finally have some young guys – Andrew McCutchen, Pedro Alvarez, Jose Tabata and Neil Walker among others, that interestingly have come from the  minors over the last couple seasons. Not all played under Walbeck. Some did. And for an organization that has shown little promise for two decades, I would think continuity would be a good thing for a team that must have done something right in 2010 to win the league championship.

Walbeck certainly didn’t do it himself, but someone had to help those players reach that level.

Maybe the Pirates will prove this was the correct move. Maybe the players won the championship in spite of Walbeck rather than because of him. If so I’ll fall on my sword later.

Until then, it would appear to me that the once-proud Pirates franchise has given the city of Pittsburgh and baseball fans around the country another illustration of how the organization has spent two decades as a laughingstock.

Today Jeff Passan from Yahoo! Sports uses documents obtained by Deadspin to put the franchise’s distortion of its financial situation to get Dade County to approve a new ballpark, which will open in a couple years.

Deadspin has spent the last several days exposing financial documents Major League Baseball owners likely never wanted made public (Marlins’ president David Samson called it “a crime” in Passan’s piece, which might technically be true).

Passan’s column is good. I haven’t read the entire Deadspin series yet, but from what I’ve seen and heard, it’s worth a look. It takes a look at “the other side” of the game, which compared to the gracefullness with which Joe Mauer can hit opposite-field doubles all season long and makes it instead look as ugly as watching Delmon Young patrol the outfield.

But it’s the reality of professional sports these days.

Unfortunately for baseball fans, Selig apparently found 14 people even more stupid than himself to be on the committee.

One of the top plans this committee has come up with to create more parity in MLB?  By allowing for “floating” realignment, where teams would be free to basically trade division spots from year-to-year based on geography, payroll and their plans to contend or not.

That’s right, their plan (which apparently has gained some steam in the group) isn’t one to help more teams compete every year–it’s one where teams can basically opt-out of competing, and trade their spot in a less competitive division for more match ups with teams like the Yankees and Red Sox, which will (supposedly) draw bigger crowds.

What’s next, promotion and relegation, a la the Premier League?  The top two Triple-A affiliates replace big league clubs the next year?

Never mind that floating realignment will actually make it easier for teams like the Yankees and Red Sox to make the playoffs every year (more teams against the weakest teams in the league), and tougher for teams like the White Sox, Tigers and Twins.

Never mind that it’s not truly floating realignment, because “no team would be allowed to switch into a division more than two time zones away from its own in order to protect against travel costs and late television start times,” meaning from the AL West the Rangers could move to the Central or the East, but the other three teams could only move to the Central.

And never mind that it does nothing to solve the fact that there was about a $165 million gap between the highest and lowest payrolls in 2009.

The idea is supposedly based off of the idea that the NFL used to use (and still uses in modified fashion) that the teams with a weaker records would play a schedule with other weaker teams on their schedule (never mind that the plan for MLB would most likely pit the strongest teams against the teams with the weakest records).

Of course, the NFL had a few other advantages when deciding on their schedule structure, such as all teams in the league playing under the same rules.

This might just be the tip of the iceberg, but if MLB wants to get really serious about bringing parity to the league–which could help them gain some popularity if the NFL does in fact face a work stoppage in 2011–here’s a few ideas:

• Make a decision on interleague play–does it stay or does it go?
• If it stays, it has to be fixed–every team in a division should play the same teams from the other league, the same number of games, “regional rivalries” be damned.  No reason that St. Louis should get to face Kansas City, while the Brewers have to face the Twins every year.
• Only way that probably works is to (finally) even out the divisions–meaning an NL team has to move to the AL.  My first thought would be the Brewers moving back to the AL, joining the Central, while the Royals move to the AL West (I’m open to other ideas, though…)
• If interleague play is here to stay, can we make a decision on the DH rule?  This one isn’t an absolute necessity, but I think it would help–I think one reason that average to good AL pitchers getting traded to the NL tend to do really well (while average to good NL pitchers going to the AL stuggle) is due to the AL pitchers being used to facing 9 hitters.
• At an absolute minimum, can we play with NL rules in AL parks during interleague play?  I’d like to see pitchers batting without having to travel hundreds of miles…
• Two words–aluminum bats.
• Just kidding on that last one, seeing if you’re really reading.
• Fix the draft.

