Forgetfulness and salary caps

Well some things are too perfect to invent, and this was one of them. In a post titled: “Salary caps and forgetfulness”, I completely forgot to talk about salary caps. This makes sense, as my sports mood right now is scattered and lackluster. The summer is a complete sports void if your baseball team sucks. My baseball team sucks. Hence, the summer is a complete sports void. (How’s that for you amateur logicians).

While I could scream and inveigh and pule about the Yankees as I have done many times before, I believe that this would be pointless. They are wasting a monstrous A-Rod season, they are wasting a $20,000,000 Roger Clemens contract, and basically, I blame two people: Joe Torre and Bobby Abreu. As usual, Torre has destroyed the bullpen. However, Abreu’s year has been one of tremendous significance. Red Sox fans should send Bobby Abreu Christmas cards, and they should stuff them with cookies too. He obviously likes them. The fact of the matter is that Abreu has sabotaged this team (notice how during his own decent streak, the Yankees went 11-2) and I don’t care to relive his atrocious half a year by yelling about it. Though I just did, so...

Anyway, I was thinking to myself as the Spurs were labeled a dynasty by idiots and the NFL labeled as full of parity by morons and baseball labeled as broken due to no salary cap by stupid people... I thought to myself (...SELF! [BAM! {Le Betard!—tell me how many of those you got—}]) that not only are the people clamoring for a salary cap simply mad that no one cares about their teams, they simply don’t understand sports. At all.

The NBA, which has a salary cap, also has no parity. At the start of the year there are three teams that have a legitimate chance at a title—maybe a fourth some of the time—and that is it. That is the list. (Never mind that they all live in the West; each of the big three has one conference that dominates the others). The vaunted salary cap has not kept the Spurs, Mavs and Suns from dominating the league consistently. It didn’t keep the Lakers from dominating the league consistently. And the East is hardly better in terms of parity. All the teams are worse, but Detroit has reached the conference finals five straight years. Now is any of this a reflection on the money system of the NBA? Perhaps in the sense that good GMs know how to manipulate it with better results, but that is true of anything, anywhere. The lack of parity really only attests to the fact that a dozen players in a decade are good enough to take their team to the title, and the chances of those players changing teams are extremely low. In one of the rare cases where it did happen—Shaq—the team he moved to soon won a title.

In the NFL, the super salary cap and myth of parity are no different in falsity. Once you get past the shiny Brummagem they project, the NFL has no parity at all. The Colts, Patriots, Colts and Patriots have completely dominated the league for the past six years. Why? Hunh. I wonder. Might they have the two best players in the league at the most important position? Yes they might. In a similar situation to the NBA, where the East sucks, the NFL’s weaker conference also has a team or two that has dominated for the last half a dozen years. The Eagles in particular. Now granted, the titles are more spread around in the NFL than in the NBA, but that is because A) the NBA plays a series in the playoffs, and B) the NFL has 53 players on a team, tons of changeover from year to year, and regardless of a salary cap, it is made so that teams wont win for as long (players even break down faster. Great running backs are done by the age of 31. Great guards hit their prime somewhere around there). Both of these leagues have salary caps, neither have parity, and yet...

Baseball, the land of ultra unpredictability, is decried as being behind the times for its lack of a salary cap. Lemme see... How many teams have won two titles in the past eight years? Uh... none? How about in the past twenty? Two? Baseball doesn’t need a salary cap because for one thing, the idiotic first round allows a hot hitting team to win a bad game or two and get by a superior team before either side has even blinked. It doesn’t need a salary cap because baseball is inherently more luck based in a short series than basketball. It doesn’t need a salary cap because buying a team obviously doesn’t *work* over vast periods of time (no one remembers this, but the Yankees only stopped winning World Series’ when they started spending money). One player can’t dominate for years the way a Shaq or a Jordan or even a Peyton Manning can. If they could, the Twins would win every year.



Closing the Gap? This nonsense about Rafael Nadal "closing the gap" with Federer cracks me up. That's all I have to say. Really. Did anyone watch the fifth set? Before the fifth set, Federer stunk to high Heaven and he still won two out of four sets. When he flipped the switch in the fifth set (granted, it took him longer than usual to flip the switch), he made Nadal look like an amalgamation of n00b, L0s3R, and aMat3_R. Plus, Nadal looks like a girl. Federer wins all around.



In a really funny story I heard just the other day, apparently when Pete Sampras was dominating Wimbeldon (7 out of 8 years he won), and was closing in on Borg's five in a row record, Bjorn called the man who beat Sampras and thanked him for saving his record. Who was that man? Yes, it was Roger Federer. Who the heck would have guessed back then that Bjorn really owed him no thanks at all, since a few years later Roger would finish the job? I mean... wow. i-r-o-n-i-c.

In Women's Tennis News... Normally I would not deign to discuss the slow motion snore fest that is women's tennis (unless Maria Sharapova was somehow involved...), but I have to ask...

Who the heck is Venus Williams screaming at? Everytime she swings, she lets loose the most vicious, unecessary yelps that I have to wonder if she is being mugged. As if I needed any other reasons to avoid women's tennis.

Home Run Derby. Well. If you can call it that. The Derby produced zero moments of interest, including a putrid 3-2 (3-2!) final round. I guess the only good thing was that due to a lack of dingers, we didn't have to endure too much of the quacking, or clucking, or whatever you call that atrocious cacophony of noise that Chris Berman constantly shouts every time a player hits a--GASP!!--home run in the home run derby.

All Star Game: The AL won. But then, I could have told you that a week ago.

Sorry about the slow rate of posts, but it really isn't my fault that only one sport is going, and that nothing of interest is going in that solely going sport. Err... yeah.

~The Sports Maunderer~