"The Yankees financial muscle has been used in this century as leverage to spread the wealth among the 30 franchises in MLB, and (Hal) Steinbrenner has tacitly agreed to this arrangement as long as the Yankees APPEAR to be a constantly dominant and winning team." The Financial Politics of Revenue Sharing

From the pen of our commenter Richie Dick Allen... 

THE FINANCIAL POLITICS OF REVENUE SHARING

What is the purpose of a bureaucracy? To sustain and maintain the bureaucracy. Nothing more. Nothing less. It is a structure that is built solely for the purpose that all may prosper in equal measure. Major league baseball has become such a bureaucracy. 

It is, in effect, a self-contained monopoly with money as its sole reason for being, and the membership has very quietly and deliberately orchestrated dealings that seem to be random and unconnected, but are in fact, a carefully disguised and elaborate series of manipulations of their marketplace that is designed solely for mutual enrichment of the membership and not about winning. 

Success and winning is a product that must, in this particular bureaucracy, be distributed like so much scattered bird seed. It is a conspiracy in which no one member of this very exclusive club has any advantage over another and competition is a quality to be frowned upon. 

There may be the appearance of competition, especially during the regular season, but in the end, there are subtle and ongoing manipulations that determine on a rotating basis who will have hope of winning and hope is one of the key elements of this charade. At its core is the principal of revenue sharing.

We all remember the Yankees teams from the 1995 through 2000 that won four of the six World Series and two of those were clean sweeps. They Yankees were dominant. This was bad for business.

During those five seasons in the late 1990s, none of the 14 teams in the bottom half of payroll spending won even one of the 158 postseason games played. Every World Series was won by a team with one of the top seven payrolls. This was also bad for business.

While I won’t get into the details of how disastrous this has been for the Yankees, who are only a minor cog in the greater realm of major league baseball, I will go so far as to suggest that revenue sharing has destroyed any chance of the Yankees ever being the dominant team we enjoy from our collective history. Those days are over, and the Yankees ownership is actively complicit in this conspiracy to make money for all, owners and players alike. They are all participants in this annual fraud.

Consider this: the Astros tanked for nearly a decade and were rewarded with a championship in spite of the common public knowledge that they were deliberately losing for the sole purpose of acquiring higher draft picks. What allowed them to do this was revenue sharing. While they were losing, revenue sharing was the device that allowed them remain profitable. 

The Orioles are next in line. Kansas City has already had their championship, as the Cubs have had theirs (and god knows they waited long enough for it). Now, each of those franchises has a history to be proud of.  This success-sharing is good for business. On the other hand, there are franchises that are led by the perennially inept owner/management teams, such as those in Pittsburgh, and Anaheim, for example, that will live in the basement while lining their pockets with revenue-sharing cash. Revenue sharing has removed any incentive for many teams to even attempt to win, and winning, as I said earlier, is no longer a prize to be coveted.

Now for the Yankees. This particular Steinbrenner is a member of the boy’s club and he has been generous in propping up the club – and by club I mean the MLB club, not the Yankees club. He is less interested in the Yankees on-field success than in ensuring that MLB remain profitable and by extension, his own private profitability. He defines success by a different metric. For, as long as the Yankees APPEAR competitive, he will remain profitable and thereby increase the value of his franchise. The Yankees have become a franchise in the same way that he would own a McDonalds franchise. There is just no way the Yankees burger is going to be any better than a Pittsburgh burger but it will be proportionally more profitable, and turning out a profit is his measure of success.

Steinbrenner has aided and abetted this criminal conspiracy in many ways:

They Yankees absorbed the contract of Giancarlo Stanton, thus allowing Miami to become profitable in the wake of their sale. You know why Jeter resigned? He wanted to win while the other owners only wanted to remain profitable. Derek Jeter will never be a welcome and satisfied member of the MLB boys club because he has a competitive fire in him that is inconsistent with the goal of mutual profitability.

I would even go so far as to suggest the Yankees absorbed A-Rod’s contract so that the Rangers could remain profitable, and I believe, since the dawn of the century that the Yankees have been in collusion with all the other owners and the players union to make MLB profitable and none have any interest in winning. Competition is a thing to be frowned upon.

The Yankees absorbed Josh Donaldson’s contract so that the Twins could sign Carlos Correa. I have no doubt that many other similar dealings in the past twenty years can be attributed to this strategy. The Yankees financial muscle has been used in this century as leverage to spread the wealth among the thirty franchises in MLB and Steinbrenner has tacitly agreed to this arrangement as long as the Yankees APPEAR to be a constantly dominant  and winning team. Appearances are everything. It is very good for business.

To Yankees fans everywhere, it is maddening to see how a once mighty team that currently sells itself as a “championship-caliber team” is nothing more than a chimera. They see through the distant haze of history that these once mighty pinstripes are nothing more than prison bars that obscure the one simple fact of life for them today: it was the dominance of a team in the nineties (that did nothing but consistently win at the highest level) that has created the successful mediocrity that confronts them today. The days of the New York Yankees being a force to be reckoned with are over, having given way to the commonplace motivation of profit brought about by revenue sharing. The desire for profitability has ruined the Yankees forever.