And finally, the big ones:

• Better revenue sharing.  I’m not sure I’m 100% sold on this myself, but for years the NFL has shared a lot of their revenues, and made deals as a league.  MLB’s failure to do so has widened the gap between large market and small market teams–imagine a city like Green Bay trying to survive in MLB…
• Salary cap – it just has to be done.  I’ve seen one argument that “a player should get as much as the market is willing to pay for his services.”  Well, that’s a great concept, but it’s not really the full market paying for those services for the top guys–it’s one or two teams (or sometimes one team bidding against themselves).
• Salary floor – not doubt, with the cap, must come a floor, especially with revenue sharing.  If you want to cap the Yankees at $150 million, then force the Marlins to pay at least $75 million.  Heck, that would be more than double what they did last year.

So that’s our start of a list–making some moves like this would, in my opinion, make the league more competitive, increase interest, and in the end, increase revenues for the whole, which should make everyone happy (well, maybe not Yankee fans…oh well).

What else could MLB do to improve their competitive balance?

“People see dark faces out there, and the perception is that they’re African-American. They’re not us. They’re impostors. Even people I know come up and say: ‘Hey, what color is Vladimir Guerrero? Is he a black player?’ I say, ‘Come on, he’s Dominican. He’s not black.’ …

While he admitted that it was poor word choice, he declined to apologize for the comments.  And to be honest, I don’t think he has to apologize–in fact, when in the Dominican a few years back, I had a tour guide pointedly tell me that the reason that he disliked the Haitian kids that were begging us tourists for a dollar was because they were black, unlike him.  So I think a lot (if not all) Latino players would agree that they are not black–meaning, as he indicated, that the only problem with Hunter’s statements would be the use of that word “imposter.”

Aside from that, though, I think that Hunter did touch on one subject that is probably going to be an increasing problem with the way MLB is structured–especially if Latino players do actually “Take over [the game],” as Ozzie Guillen said in response to Hunter.

And that problem is that players outside of the U.S. are not subject to the MLB Amateur Draft.

As broken as the draft process is, with some players who have never played a professional game in their life and many of whom won’t for a few years–if ever–getting multi-million dollar bonuses, at least the draft process allows for teams such as the Nationals, Pirates and Royals to have a shot at acquiring some future stars.

With players from Latin America and Asia being allowed to negotiate with any team willing to pay, the top talent from outside of the US is frequently signing with just a handful of teams.  The only way the smaller market teams have been able to compete with this is to employ more scouts, and sign more hopeful prospects at a younger age–and pray that one or two of them turn into someone like Johan Santana, who was signed as a center fielder by the Houston Astros at the age of about 15.

Although there have been a few recent cases where smaller market teams have ponied up the cash to land a hot latin prospect, like the Reds signing Aroldis Chapman, that’s still the exception rather than the norm.

Major League Baseball may be facing an unprecedented opportunity to grow their fan base in 2011, as it looks like the NFL is moving closer and closer to an eventual work stoppage due to labor negotiations.

It would be nice if they tried to take some steps to increase the competitiveness and create some parity in the league before that. Acting now won’t completely fix things by fall of 2011, but if they’ve started to address some of the issues, hopefully some of the fans turned off by the 1994 World Series cancellation, steroid scandals and salary and quality of play between top and bottom teams will start coming back.

And when I picked the complimentary USA Today off the floor in front of my door this morning, I turned to the sports page and saw a story about Mark Teixeira, CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett, and their respective contributions to the New York Yankees this season.

“It’s incredible how important these guys have been,” Johnny Damon told the paper. “I feel like they’ve been worth about seven or eight games a piece.”

AMAZING HOW IMPORTANT THEY’VE BEEN?!?!?

You spent $423.5 million last offseason to bring them in. I’d say for that amount they’d damn well better be important or the Steinbrenners would have every right to be as stuffy and huffy as they have been the last seven or eight years while the Yankees have languished below mediocre by their high-priced standards.

