This week we are heading over to Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, Florida, to see how MLB is getting along with its new ABS system for calling balls and strikes. According to our source at MLB the challenge system is being readily accepted by fans. If it goes as well as the time clock and catchers callig pitches elctronically it will be welcome.

In planning for seeing a  game we had a choice between seeing the homestanding Miami Marlins or St. Louis Cardinals, who share the stadium in the spring. Our 16th-row seats for the Marlins/ Washington Nationals game are US $16 each. Had we chosen a Cardinals game versus Washington the next day that same seat would cost US $79.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is called dynamic pricing. The unloved Marlins can’t draw flies. The Cardinals— even a bad Cardinals team— are still a big draw. The gap between the two realities is growing fast. Leading many to say, What about parity?

As we wrote in December of last year, “MLB has seen parity and proclaimed, “We don’t give a damn!” Okay, they didn’t say that. In fact they insist the opposite is true. They’re all about competition and smaller markets getting a shot at a title. But as the 2024 offseason spending shows, believe none of what you hear and half of what you see in MLB.

Here’s the skinny: Juan Soto‘s contract with the NY Mets — 15 years and guaranteeing $765 million, not a penny of which is deferred. Max Fried signed an eight-year, $218 million deal with the New York Yankees. Later, Nathan Eovaldi secured a three-year, $75 million contract to return to the Texas Rangers. Blake Snell (five years, $182 million with the Los Angeles Dodgers) and Matthew Boyd (two years, $29 million with the Chicago Cubs) added to the splurge.

There’s one more  thing that stands out. MLB has no trouble with the financial big boys in New York, Los Angles, Texas, Toronto, Atlanta and Chicago shelling out money no small market dare pay. In the MLB cheap seats, Tampa, Pittsburgh  and Miami can’t send out quality players fast enough. But MLB is cool with that, too, as those paupers get a healthy slice of TV money. 

So yes, they’re all about talking parity with their luxury-tax system. But to keep the TV, digital, betting and marketing lucre flowing they have to have large media markets swinging the heaviest bats come postseason. The question is, do MLB fans care anymore the way they used to about parity? It says here they don’t. More want to seed best-on-best more often. Which is brutal but refreshing.

Their sister leagues, married to draconian salary cap systems, are still pushing parity, even as they expand beyond recognition. In our 2004 our book Money Players, legendary Boston Bruins coach/ GM Harry Sinden noted, “The problem with teams in the league, is that there were (then) 20 teams who all think they are going to win the Stanley Cup, and they all are going to share it. But only one team is going to win it. The rest are chasing a rainbow.”

And that was before the expansion Vegas Golden Knights won a Cup within five years while the third-year Seattle Kraken made a run in those same 2023 playoffs. There are currently 32 teams in the league, each chasing Sinden’s rainbow of a Stanley Cup. That means 31 cranky fan bases every year demanding changes. And 31 management teams trying to avoid getting fired.

Maybe we’ve reached peak franchise level? Uh, no. Not so long as salary-capped leagues can use the dream of parity to sell more franchises. As we wrote in October of 2023, “If you believe the innuendo coming from commissioner Gary Bettman there is a steady appetite for getting a piece of the NHL operation. “The best answer I can give you is that we have continuous expressions of interest from places like Houston, Atlanta, Quebec City, Salt Lake City, but expansion isn’t on the agenda.” In the next breath Bettman was predicting that any new teams will cost “A lot, a lot.”

Deputy commissioner Bill Daly echoed Bettman’s caution about a sudden expansion but added, ”Having said that, particularly with the success of the Vegas and Seattle expansions, there are more people who want to own professional hockey teams.” Translation: If the NHL can get a billion for a new team, the heck with competitive excellence, the clock might start ticking sooner. After all, small-market Ottawa just went for $950.”

It’s not just the expansion-obsessed NHL talking more teams. MLB is looking to add franchises. Abandoned Montreal is once more getting palpitations over rumours that the league wants to return to the city that lost its Expos in 2005. Recent reports indicate that while MLB might prefer Salt Lake City and Nashville it also feels it must right the wrong left when the Expos moved to Washington DC 19 years ago. 

The city needs a new ballpark to replace disastrous Olympic Stadium. They’ll also need more than Expos draftee Tom Brady to fund the franchise fee and operating costs. And Quebec corporate support— always transitory in the Expos years— will need to be strong. But two more MLB franchises within five years is a lock.

While the NBA is mum on going past 30 teams it has not shut the door on expansion after seeing the NHL cashing in. Neither has the cash-generating monster known as the NFL where teams currently sell for over six billion US. The NFL is eyeing Europe for its next moves.

The question that has to be asked in this is, WTF, quality of competition? The more teams in a league the lower the chances of even getting to a semifinal series let alone a championship. Fans in cities starved for a championship— the NFL’s Detroit Lions or Cleveland Browns are entering their seventh decade without a title or the Toronto Maple Leafs title-less since 1967— know how corrosive it can be.

Getting to 34, 36, maybe 40 teams makes for a short-term score for owners, but it could leave leagues with an entire strata of loser teams that no one—least of all networks, carriers and advertisers—wants to see. Generations of fans will be like Canuck supporters, going their entire lives without a championship. 

