With the Twins headed into a new ballpark after winning five division titles in the past eight years, it's easy to forget the days when Major League Baseball seemed like an unfair enterprise to Minnesotans.
Competitive balance. The Haves vs. Have Nots. You just don't hear much about those topics these days. The Twins went 0-10 against the Yankees last season, including 0-3 in the playoffs, and there were cries about the payroll disparities then. But the Twins had themselves to blame after leading each ALDS game and still getting swept.
The Twins have had a great offseason, taking their projected Opening Day payroll to $96 million. Target Field looks magnificent. At the start of this century, there was a serious threat to contract the Twins, but the resentment toward Bud Selig and MLB seems to have passed. If the Twins can work out a long-term agreement with Joe Mauer, it's hard to imagine people around here complaining about the system, no matter how the 2010 season unfolds.
But imagine if the Twins were still feeling stifled in a dome. Imagine if they had to play the Yankees and Red Sox 19 times apiece each season. Imagine if they had overcome all this to reach the World Series two years ago and continued to churn out young talent, but still couldn't capture the collective imagination of their fans because nobody sees the odds ever changing.
That's how it feels for the Tampa Bay Rays.
It's become the annual story of David vs. Goliath & Goliath. Rays fans care, to some extent, but they're growing tired. Selig (file photo, above) is trying to help rally support for a new ballpark, but what the franchise really needs is a fundamental change to the system.
The talented St. Petersburg Times columnist John Romano captures the feeling today in an open letter to Selig. (I saw the link on Buster Olney's ESPN.com blog.) Romano pleads for a smarter payroll tax and more revenue sharing. He suggests realignment, which is a little hard to digest no matter how unfair things seem in the AL East. But as Romano notes, if MLB can't support that, then it absolutely must change the unbalanced schedule:
It is not fair to the Rays, Orioles or Blue Jays to play a majority of their games in a division against baseball's richest teams and then make them compete for the wild card against teams with easier schedules in the Central and West.
