Kovacevic: Busting 10 myths, baseball edition

PITTSBURGH — No one likes learning that they're wrong.

I don’t like it myself. It’s unsettling. I’ll find myself pausing awkwardly, trying to contort a way out of it, no matter how compelling the new evidence in front of me.

On that note, then, you might hate this column, which will derail 10 commonly expressed myths regarding the Pirates and Major League Baseball.

MYTH: Bob Nutting’s a billionaire.

REALITY: He isn’t. He almost certainly would be if he were to sell his dominant share of the franchise, given that David Glass just sold the Royals for $1 billion last August. But he hasn’t done that yet, and he’s got no evident intention of doing so.

The billionaire thing began -- and really took off -- after a 2017 article in Forbes paraphrased one in the New York Times that had mentioned Nutting in the same paragraph as owners who are billionaires but didn't actually cite him as one. Forbes was then cited as being definitive on the matter, which was hilarious since they acknowledged fully attributing to the Times. Because that's all it takes now, with everyone pilfering everyone else's material in journalism, to mess up something like that.

Anyway, again, Nutting isn’t a billionaire. Wasn’t then. Isn’t now.

Doesn't mean he shouldn't be spending a lot more on the franchise. The team was worth an estimated $247 million when he took controlling ownership in 2007, and it's obviously quadrupled in the interim while payroll hasn't increased anywhere near that degree.

My point with this is singular: He isn’t a billionaire. People in the industry who aren’t exactly his friends will attest to that. And there are some who say his greatest problem is that he’s among baseball’s most under-capitalized owners.

MYTH: Major League Baseball needs a salary floor.

REALITY: No. It needs a salary cap.

Anytime I breathe the term 'cap' when it comes to baseball, it takes milliseconds for someone to respond with, 'Yeah, but it'll only work if there's a floor.

There's always a floor in every cap system. And revenue sharing. That's how a cap system works. Local monies, even the TV contracts, are fed into the same big pool that's then evenly distributed among all teams, same as happens now with national TV, Internet, merchandise and the like. From there, all teams are required to spend within the same range, meaning a cap and a floor. There are no exceptions to this.

Hockey fans from a couple decades back will recall that a huge portion of every NHL fan's conversation was about payroll. Who was cheap, who had the unfair advantage, the whole deal. Today, since the cap, it almost never comes up. Not at either extreme.

Same thing would happen in baseball. But it’s got to be the full cap model used by the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLS and every other league everywhere. There’s no need to accentuate ‘floor.’

Read this full list for FREE at our partners, DKPittsburghSports.com.

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