Contraction. For any sports fan, it’s an ugly word. Contraction means wiping a franchise from the face of the Earth. Contraction means uprooting an entire base and leaving them to search the sports landscape like nomads, looking for another team to latch on to.

About ten years ago, Major League Baseball began toying with the idea of contracting the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos. Neither team was pulling in good attendance numbers. Both teams were mostly floundering around their own divisions. Although Minnesota had taken two of five World Series’ (1987 and 1991), they were averaging less than 1.5M fans yearly after the players’ strike ended the 1994 season two months early. Montreal was crushed by the strike; they were poised to make their first playoff appearance since 1981 when the season was halted. The franchise never recovered.

For a couple of years, the few remaining faithful fans of the Twins and Expos were on the edge of their seats, waiting by their morning newspaper to hear if their franchises would be eradicated with one signature of a pen. Minnesota escaped relatively unscathed and returned to a respectable level of competition. Montreal wasn’t so lucky. The franchise was purchased by Major League Baseball and forced to play out lame duck seasons in Quebec until they were finally sold and moved to Washington to become today’s Washington Nationals.

In 2009, Major League Baseball is in a much better place. Revenues are at an all time high, the television contracts have been locked up long term and for billions of dollars. And although a cloud of performance enhancing drugs still hangs over the game like a dense mist, fans have responded with a resounding “We don’t care” at every turn and every hand-wringing BBWAA Hall-of-Fame voter pushing a new agenda. So at a time like this, who would ever talk about something as dirty as contraction?

Well… I was bored while I waited for the hammer to fall. So I started doing a little digging, and commissioned my own research study to determine whether or not contraction of MLB teams was still a viable option. What I found was actually pretty surprising.

Let’s start with the “why”. I am a fan of baseball first and foremost. While my loyalties lie with a big-market team (Boston), I am not immune to having a soft spot in my heart for small market franchises like Atlanta, Milwaukee, Kansas City and others. Without the small market teams, the entire economy of baseball would fall apart.

That doesn’t mean the system is perfect. Salaries and team payrolls are out of control in some locker rooms while other owners barely even spend the money they get in revenue sharing in order to line their pockets with as much extra as possible.

More importantly, when spring training breaks there are usually no more than a handful of teams with a legitimate shot at winning the World Series. Red Sox, Yankees, Mets, Cubs, Dodgers, Angels, Phillies, Indians, Tigers, Cardinals. Those are the current “haves” – the franchises with good enough teams coming out of spring training as well as the means to add the necessary pieces through trades or free agency to patch any hole that might pop-up mid-season. And, aside from the random Florida Marlins’ or Colorado Rockies’ sighting, at least one of those ten teams has been involved in every World Series since Major League Baseball settled their last labor dispute early in the 1995 regular season.

I don’t know about you, but I like having a little surprise in my life. Even though “my team” is one of those that supposedly always has a shot, I’d be happy to watch a team like the Brewers, Marlins, Royals or any of the other 20 teams in Major League Baseball make a miracle run to a championship.

There are only two real solutions to the problem: A salary cap / salary floor system where all teams will be forced to spend a minimum and penalized much more severely than they currently are for violating the maximum. In 2008, there was a $188M gap between the team spending the most money (Yankees, duh, at $209M) and the least (Marlins at just over $21M). In fact, there was a $72M gap between the Yankees and just the second place team in spending, the Mets. For the record, Boston was fourth at a little over $133M. I don’t play favorites – every team spending that much or that little is a disgrace.

The other option is everyone’s least favorite word, contraction. Pretend for a moment that you have no loyalty to any particular team, just the game of baseball in general. Wouldn’t it make sense to have four or six fewer teams, to raise the level of competition by lessening the overall number of players? Wouldn’t it be better for the baseball economy if there were fewer teams fighting over the same players, thereby lowering demand and leading to fewer situations where one player can hold an entire organization hostage while trying to get every last dollar out of another?

While I am fully in favor of the salary cap / floor proposition, Sparty has already given us the numbers on parity in the major sports since 1980. So let’s remove that as an option and instead explore the contraction question.

I set up four qualifications to “save” a team from the contraction axe based on statistics from 1995 (the year after the strike) to 2008. The categories were all based on averages of the 14 year period (11 for Tampa and Arizona), and were chosen to represent some of the more important measuring sticks of a Major League Franchise. (Click images to enlarge graphs)

Overall Regular Season Record – teams falling behind the median winning percentage over the span of fourteen years (a surprisingly low 0.495) were on the chopping block.  Tampa Bay and Arizona had a bit of a disadvantage here, being expansions teams that, one would think, started out slowly in the early days of their franchises.  However, Arizona has a respectable .504 winning percentage since the inception of the team, high enough to be spared.