My brother tells me Mike and Mike in the Morning were talking a couple days ago about parity in baseball. How great is it, they apparently said, that there has only been one repeat World Series winner in the last 10 years (Boston) and nobody has won it back to back. Others have been writing about this fallacy as well. It’s been quite the popular topic on ESPN and elsewhere.

A whole bunch of teams have made the playoffs in the last few years as well and there are more than 20 teams with legitimate playoff hopes still alive this year.

Parity, they said. What a great thing.

Parity my ass.

Parity doesn’t mean there are 20 teams with legit playoff chances at the trade deadline in July. Not having a repeat World Series winner in 10 years doesn’t signify parity. Not in my eyes.

If the season were to end today, the American League playoff teams would be Boston, New York, Los Angeles Angels and Chicago. You’ll note that of those four teams come, three come from the largest media markets in the country and the fourth, Boston, consistently has the second-highest payroll in baseball.

And, taking into account this year and the last five completed seasons, Boston, New York and Los Angeles would have claimed playoff spots in five of six years. That means there’s one spot – generally the American League Central division – up for grabs each year, as you can largely count on two divisions and the wild card participants.

During that same time span five American League teams (Baltimore, Toronto, Kansas City, Seattle, and Texas) have failed to make the playoffs even once while three others (Tampa Bay, Cleveland and Oakland) have each made one appearance in the fall. Some of this is due to poor organizational management, no doubt. But some of it is the continued economic disparities inherent to Major League Baseball.

The playoff spots in the National League have been slightly more spread out. Still, Los Angeles Dodgers have made four playoff appearances and the Philadelphia Phillies three (again, if the season were to end today). St. Louis (which I have credited with 1/2 a playoff appearance because they are tied with Chicago for the Central right now) has made it 3.5 times and the Cubs 2.5. Four other teams have two playoff appearances (Colorado, Atlanta, Houston and San Diego).

But even with the different spread of teams, the leaders in appearances are in large media markets and there are still five with no appearances (Florida, Washington, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and San Francisco).

The one weird outlier in all of this research is the New York Mets, who despite playing in the Big Apple, have still managed just one postseason appearance in the last six seasons. That’s in part due, I would guess, to organizational incompetence, partially due to two collapses the last two seasons, partially due to competing with the tail end of the Atlanta Braves’ stretch of divisional dominance, and partially due to sharing the division with Philadelphia.

Mets aside, however, the research indicates clearly that large media market teams continue to have a dramatic advantage when it comes to making the postseason.

They also have an edge in winning the Fall Classic. While 20 teams have made at least one appearance in the last six seasons (again, factoring in this year if the season were to end today), the last five World Series winners were Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Chicago and Boston – respectively the fourth, seventh, 20th, third and seventh largest media markets in the country. St. Louis is an outlier, but the other four are large markets and consistent leaders in MLB payrolls.

And while St. Louis isn’t a top 10 market size-wise, they have in the past fielded $100 million-plus payrolls as well. They’re down to the upper $70 millions this year.

So don’t give me parity. Parity would be when the Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Angels didn’t have a virtual stranglehold on three of the four American League playoff spots year after year.

Parity would be when more teams besides the Yankees could compete for the trio of free agents they paid $423.5 million to sign.

Parity would be achieved not when 20 teams have a “legitimate” shot to make the playoffs at the All Star Break, but when something approaching 20 teams had a legitimate shot to compete in the playoffs once they get there.

This might be parity for ESPN, which goes googly over everything Boston-New York in the postseason. But for fans of the other 28 Major League Baseball teams this is not parity.

Now I don’t necessarily blame Boston, New York, the Angels or the Dodgers for this. They’re just playing under the rules and the system that are currently in place. The fault belongs to Major League Baseball and the Players Association and the lip service both entities play to creating a level playing field for every team. It might look different. But at the end of the day it’s really just more of the same.

Research from Westminster, Colo.-based Costigan & Associates indicates that MLB’s teams have 168 total “major sponsor” deals, including 18 naming rights agreements, with 88 companies encompassing 36 categories.

