MLB draft offically broken?

[Crashcup]

that is a good point, some of these owners don't care about wins and losses as long as they make money.

They all care about a profit FIRST. If they can also manage to win then that PROFIT will grow exponentially and hence the rich get richer.

 

[Zurp]

The problem with this line of thinking is that if you don't have healthy competition, you don't have a product...That's where sports deviates from other businesses...I personally don't follow baseball until about this time of year. Part of that is because I know you can scratch off the names of 90% of the teams before the season even starts. IMO that makes for a bad product...

You're right in that, for many people, the product IS the competition. But for other people, their team is the product. In baseball, as with all sports, I want my team to win all of their games. I don't want to see a penant race at the end of the year to keep things competitive and exciting. I want to see 20-0 games every night. Just like I want my company to get every job we ever bid on. I don't want to lose some jobs just so those other companies stay in business.

However, only people in northeast Ohio will be happy if the Indians win 162 games in the regular season, and then 11-0 in the post-season. The Indians aren't a good nation-wide product, and they probably can't ever be one. I don't think that any team ever can be one. My company can be a national company, and I think that's the big difference between sports and other businesses. MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, etc. want their entire leagues to be money-makers, not just individual markets, whereas there is no similar governing body for my business.

That is why the leagues, themselves, see benefit in salary caps.

And, for the record, I don't usually watch much baseball, either. It's an extremely boring sport, in my opinion, and if a team has the best record in the American League with 65 or more losses, it just shows that individual games are practically meaningless. In the playoffs, games count for more, and I watch more.

But I guess I got us off-topic. So let's talk about the draft. I don't know anything about baseball drafts. So nevermind.