Salaries – Teams who aren’t even bothering to spend on their product (at least over the median of the average salaries for all teams since 1994 – $60,601,545 per year) are up for the guillotine. Unfortunately, this statistic was the most skewed by the new economics of baseball over the past eight years when the $100M barrier was broken, then left in the dust.  Marlins, Nationals, Twins, Royals and Rays – just five teams that have almost never even approached that “average”, let alone consistently broken it.

Attendance – If the fans aren’t showing up, then they’ve turned their backs. Some fans (Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Montreal/Washington) can be given a little bit of a pass considering how terrible their teams have been for the past 14 years, but taking an objective look, no franchise could be spared.  The average attendance was 2,546,810 per team since 1994.  For comparison, the Nationals, Pirates, Reds, Marlins and Royals have broken that “average” number three times in fourteen years.  Total.  For all five franchises combined.

Franchise Success – If the team has won a pennant and appeared in a World Series since 1995, they’re safe. Barely.  Seventeen of the thirty MLB franchises were saved in this way, and for five teams, this was the only think that saved them.

So, what did I come up with? A whopping seven franchises failed all four tests, and another seven were barely spared with a World Series appearance, futile spending or just plain old dumb luck.

Some of the teams that might be directly in the line of fire were obvious – Washington, Pittsburgh, Kansas City. Others were a little more surprising – Toronto, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and yes, even Minnesota. Maybe the Twins didn’t make it out unscathed.

The seven teams that were only barely saved were Oakland (good enough overall winning percentage at .538), Texas (they keep spending, just not winning), Tampa Bay, Detroit, Philadelphia, Florida, San Diego; they all failed every numbers test, but they each made a World Series run since 1995 and combined have won three titles including the Phillies last year when they beat Tampa Bay.

Let’s go one step further. Let’s assume that any of these fourteen cities would throw a complete shit fit if Major League Baseball suddenly announced that their teams were being contracted following the 2009 season. Kind of goes without saying. Now, let’s assume that any team that has built a new stadium in the past ten seasons would go completely over the edge, bringing in the lawyers and filing suit to keep their team because of city bonds, leases, etc. Again, just speaking in generalities here. But let’s say that any team that has opened a new ballpark since Opening Day 1999 is exempt from this study.

Thanks to Wikipedia, we find that thirteen MLB teams have opened the doors to a new ballpark since 1999, starting with the Mariners at Safeco Field ten years ago and continuing up to the much ballyhooed celebrations at Citi Field and New Yankee Stadium this season.

And, using that list, we can see that of our 14 teams potentially on the chopping block, seven (Washington, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Detroit, San Diego and Philadelphia) have all opened new parks since 1999. Minnesota and Florida (to be renamed the “Miami Marlins”) are in the process of building their own new stadiums to be opened in the next five years.

So, we’re down to five potential candidates. Kansas City, Toronto, Texas, Tampa Bay, Oakland. Yikes – there goes 1/3 of the American League.

So, after this entire exercise, it looks even less likely that something like this would ever happen. But, just for the hell of it, let’s take the final step and look at the realignment of the divisions. We’ll save the allotment of players in what would immediately be the best supplemental draft in baseball history for discussion in the comments.

With five teams being cut, the leagues would be uneven. As MLB is currently setup, there are 16 National League teams and 14 American League (Thanks Bud… way to help the Brewers out back in ’95.) If we cut five teams out, we’d be down to twenty-five total teams, and still have an un-even setup. So, let’s make the numbers work a little more effectively, and drop one more team from the ranks to give us six solid divisions and keep the playoff structure that has worked so well in the past fifteen seasons.

From our original list of 14 possible teams to be cut, the one falling below the threshold with the oldest (in relative terms of speaking) ballpark is… the Milwaukee Brewers. Oh the irony…

The AL East & West would each lose two teams, as well as one from both Central divisions. The remaining teams would have to be reshuffled into six four-team divisions, perhaps along these lines. The unbalanced schedule would be a thing of the past, allowing for teams to truly be tested against the rest of the league and not just against their own division for ½ of their yearly games.  Maybe we’d see the end of Interleague Play, maybe not.

We’ve finally determined our teams to be cut. We have former World Series champions, our only international franchise, and a perennial loser that just recently started to turn things around. In one fell swoop, the entire balance of power could be shifted in Major League Baseball. Parity could be reinstated across the baseball landscape in an instant.

Now, the million (or even billion) dollar question. Who ya got?

If every team were allowed to draft from the Major League rosters of the contracted teams, think of the changes… Zach Grienke… Ryan Braun… Roy Halladay… BJ Upton… there’s almost an entire All-Star team just on these six franchises. The Supplemental Draft would be Must-See TV.

I’ll leave the draft up to you guys. If you have the #1 overall pick in the supplemental draft, who are you taking off of these six rosters? Personally, I’d go with Halladay, Braun or Carl Crawford. But I’ll leave it to you. Have at it.

Lata.

Popularity: 6% [?]