Baseball and hockey should learn from NFL socialism

There’s a new socialist revolution brewing right here in the United States. It’s a model of… There’s a new socialist revolution brewing right here in the United States. It’s a model of economic efficiency. But before any of you take alarm, I must caution that quelling this socialist revolution would mean taking on the likes of Brian Urlacher, Ray Lewis, Joey Porter and the entire National Football League. With any luck, this revolution will succeed, and in a few years, Derek Jeter, Sammy Sosa, Alexei Kovalev and Peter Forsberg can join the NFL’s top stars as the poster children for socialism in the 21st century.

The NFL’s socialism should be a model for baseball and hockey. Revenues are shared, there’s a hard salary cap and while the greatest players can’t sign $25 million-a-year deals like Alex Rodriquez, nobody walks away unable to live a comfortable life. Pittsburgh sports personality Mark Madden reports that each NFL team made $77 million last year, and paid their players an average of $1.1 million. The league was competitive, with several teams in each conference not knowing their postseason status until the very end, and even the 2-14 Cincinnati Bengals managed to cost the Saints a playoff spot by beating them.

The NFL has figured out the recipe for excitement and fan-interest: parity. That in turn translates to profits. Parity is necessary for competitiveness. By setting a hard amount of money teams can spend on player salaries, no one team is able to monopolize talent because they can spend more than every other team. Players also have to accept the reality that teams will be reluctant to sign them to vastly lucrative contracts, because spending too much on one player will leave the team broke when they need to fill another position.

The other thing that ensures parity is revenue sharing. By evenly distributing money made from television contracts, the NFL ensures that each team will have enough money to field a competitive team. The NFL operates with a restricted labor market and the redistribution of revenues.

That’s socialism, and it’s working.

Compare this to Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League. They are leagues full of bankrupt or near bankrupt teams. Several teams have no chance of making the playoffs before the first puck drops or the first pitch is thrown. They are sports that have been dominated by the same few wealthy teams year in and year out. Last Monday, every Penguins fan shed a tear as playoff hopes, in the form of Kovalev, were traded to New York just so the Pens could get enough money and dump enough salary to avoid being in the red this year. Will Michael Samuelson, Alexander Daigle, Randy Robataille, Dick Tarnstrom or even “Big Mac” Steve McKenna be enough for Mario Lemieux to work with and lead the Penguins to the playoffs? I suppose there’s the possibility. There’s also the possibility that a lame duck Lloyd McClendon can lead the likes of Matt Stairs, Kevin Young, Jacques Wilson and the rest of the triple-A Pirates to the NL Central crown or the wild-card playoff berth. Maybe in both cases I should say “impossibility.”

The reality of baseball and hockey is that they are not competitive. The capitalist economic system in place in both these sports allows teams like the New York Rangers, the Detroit Red Wings, the New York Yankees, and the New York Mets, among others, to monopolize talent by simply buying it all for more than the competition can afford. The Penguins traded their top goal-scorer and second largest source of offense to a team with four or five. This leaves the Pens with just one source of offense, No. 66. While the Pirates are looking frantically for a third starter, the Yankees signed their eighth and ninth starters over the summer. In baseball and hockey, the rich get richer and the poor get Pokey Reese and Rico Fata.

Baseball and hockey need to jump on board the socialist revolution the NFL has taken the lead in. While players don’t want to see salaries be restricted, they also don’t want to see teams fold. Both sports have teams that are facing dire economic times and that are on the verge of collapse. The lesson to be learned from the theory of capitalism is that competitiveness makes money. NFL owners and players understood that when they instituted a salary cap and revenue sharing. They understood that socialism was the only way to ensure that a competitive balance was maintained. That competitive balance ensures perpetual profitability by sustaining fan interest and giving each team a realistic chance of winning it all each year. For the sake of bringing the Cup back to Pittsburgh and the Pirates at least back to .500 ball, let’s hope socialism in sports becomes as American as baseball and apple-pie.

Jason Lawrence hopes you too appreciate the irony that it took football players to make socialism work. E-mail him at jrl4@pitt.edu.