Book Overview
Cap In Hand
Iconic baseball writer Bill James, in 1987, frustrated with MLB’s labor stoppages
and the decline of
the minor leagues, wrote that the minors “were an abomination … if you’re selling a sport and the
players don’t care about winning, that’s not a sport. That’s a fraud … an exhibition masquerading as
a contest.” Bill imagined a better model and proposed that, as opposed to limiting
the number of
teams in MLB to protect parity, a free market was capable of sustaining many more franchises —
hundreds, even — if we would just allow it to sort out the level at which those cities might best
compete.
Cap in Hand goes a step further, arguing that a free market in sports teams
and
athletes once
existed and could work again if the monopolists of MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL would simply relent
from salary-restraint schemes and reserve-clause models that result in elite talent being spread as
thinly as possible and mediocrity being rewarded via amateur drafts and equalization
payments.
In fact, the model for this exists and may be the most wildly popular and monetarily
successful of all
professional sports: European football.
Cap In Hand asks: what if the four major North American pro sports move
beyond the restrictive
covenants of the franchise model? The product sold to fans today is a pale copy of what it might be
if the market could guide the best players to the best teams, whose ingenuity and
innovation would
inspire everyone to do better and put on a better show.