It's not hard to miss the fact that baseball is the only American sport without a salary cap. Teams like the Yankees, Mets and Red Sox have very little in common with their brethren in Miami and Kansas City, and many complain about the competitive imbalance that results. Why that complaint continues after the success of teams like the Rays, Rockies and Twins in recent years is a mystery but it doesn't help when baseball executives act as the engine.
David Samson, president of the Marlins, made sure to let his team's fans know that the Yankees largesse wasn't indicative of the overall baseball environment.
"The Yankees can do they want to, but I would caution the public to draw any relationship between how the Yankees operate and how other teams operate,'' he said. "I very much feel like the producer of an independent film trying to compete with a big-budget studio blockbuster. That's hard. The only way to do it is to have a low-budget film that is actually good that people will watch. We are very much like "Juno" going up against "The Dark Knight.''
It's actually a decent analogy. Whenever the Yankees spend massive amounts of money, baseball's luxury tax kicks in and distributes money to teams like the Marlins, who never met a nickel they couldn't squeeze. In film, movies like "The Dark Knight" pour money into studio coffers so that they can finance prestige "indie" arms like Fox Searchlight Pictures, which released "Juno."
It's cute, though, the way that Samson bemoans the fact that movies like "Juno" have to be good to succeed. What a horrible concept, that you'd actually have to put a good product out there in order for people to show interest in it. As you'll see in the picture above, the Marlins don't have much luck getting people out to see their product, which makes Samson less the producer of "Juno" and more the producer of "Gigli."
