Bill James is an interesting dude. His voice carries significant weight in and around baseball. He was interviewed recently and he had some good stuff to say about MLB payrolls and teams content to get fat on cash rather than win. Keep in mind, too, that he’s an employee of the RedSox, not exactly a small market team…

What are the biggest issues facing baseball right now?

We’re making a lot of progress on the income disparity between the teams. We haven’t wiped that out but we have made significant progress on that. It could be that the biggest issue now is getting the — well, I’m between a rock and a hard place here. I’ve got to make news to sell books, but not make too much news to avoid being fired. We have some franchises now that are happy to make money and don’t care whether they win. That destroys the enterprise if you get too much of it. If you get too many franchises that are just counting the cash and are not committed to the effort to win, that seriously undermines the game. At some point, we have to get a hold of that. There may be perverse economic incentives in the game that need to be restructured in order to prevent that from happening.

We’ve mentioned this before, too many times. You can’t simply reign in the top spenders without doing something about the teams “hoarding” the revenue sharing loot.

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And no, I don’t think I was invited to the launch party. Bummer. Must have gotten lost in the mail. Or email. Whatever.

Here’s to hoping that IIATMS has a spot there, too, thanks to our Rob Neyer/ SweetSpot Network affiliation!

See that “Blogs & Columns” header? We’d fit quite nicely in there, we think (hint, hint!).

H/T to Fangbites via my Canadian RSS reader, Pete Toms