Let’s put a third team in New York

While we all grouse about how much money the Yankees have, Sports Illustrated’s Tim Marchman reminds us why, exactly, they have so much money:

According to the measure used by the Office of Management and Budget, the New York metropolitan region numbers about 19 million people. In other words, New York has one MLB team for every 9.5 million people. Chicago, by this measure, has one for every five million people, just as Miami and Atlanta do. Los Angeles has one for every 6.5 million people, as do Dallas and Philadelphia.

So, with such an inherent advantage in eyes, which gives their cable outlet an inherent advantage in revenue, which gives the team so much more money, the obvious solution is to impose a salary cap, right? No, silly. That’s hard. This is much easier, at least theoretically-speaking:

The better solution would be to place a third team in New York. That would bring the town’s population:team ratio down to the level of Los Angeles or Philadelphia, and with the same number of people and dollars chasing more baseball, would quite likely bring Yankee spending down a hair without doing anything punitive or unfair.

Easier in that the territorial rights system which keeps a third team out of Gotham could be cast aside by the owners themselves, whereas a salary cap would require a labor battle that the owners could never win.

Not that getting the owners to roll over for that would be easy -- both New York teams and their affiliated interests would go crazy, and the teams in Los Angeles and Chicago could fear that they’d be next. Plus, you have the small problem of where specifically a third New York team would play and who would pay the billion dollars+ for the building. New Jersey, in a ballpark paid for buy an eccentric billionaire? OK, we’ll work on it.

The point is that a third team in New York is merely hard, not impossible. It worked for nearly sixty years, so it could work again. At any rate, it seems more realistic to agitate for that than it would to agitate for a salary cap.