My email to him:

Howard,

Baseball drastically needs a salary cap. If it doesn’t it might soon start losing fans of my ilk. The reason why this is so is something I wrote under a pen name here.

The situation is bad and getting worse because the big money teams are getting smarter. For a small market team to win, everything has to come together at the exact same time because if your hitters mature and come off contract before your pitchers do, you’ll have a mediocre good-hitting team followed by a mediocre good-pitching team because the large market team took your hitters. It is sort of like the rhythm method in reverse and just as effective… It may very well be a waste of time for me to continue to root for the Indians because the mlb house odds are skewed. They may win but the odds are strongly against it. Some have argued with me that I should watch as I love the game and I shouldn’t need a WS win to justify my fandom but if the game is rigged, how can I continue to love and support a fraud?

To your point of the Yankees not winning every year, I say three things:
A I hope that they win ten World Series in a row so that the parity parrots can stop parroting their fallacies
B The Yankees and other large market teams are getting smarter and are using their money more wisely.
C A dominant team in baseball will still lose every three out of eight games. If you combine this with the small sample size of the playoffs and the best team doesn’t always win – lucky teams and/or hot teams frequently do…

The last point is very, very important and is the essential answer to your logic. To read more on this, please check out Posnanski here:

Since 1985, only six teams have won the World Series with the highest player payroll in the game.

Payroll in its own way represents a straw argument

There’s a straw argument here, but it’s not the one you’re thinking of….

Gee, only six times in 25 seasons? Because obviously if there’s not parity then that means the single highest payroll team wins the World Series, what, every year? Seems to me one team winning every four seasons (in fact, every three since 1992 if we’re allowed to arbitrarily pick a year that best supports our position) is pretty damn good evidence that they have a ridiculous advantage, when there are 30 teams in the game.

Stuart’s point C is critical. To make it more concrete, let’s play with some numbers. Suppose a team is favored 3:2 in any given playoff game (pretty high odds, considering that they’re presumably playing one of the top 10 or so teams). If the odds are accurate (that is, they really do have a 60% chance of winning each individual game), the chances that team will win all three series in the current playoff format is only a bit over 1/3 (in fact, 34.4%). So a high-payroll team could win their division for 24 straight years, and have heavily stacked odds in the playoffs (to the tune of 3:2 in their favor), and you’d only expect them to win about 8 championships over that stretch.

If we just look at the last 15 seasons (i.e., the wildcard era), the Yankees have 4 championships — only one fewer than you’d expect under my fairly extreme scenario above. You’re telling me that’s somehow not a rigged system?