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This reaction is weird, if you ask me. Preventing rich teams from hoarding players is the entire purpose of the tax. If the tax never discourages anyone from signing or re-signing an elite player, in what sense could it be possibly said to be effective? The whole idea is that the Yankees, Dodgers and Red Sox will “evade” the tax. It’s not really intended to raise revenue; it’s intended to provoke evasion, to create an incentive for rich teams to keep payrolls reasonable. (Lawyers and accountants would make a careful distinction here between “tax avoidance” and “tax evasion.”)

Preventing rich teams from hoarding players is the entire purpose of the tax.

The Dodgers have an even higher total payroll than the Sox now, but have less money already committed to players from 2021 on. On the assumption that the Dodgers’ intention is to sign Betts to an extension, this trade is, in that sense, an asset going from the “richer” team to the “poorer.” Somehow this isn’t what anyone wants! Agreement seems to be universal that the right thing for the Red Sox front office to do would be to: (1) keep Betts; and (2) pay the effin’ tax. Almost no one wants the tax to actually function to preserve competitive balance, which it can only do by encouraging the occasional “salary dump.”

The Sox are, of course, in an awkward position only because they have overpaid several players in the recent past. Sox fans would surely prefer to go back in time and undo some dud contracts rather than lose Betts now. But this doesn’t alter the moral issue. “Teams should be able to overpay players without suffering some later restraint” is the same thing as having no assurance of competitive balance at all.

It is as if everyone regarded the real function of the competitive balance tax as making rich owners of rich teams suffer, and do so personally. It seems we don’t want them to restrain payroll, or want fans of small-market teams to have a shred of hope each spring: we just want the fattest SOBs to lose money, or at least make less.

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