Just owning a baseball team is lucrative in itself it gives you a lot of political power in the city. You never have to invest a dime in them and still get paid dividends in a sense. Like Keith’s Moustache said there’s really just no way Miami could see a major return on their investment because their market is essientially capped. So rather than investing the money, which for the first few years would likely be at a loss since it takes a while for fans to come around usually especially when a team has a history like the marlins of being cheap, Loria basically just keeps the team for the other benefits, which still bring in a huge profit for him.

If, say, UPS knows that it’s trucks are really old, and falling apart, but they don’t use their revenue to replace/fix them, they’re going to start decreasing their profits because of it- their trucks fall apart, causing the company to use funds to repair them. Because they fall apart, there are less drivers who are willing to work for UPS, because they don’t want to have to deal with break downs. Because they have crappy trucks, and is a shortage of drivers, people are less willing to let their goods be shipped via UPS, because they don’t want their packages to disappear, arrive late, be damaged, whatever else. If you don’t reinvest your money into your business, your profits, even if steady for a time, will eventually tail off, when you don’t meet market demands. Or some phrase like that; it’s been a while since I took any kind of class related to business or management.

If, let’s say, the Marlins make $10 million dollars because of revenue sharing, and pocket all of it, not reinvesting in their team, they aren’t meeting market demands (put a good team on the field [regardless of the payroll, but as we all know, the better players cost more money]). When they don’t meet their market demands, over the ‘long haul’- whatever that set period of monitoring is- revenues drop. Pocketing things is just shooting themselves in the foot. When their other source of revenue- fans attending games, gear, etc.- begins dropping, their revenue from those mediums dry. When that starts happening, and interest in the team tails off, big business contracts, like the media and commercials, and whatever else, also tail off, and again, the team is losing money by not reinvesting.

I agree that there are huge disparities, but that’s the nature of businesses- not everyone is rich and successful. If you willingly do things that, ultimately, lower the value of your business, you’re following a bad business model. Owners shouldn’t go broke investing in their team, either, but you get what you put into it, like anything else. Like any other business, if they put out a bad product, and people aren’t interested in it, the ownership needs to eventually figure things out, or be removed.

Maybe changing the rules so that the money obtained from revenue sharing luxury taxes has to be spent on players by some arbitrary date, otherwise it gets reappropriated and distributed back across the other 29 teams might help things, or something similar.

Did most of that make sense? To me, on painkillers right now, it did, but I just want to make sure, lol

This would encourage the small market teams that don’t want to spend to make teams entirely of homegrown players regardless of skill level because they cost 10% less. Its a coin toss as to whether this would get them spending more or just make a team of homegrowns and only have to pay 90% of their salary (which will likely be low because in general you don’t raise too many multi million dollar players all at once.)