Selig was so proud of parity which meant he was glad to see the Yankee dynasty end. If the Yankees win it all this year, they will have bullseyes on their pinstripes. Others are mad that the Yankees refuse to be reigned in.

But they play in the biggest market in baseball and there are HUGE expectations of a team that has more championships than any other sports team in the biggest market in the world.

So when other teams have the history, the market and the expectations, and spend to meet those expectations, keep the market happy and make the history proud, there will be parity.

The advent of free agency did not suddenly make the Yankees the dominant team in baseball. They were, if anything, even more dominant before free agency – winning 20 WS and losing 9 in the 72-year span from 1903 to 1974. Further, all those WS appearances came after 1915, when Jacob Ruppert bought the club and started spending money on it. Sound familiar?

And there have always been teams that were perennial losers and others that enjoyed fairly consistent success. If it were all parity except for the Yankees most teams would be in the .495-.505 range over their lifetimes.

What I’m saying is that the Yankees have a financial advantage from being in NY, and if they use it they do well. Signing free agents is one way to do that, but if you cut that off the money will find another way.

All organizations face issues of representation. But the US Congress and the UN chose to balance sovereign power (the states, sovereing nations) with mechanisms that reflected size and population. Baseball has in at least the last 30 years been run to reflect the interests of small market franchises. The amatuur draft, revenue sharing, luxury tax are all designed to that end. Only the countervailing power of the union has likely kept baseball from imposing a salary cap.

Baseball can organize itself as it chooses. I’m only saying there other models. And baseball has simply used majority franchise rule to thwart the interests of large market fan bases.

(It would be interesting to know at one point the large markets have an absolute majority of fans– I’m guessing it might be with as few as eight teams.

You can argue that these fans have no greater right to success. Fine. But it’s tough to deny that this is precisely the position MLB has taken. There is simply no mechanism to enfranchise the fans of the major cities.

And why would there be? Baseball has been run by a man obsessed with the small market “narrative.” I have sat in rooms with the man and heard directly just how parochial his viewpoint and interest are.

In that situation, shouldn’t you expect to be mediocre?

Seriously, though, that last paragraph was brutal. No, baseball does not have a utilitarian need or want to reward the teams with the most fans, the bicameral nature of the US Congress is not an apt analogy or parable for baseball, and the North American pro sports leagues do not intentionally deny the interests of large market or successful franchises. No to all of that hyperbole and dubious reasoning.