Interestingly, despite well-reported industry struggles nationally, the banking and financial services sector remains one of the strongest categories. Bank of America has five sponsorship deals. Wells Fargo has four and PNC Financial has three, according to the research.

Malt beverage powerhouse Anheuser-Busch is the most frequent major sponsor partner with 17 deals. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. continue to duke it out for soft drink deals, each netting 12 for the 2009 season.

Costigan & Associates is a sports and entertainment marketing firm that specializes in the evaluation of sponsorship and naming rights deals. Its founders, including principal Charles “Chuck” Costigan, came from The Bonham Group, an internationally-recognized firm that succumbed to economic issues early this year.

Costigan is a 10-year veteran of the sponsorship industry who has provided in-depth analysis and strategic recommendations to many blue-chip brands including the O2 Dome, IBM, the NFL, the NHL, JPMorgan Chase, and several individual teams, universities and organizations, according to a bio at the company Web site.

At the beginning of IP this year, Jayson Stark went and found a group of players who don’t like it.  Aside from revealing Adam Dunn to be a complete whiner, Stark’s column tries to take an objective look at some of the things that make the players unhappy.

The major complaints seem to be that there are more “meaningless” series’ (i.e. Kansas City vs. Houston) than there are “rivalry” ones (like the Yankees vs. the Mets), it goes on too long, the travel can make things really difficult, and of course my personal favorite: “it’s not fair.”

I have some pretty strong opinions on the unbalanced schedule, and it occurs to me that we should explore that topic very soon. I’m the rare guy who is a fan of baseball’s schedule, and nothing gets me itchy quicker than someone telling me “it’s not fair”. Dude. You’re a professional ball player, playing at the highest level. If the New York Yankees had to play the New York Mets, and the Tampa Bay Rays had to play Edison Community College, I’d say that’s not fair. You’re playing another major league team. Stop talking and sit down. You’re embarrassing yourself.

I have to say I kind of enjoy interleague play. I’m not over-the-moon in love with it, but it is sort of fun to see my AL club go to Wrigley and St. Louis, as they did this year. I’m not a big fan of the designated hitter, and I like watching Ron Gardenhire have to manage under national league rules.

It reassures me that my skipper understands the nuances of the game. I don’t really understand these people who get all worked up over it, and think it’s an annual scarring of the game. What’s the big deal? The world is not going to come to an end because the Dodgers are playing at US Cellular Field. It mixes things up a little bit. Don’t get your undies in a bunch.

I do think MLB should look at some format changes, though. The National League should bring the rules with them when they go on the road, and vice versa. Namely, there should be a designated hitter at the NL home games, and pitchers should bat at the AL home games. It would make things a little more interesting for the fans, and might sell a few more tickets.

Also, I think the overall league records should determine home field advantage for the World Series. That would be infinitely more fair than a using a one shot beauty pageant like the All-Star Game to determine such an important facet of the championship series. If MLB is going to continue to ignore the best and most obvious way to determine home field advantage (which is, of course, the better record of the two participants), they should at least try to do something a little more played out, if not scientific.

Neither of these are new or original ideas. I’ve probably heard Bert Blyleven talk about the home field advantage thing on 50 different Twins broadcasts over the years. But just because Bert wants it doesn’t make it a bad idea.

It’s not a panacea. It’s not going to end world hunger, fix insolvent banks or bring stability to Afghanistan, but it is a nice little diversion. It’s the rare venture that MLB puts together that is largely for the fans. Stark’s column points out that IP increases ticket sales on an average of nearly 10%, and my guess is that it increases TV ratings by at least that much.

Tweak it, yes. Make some minor changes. But don’t get rid of it. It’s just kind of fun.

We here at Brushbackpitch.com have been extremely critical of Fehr. He is one of the five or six people in baseball most responsible for the financial inequities of the game. His attitudes begat Scott Boras, which is an absolutely unforgivable sin. And although baseball now has a comprehensive drug testing policy – or at least that’s what Bud Selig says – Fehr has fought the idea of drug testing at every stop.

