ESPN.com: MLB - The interview: Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell may know his stuff about "why change so often happens as quickly and unexpectedly as it does", but when it comes to baseball, at least as a business, he's obviously clueless. He's fallen for the bizarre bad-mouthing-the-game that is the owners' line hook, line, and sinker. He says he now "loathes" baseball because most teams can't win the World Series. He then compares this to the NBA and NFL.

As for the NFL, it's true that any franchise can win pretty quickly, but only at (to me) an unacceptable cost to the integrity of the game. It is impossible to keep a good NFL team together for more than a couple of years, and that's why anyone can win. Player movement is good for sports, but not excessive player movement. As for the NBA, I will point out that the Lakers are about to win their third-straight NBA title, and they're going to beat a New York area team to do it. Before that, the league was dominated by Chicago, and before that it was the Lakers again. Not exactly small markets.

Baseball's defending world champions are the Arizona Diamondbacks, who beat the supposedly-invulnerable Yankees. In fact, other than the Yankees, the dominant teams of the current era are all from second-tier cities: Atlanta, Cleveland, Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco. The World Series winners -- other than the Yankees -- of the nineties were based in Minneapolis, Toronto (twice), Atlanta, and Miami. The other richest teams in the majors, after the Yankees, are the Dodgers -- who haven't won a playoff series since 1988 -- and the Cubs -- who of course haven't won the pennant since 1945. The Dodgers are in first place (tied with Arizona right now) the year after they jettisoned high-priced talent; the Cubs imported talent and are eleven games out in fifth place; the only team with a worse record in the National League is the Commissioner's Own Milwaukee Brewers.

Baseball doesn't have a competitive balance problem. It has, perhaps, a Yankee problem, but blowing up the whole system (at the cost of probably another World Series and several hundred million dollars) would be foolhardy. I think sharing some of the local television revenues would be a good idea -- after all, the Yankees don't get all that money if no one will play them -- but the salary cap would be a bad idea and wouldn't really solve the problems of "small market teams". Teams like Montreal and Milwaukee already have payrolls far below any reasonable cap.