Posted by Bill Baer on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 7:01 am

In the aftermath of the World Series championship won by the New York Yankees are bitter feelings shared by many baseball fans outside of the Bronx. After all, the Yankees did have an Opening Day payroll that crossed the $200 million threshold. Did you know that, according to the CIA World Factbook, eight nations have a gross domestic product less than the Yankees’ 2009 Opening Day payroll? How unfair that the Yankees get to outspend entire nations just to field a baseball team!

Joe Posnanski says as much in a recent article he wrote for SI.com. Describing the Yankees’ financial flexibility, he writes:

You have one team (and only one team) playing the video game on cheat-mode.

Posnanski goes on to argue that it’s a bigger problem than we give it credit for, since the arguments have been made (and eventually ignored) ad nauseam. He also states that the game of baseball, due to its high rates of failure (as in teams rarely reaching stratospheric heights of success), hides the iniquities of the Yankees’ luxurious spending.

I don’t disagree with anything Pos wrote. Many of the points he raises are salient, but I think he is identifying the wrong culprit in the matter. It’s similar to people blaming George W. Bush for everything that’s gone wrong in the Middle East, since he is the most prominent and easily-recognizable figure involved in the fiasco(es). The truth is that there are many other individuals (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld) and groups (Halliburton, Blackwater) that had a lot more to do with the decisions that were made than Bush by himself.

When we express our moral outrage, we tend to search for an individual or a group at whom we can point our fingers. With the performance-enhancing drugs issue, we point our collective finger at Bud Selig. We point at Bush for the War in Iraq. We Phillies fans blame the World Series Game Six loss on Pedro Feliz for his inability to get a hit with runners in scoring position. It’s much easier to pick one item to symbolize our outrage than to incessantly list each and every one of our grievances.

However, when we forget what the symbols symbolize, we become myopic. The Yankees are only doing what they are allowed to do, and they are allowed to spend freely. They are not breaking any rules* and they are not stepping on anyone else to achieve their goals.

* The Yankees do bust slot in the draft, but so do the Tampa Bay Rays. That rule in baseball is akin to our marijuana laws.

The problem isn’t the Yankees’ free-spending ways. No, that’s a byproduct of the problem. As another example: I go to the doctor, who tells me that I’m obese. “That’s a problem,” I say. My doctor retorts, “No, the problem is that you eat too many cheeseburgers and exercise very rarely.” I can take medication to reduse my obesity but if I don’t cut cheeseburgers out of my diet and start exercising, I’m not fixing the problem.

Lack of regulation is the problem. As Ken Rosenthal suggests for FOXSports.com, “I’m not an alarmist when it comes to baseball’s economic system. I do not view a salary cap as a panacea. But now that the big-money teams are proving adept at Moneyball, commissioner Bud Selig needs to at least be on alert.”

A salary cap is almost always the first suggestion for implementing regulation in Major League Baseball, but a salary cap would simply hamstring the Yankees. Hamstringing the Yankees won’t restore financial balance unless every team’s owner is making an earnest effort in providing substantial resources for the organization to field a competitive team.

That is not the case. Take the late Carl Pohlad, who owned the Minnesota Twins from 1984 until his death in January this year. Twice, in 1997 and in 2001, he unsuccessfully tried to sell the Twins. Had his efforts in 2001 worked, the Twins would have been contracted.

Those efforts would have been acceptable if Pohlad needed the money, but Forbes estimated his net worth at $3.6 billion, making him the 102nd richest citizen in the United States. According to USA Today, from 1988-2001, the Twins never had a payroll higher than $28 million. Additionally, according to the Twins blog Twinkie Town, their payroll never ranked higher than 18th out of 30 teams between 1999-2008.

The Twins started their more recent run of success in 2001, always thriving in spite of their perennial lack of financial resources. Carl Pohlad is an example of what is really wrong with the lack of regulation: owners spending too little and pocketing too much.

Any fan would love to have George Steinbrenner as the owner of his or her favorite team. Steinbrenner clearly has a personal –  not to be confused with financial — stake in the success of his team and would sail to the edge of the Earth to put his team in a great position to succeed. Conversely, we would all hate to have Pohlad as an owner because his actions bespoke viewing the players as dollar signs. Star free agents gave Pohlad nightmares of money being thrown out of a Rolls-Royce convertible on a windy day in the Hamptons.

The solution isn’t just a salary cap; it must also include a salary floor. There needs to be regulation on organizations that are too eager to spend and those that aren’t eager enough. If George Steinbrenner is a problem in baseball, then so too are owners like Carl Pohlad who make enough money to have a competitive payroll but choose to pocket that money instead.

We need to be more prudent in identifying cause and effect if we intend to problem-solve. The Yankees’ free-spending is an effect, and the relative lack of regulation is the cause. As such, I would amend Posnanski’s statement quoted above:

Most teams have the capability of playing the video game on cheat-mode, but few teams choose to do so.

Let’s stop blaming the Yankees and start fixing the system.