From illegal narcotics to steroids, Fehr has consistently maintained that drug testing is an invasion of privacy. If Fehr had had his way throughout his 25-plus year tenure, baseball players today would resemble the Looney Tune Monstars from Michael Jordan’s mid-90’s movie Space Jam. They’d be ‘roided up beyond belief, hitting 861 ft. home runs and sliding head first when they stole a base so as to not break the vials of cocaine in their back pockets.

To me Fehr will always be the man who killed the 1994 World Series. He led the players into a strike in August of ’94 because MLB owners were demanding a salary cap. To Fehr, it was as if ownership was asking for the right to keep the players in little cages. The idea wasn’t only out of the question, but it was insulting and inhumane.

He dug in. He wouldn’t budge. He knew that the owners wouldn’t be as unified as the players, so he engineered a seven-and-a-half month work stoppage. Over and over again that winter, Fehr would talk to the media about salary caps being unconstitutional, and that he would never allow something to artificially slow the growth of player’s salaries.

In truth, the owners were looking for protection from themselves, and a salary cap was the only way that was going to happen. Fehr knew it. He also knew if he held the players out long enough, the owners would turn on themselves. Never mind that the average baseball fan would have supported a salary cap of some kind because it would have provided a little more continuity on rosters, and it would have allowed “small market” teams to at least keep their own home grown players (think about how much a salary cap would have helped the Montreal Expos in 1994).

He was smarmy, self righteous and smug. But he was right about ownership, and he won. Fifteen years later, Major League Baseball remains the only professional American sports league without some form of a salary cap. Fehr is an evil genius, and the perfect man for his job. He’s done everything he can to protect the rights of professional baseball players, with no plausible regard for the fans or the game, and with sometimes open disdain for management.

So why do I have a nagging feeling that his retirement is a bad thing for baseball, at least in the short term?

Well, first, I think it’s because Bud Selig isn’t going with him. Baseball needs new leadership across the board. We can’t be much clearer about that than we have on this site. Fehr, his sidekick and MLBPA Chief Operating Officer Gene Orza and Commissioner Selig have all outlived their usefulness. New ideas are in pretty short supply at the top of the baseball food chain, but they are desperately needed. If Fehr really is going to leave before the end of March, he really needs to drag those other two bozos with him.

But that’s not what’s bugging me. The problem I really see on the horizon is the current collective bargaining agreement, which expires at the end of December 2011. For all of his many, many (many, many, many, many) faults, it seems like Fehr has softened some, or at least developed a little bit of common sense in the last few years.

Yes, he opposed re-opening the CBA in 2004 and 2005 to allow for stronger drug testing in reaction to steroids, but he could have slammed his fist on the table, declared new drug testing to be an impossibility and stopped the reform that has happened dead in its tracks.

Any drug testing program has to have his initials on it. He put his personal misgivings aside and allowed it.

Even more impressive, though, is his quiet understanding of the damage he did to the game in 1994. In 2002 the MLBPA and Major League Baseball came to agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement, and there wasn’t a work stoppage. This was unprecedented in the La-La land that is MLB. It was the first time a CBA had been agreed upon without a strike since 1972.

In 2006 the CBA was in place a full two months before the old one expired. Somehow Fehr and Selig had found some common ground. They may be making some terrible mistakes in their stewardship of the game, but at least these guys have learned to play nice. They’ve learned how to keep the game going.

So now, we’ll have a new Executive Director, most likely Michael Weiner who has held the number three position with the MLBPA for years. There are ringing endorsements for him from Fehr and MLB team representatives alike. The 2011 CBA negotiations will be his first real opportunity to prove himself to the rank and file members of the union.

Meanwhile, there are new rumblings among the owners for a salary cap. A new, freshly scrubbed Executive Director will have the standards set by Fehr and Marvin Miller to live up to. And anyone who ascends to that position will undoubtedly be looking for a fight.

We’ve had sixteen years of labor peace, in part thanks to Donald Fehr, but that could change.

Expect to hear talk of a strike next season, and pray for the 2011 baseball playoffs.