This MLB Is A Different Brand Of Baseball
No longer do older teams win. That trend stopped once PEDs testing started to become more stringent and amphetamines started to leave the landscape of baseball.
Caasual fans don’t realize just how big both of these factors are, especially the amphetamines piece about it.
Baseball is a long season. It’s a grind of 162 games, day in and night out of constant play. Players in their 30s just don’t bounce back the way youngsters always do.
Not only does the drug factor come into play, but baseball’s zooming in on parity does as well. Sure, there’s still no salary cap in the game, but the increased hit on the luxury tax has balanced out the field. The days of gauranteeing a playoff spot purely based on salary are long gone.
Just take a look at the evidence:
Every season that the luxury tax threshold has gone up, it has brought us one year closer to this day. It’s a brand new day that sees the likes of the Kansas City Royals and Pittsburgh Pirates dominating. These are two organizations who couldn’t get out of their own way for more than two decades, but suddenly, that painstaking scouting and developing is coming to fruition.
It’s not a coincidence, it’s simply the new age of finance in baseball. Developing talent weighs much more than spending for free agent players who are usually in their late 20s.