In addition, as we’ve argued in our 2018 book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports and How The Free Market Can Save Them, watering down the product with a lot of teams no one wants to watch nationally or globally seems counter productive. The move away from quality toward quantity serves only the gambling industry. But since when has Gary Bettman Truly cared about quality of the product? So long as he gets to say, “We have a trade to announce” at the Draft, he’s a happy guy.”

When we published Cap In Hand we proposed a system like soccer with ranked divisions using promotion and relegation to ensure competition, not parity. Most of the interviewers we spoke to were skeptical of the idea. But as MLB steams closer to economic Darwinism our proposal is looking more credible every day. Play at the level you can afford. Or just watch Ted Lasso. Your choice. “

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

Longtime U.S. resident Mike Myers has become a hero to the over-50 SNL population in Canada. Myers wore a T-shirt saying Canada is not for sale. Perhaps. But 43 percent of millennials polled in Canada say they are open to joining Myers in the U.S. if the compensation is right. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is pulling a whopping 60 percent approval among the under-40 year old crowd in the latest Rasmussen poll. IOW (In Other Words) this effusive Save Canada debate is a sunset industry. You can’t defy the demographic clock.

But don’t tell the Laurentian elites. Outside emotional hockey wins and equalization, Canada is nothing like the place Myers left behind when he became a comic superstar in the U.S. last century. It’s now, in the words of author Mark Steyn, an unsustainable welfare state, with a side order of anti-spiritual solipsism. Oh, and a money-laundering den and a launching pad for extremists ranging from raging Muslims to pissed-off Palestinians.

Instead of dealing with the above the (allegedly) departing PM has flown to Europe to spoon with the Mass Formation Psychosis, also known as the EU, where they rail against Russia while also funding Russia’s war by spending billions of euros on its natural gas. It would be rude to repeat for the zillionth time that Trudeau’s jet spews the noxious CO2 of climate catastrophists like himself. But hey, we just did.

Citing Fintrac records, investigative journalist Sam Cooper highlights the current U.S./ Canada tension. “I honestly don’t know if it’s a drug war or a trade war. What I do know is the average Canadian has absolutely no idea how penetrated our banks, housing and institutions are by organized crime, but the U.S. military and police and intelligence know and are deeply concerned.”

In this collision of solitudes Canadians are putting aside Trudeau’s posturing or Mark Carney’s ‘oopsises’ on the campaign trial to link arms with Myers and Kumbaya themselves to death. Already Trudeau, spun up to insubordination by the EU globalists last week, is sniffing the rank air and hinting he might perform as a “caretaker PM” till Carney learns not to extemporize in front of open mikes.

After watching Zelenskyy slapped around at the White House he’s decided to play tough with Trump, swearing no retreat on either his own tariffs or carbon taxes. Leading good-old-days Canadians to launch a self-deception party not seen since the Covid panic. They’re stripping the shelves of American goods. They’re flying an airline that eschews American destinations. And they bloviate. How they bloviate.“ @ArpaSelect I love that Trudeau is taking an all or nothing approach to the tariffs. He’s standing firm and not conceding. This is the Prime Minister we need in this moment.”

The endgame cocktail they’re encouraging has been long brewing. Back in 1986 when Canadian publishers still believed in conservative books Peter Brimelow’s The Patriot Game: National Dreams and Political Realities was clearly pointing the way Trudeau senior was taking the nation that his son is now deconstructing.

Ex-pat Brit Brimelow, then a financial/ business writer in Toronto, labelled Pierre Trudeau the most impactful PM in Canadian history— though not in a complimentary terms. Identifying Trudeau’s championing of bilingualism, unlimited immigration, re-orientation away from the Crown, socialist financial policy and the liberal victimization hustle (later echoed by Barack Obama) he saw portents of endgame for traditional Canada. At the time this was published, the opinion of a TDBS library consultant was, “disturbing, often thought-provoking”

The book received little attention once Jean Chretien became PM, and Brimelow slipped south to the U.S. where his take on the fate of Western Judeo Christian society has had him labeled as racist by rackets like the Southern Poverty Law Center. His DARE website (named after Virginia Dare, the first white English child born in the New World ) was hounded out of business by the U.S. government.

Canadians have little clue about any of this impending doom. You can hear Brimelow on my 2017 podcast The Full Count, as the first Trump administration ramped up hysteria among liberals.

If Brimelow weren’t warning enough, Mark Steyn’s prescient 2006 America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It was also warning of pending decline. The Canadian author/ broadcaster forecast the downfall of the Canada and the West due to “internal weaknesses” and Muslim incursion into liberal Western countries and the world generally. His predictions— derided by the liberal Canadian media of the time— are now as obvious as a Muslim prayer session in a busy Canadian intersection.

“We’ve elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance, family, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity. If you don’t ‘go forth and multiply’ you can’t afford all those secondary-impulse programs, like lifelong welfare, whose costs are multiplying a lot faster than you are.”

Which is how we have ended up with ex-pat actors in T-Shirts stirring sentiment for a Canada that no longer exists. And re-energized Liberals pushing to have an emergency crisis “delay” the next election till unelected place holders decide how to stack the cards. in the words of Stephen Punwasi: “Not a lot of people know this, but in Canada democracy is whatever the elites feel like that day.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.