Baltimore Orioles: End to big market teams?

On Christmas Day I watched the Washington Wizards defeat the New York Knights pretty handily. First off as a longtime Washington Bullets fan as a kid, I appreciated seeing the current incarnation of the franchise havint the opportunity to play on Christmas Day. Much of the postgame chatter centered around who would possibly want to come to NY to play for the Knicks given the state of the team. And it got me to thinking about big market teams vs. small…

Courtesy of Joy R. Absalon-USA TODAY Sports

The Baltimore Orioles aren’t a big market team. The New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and LA Dodgers most certainly are. While comparatively in their sport the Yankees aren’t anywhere near as bad as the Knicks, the consensus is that they’ll struggle in 2015. So do they find themselves in the perfect storm so to speak?

It could very well be – save for one caveat. First off, what do I mean by the perfect storm? I never would have thought that the Knicks would be at single-digit wins at Christmas. They’ve always been a destination franchise in the sense that marquee players tend to want to sign there. The same is true of the Yankees. But if the Knicks could be that bad, the Yankees certainly could at some point also.

And that time might not be too far off – most likely not in 2015, however. With the likes of ARod, Mark Texeira, etc on their roster, the Yankees are an old team. The fact is that they don’t have the horses in their farm systemm that are necessary to get better really quick, So they might get alot worse before getting better. So the point here is that while money talks, free agents might see other teams as having a better opportunity to win a title than teams like New York or even Boston…in the near future, that is.

But as I Said, money talks. I mentioned a caveat, right? The difference between MLB and other sports is that the contracts are guaranteed. So if a team like the Yankees wants to throw a ton of money at a free agent, he might be inclined to take it simply based on the fact that he knows it’s gauranteed money for him and his family. And I can’t lie – if someone’s throwing me a gauranteed $[insert value] million, I’m going to listen also.

I suppose that the theory here is that with so much emphasis on winning there’s a chance that players might look at a franchise like the Orioles, Nationals, Royals, or Pirates one day and think to themselves that they’d have a better shot at winning a title sooner there than they would in New York or Boston.

But remember, we also need to be careful when it comes to expecting or hoping for championships. It’s that yearn for winning and glory which added to the need for people to use PED’s. There was a lot more involved than that, however it’s a part of the overall picture. Ultimately, winning’s important to players. And many of them might have a decision to make when being courted by the Yankees (among others) moving forward; take the money, or a better shot at winning a title?