[Dakota]

It would never work to turn the clubs loose and have no "league" to speak of.

You are overstating my case. My ideal solution would be to have one business enterprise, MLB, with each team treated as a divisional office. Employee salary and benefits would be set by the corporate HQ (MLB). Employee location would be jointly determined by the company (MLB), the divisions (teams), and the employees (players), just like in a “real” business.

However, I cannot see this ever coming to pass. In my alternative, I did not suggest there would be no league to speak of, only that the league could not veto team location.

As for teams moving around, this is heresy. Teams moving is BAD for baseball. I repeat: When teams move, baseball SUFFERS. The location of teams in MLB is OPTIMAL. There is nowhere for anybody to move! This is what the owners of the Twins and the Expos have found out; they WILL make more money in their crappy domed multi-purpose stadia in the Twin Cities and Montreal, both 4 million+ metro areas, than they would five years after a move to Charlotte, San Antonio, Austin, or Salt Lake City. (If MLB were to expand again, the only logical places to go are Monterrey, Mexico City, or a third New York team. Thus, MLB will NOT expand for a very long time.) So, the poor fans in Minnesota like me keep their poor team, and we're much happier for it.

I shudder to think of the results of MLB dissolving into the clubs, with teams moving at the rate of a few per season, with teams folding and starting up. I just imagine and dream what my Twins could do with a new CEO/GM, an infusion of shared revenue, and a $40 million spending quota.

Maybe we could afford to give Ron Coomer $2 million. As it stands, he'll be playing elsewhere and we'll be starting gold medalist Doug Mientkiewicz every day. Oh, he's a good prospect, but pardon me if I don't think he'll hit 10 homers this year. 9 should be enough to lead the team.

This is a strange argument for a Twins fan to make. The Twins were the last team to move in MLB. Enforce your rule 30 years ago, and we would have no Twins; we would still have the Senators. Do you have an example where a team moving was bad for baseball? Twins? Dodgers? Giants? Athletics? Braves? I agree that Charlotte is no better financially than the Twin Cities for a MLB team, but if all of the fetters were removed, do you really think Carl Pohlad would move the team to Charlotte? No, he would move the team where he could make some real money (either directly or by sale).

I wasn’t talking about expansion, only relocation. If 4 million is all it takes to financially support a MLB team, then the NY metro area should have 6-8 teams. The Twins have no local income to speak of; they survive on their share of the national TV contract and the paltry revenue sharing. They are a league team, supported by the league, in existence in order to provide a team for other members of the league to play, kind of like the DC Nationals to the Harlem Globetrotters. The Yankees, by contrast, have a local revenue stream that rivals the MLB national TV contract in total. They only need the league in order to have teams to play.

Your $40 million spending quota would only delay the inevitable without some approach to break up the local revenue streams for the top teams. IMO, it is not likely such a revenue sharing / salary floor-cap system will be put into place. Much more likely is for the league to decide that it has too many “DC Nationals”, and to dissolve the Twins & the Expos (and maybe a couple of others).