By far the most common complaint I read regarding Selig's plan to add a second wild card is that it would "dilute the regular season." Personally, I'm suspicious of this argument, and I'll tell you why...
One to rectify parity issues in baseball—without engineering a massive overhaul of the revenue sharing and luxury tax systems that would require the consent of a supermajority of the owners and the MLBPA—is simply to sweeten the pot: add a couple more playoff teams.
So there you have it--the MLB is clearly the most balanced American sports league [when looking solely at regular season data], and the NFL the least balanced, contrary to popular opinion. This tells us that there is something inherent in baseball that is generating a great deal of fairness for the teams that play, regardless of payroll disparity. This also raises the possibility that Baseball's "competitive balance problem" may be nothing more than a public relations problem (which isn't insignificant, it's just not a problem that can be fixed by modifying the distribution of payrolls). Readers: Before you bring up the issues of sample size and granularity regarding the use of Gini Coefficients, please read the whole piece. Continue reading at Rational Pastime...
As you can see, the MLB has consistently maintained a greater disparity in payrolls than the NBA and NFL since the start of the previous decade, and the NHL since 2005. Far more interesting are the trends of salary disparities in the non-baseball leagues. Before the 2004-05 lockout season, the NHL was maintaining a level of payroll inequality similar to that of the MLB. Pro basketball has also seen payroll inequality wax and wane through time, while the NFL's distribution of salaries remains rather stable. Read more at Rational Pastime...
