I'm wearing a green cap in protest. A simple six panel hat with a neon green dollar sign symbolizes the real green cap that is screwing up baseball. The green cap is a barrier to entry to dozens of players each year who are held down on the farm by high-dollar contracts.

Are you a top prospect in the Yankees farm system? Guys on death row will be executed faster than you will find yourself in Yankee pin stripes.

George will blow a lot of competitive sunshine up the skirts of his die-hard fans, but the bottom line of his business is YES television, the much larger revenue stream in the Steinbrenner empire, separate from the Yankee organization and the MLB ownership revenue sharing deals. To make YES hum and click, you need names.

Why build reputations that may or may not gel when you can buy players pre-built for TV?  More important, Steinbrenner understands Yankee fan.  They'll pay for that YES package as much to complain and curse as cheer. Pay Johnny Damon millions? Sure! Why not?   As many people will tune in to complain if he fails as will turn the dial to see him succeed. The Yankee nation of six or seven million nobodies likes to pick on big target somebodies.  Win or lose, George laughs all the way to the bank.

That's not baseball for the rest of planet Earth, though.

Word is that there is more revenue being generated from increased ticket prices and more avenues to sell the product, like satellite radio and expanded cable and satellite package subscriptions. The players association (PA), has been holding long meetings this Spring with its membership, figuring out how to make sure that they cash in on the added cash. 

Breaking through the green cap from the minors means entry into Xanadu, the promised land of high dollars and low expectations.  Once you sign a multi-year contract, you're "made."

In the bad old days before free agency, a player could get sent down to the minors if they didn't perform. Sometimes it would sober them up. Other times it would allow a new young talent to emerge and help their major league ballclub.

It is rare for a made player to be sent down in these days of moneyball. Very few clubs are going to take the financial hit for sending down a million dollar-plus athlete to Toledo or Las Vegas or Memphis and bring up a rookie to fight for that job.

That would be good baseball, but it's bad business.  Look at the crisis that Ryan Howard caused the Phillies.  Jim Thome can play. Howard can play.  Usually the superstar, with the greater name for marketing, wins these show downs. Howard was the rare exception to the rule, and forced the Phils to find Thome a new home (See: Thomecoming)

Spend a little time listening to ESPN radio. You'll hear more business news than sports news. When they're not gossiping  about who has tested positive and they finish going over the nightly replay of which player was on COPS, the players are rarely talked about for their performance, stats, records, and the like, unless it is relative to the huge contracts that they hold.  ESPN is the golden temple of the big deal. You're nobody  unless you signed a contract that big, or Dan Patrick caught you at a minor league game in Bristol and can remember your name.

Lost in all of this mess is the game. 

You have a lot of crappy players out there who get huge checks to be crappy.  Fans are given a lot of homilies about over expansion causing a dilution of the talent pool, and that these few mortals with the high dollar contracts are really our best and brightest.

Bull. 

We recruit players from all over the world now who wouldn't have been in the talent pool a decade ago. Australian pitchers? Nonsense!  In the 1970s Nomo and Matsui would have been patted on the head and told that they play well for Japanese guys.

The real problem is that the green cap keeps large segments of a new generation of exceptional, talented players "parked," usually in the AAA. There they will sit until the player with the multi-year, multi-zeros contract either retires, is struck by lightning, traded, or tests positive for steroids and gets kicked out of baseball. I was just kidding about that last one. Being struck by lightning is more likely.

This is why the BA beauty fest of prospect rankings is more academic exercise than fact. A lot of their top prospects are so-labeled because many Major League Baseball clubs use the BA rankings as part of the formulae to determine trades and compensation.  This is a fact not lost on Baseball America, an ESPN company, which has become as much a part of the problem as the owners and the players.

Why is minor league baseball on the rise when major league baseball costs more and more to be watched by fewer and fewer fans?  One of the few positive side-effects of the green cap is that it keeps great players in Round Rock and Indianapolis and Richmond.  In the land of lower  salaries and driving ambition, the game is still king. Fans watch these guys play the way that they should be playing for their major league parent. 

The biggest problem with the green cap though, is that it strips these players of their maximum potential.  By the time that many of them are called up, they are often a shadow of the player that the team recruited.

Joe: A Green Cap Tale 

Joe plays third base for a triple-A club. He is first on the depth chart behind Will, who holds down the bag for the major league club.

Will stinks. While he had a good three year run, his current season highlights includes a batting average that is an anemic .201. Balls heading for the outfield take the bypass through his legs to get there faster with such regularity that the equipment manager has stitched an off-ramp sign on to his pants leg.

He has CO (Career Odor) so bad that no one will trade for him, not even his mother, who owns another club and loves him, but, after all, business is business.

Yet Will does have one thing going for him. Before the old General Manager was carted off babbling to the asylum after trading Rex Starr, the club's franchise pitcher, for a couple of aging outfielders and a bag of magic beans, he signed ol' true blue Will to a three year contract that still has two more years to run.

Sure, Will will be out for a week or two at the David Wells Center for Complainer Therapy, and Joe will get his moment or two in the sun on the big league field.

While he's with the major league club, Joe will get lots of information and loving attention in his special spot in the locker room, that dark closet full of manure where the other mushrooms are growing.  His teammates, many of whom are not much more stellar than Will, will welcome him with open arms.

Soon enough though, Will will learn to take personal responsibility for that nagging hang nail problem. Then it's off to Buffalo, or Columbus, or Sactown for Joe, to that nice bag that he's got personally monogrammed after nesting on it for so long.

It's about this time that Joe, who actually used a mirror to see that the Sun really does shine out of his rear end one fine day back in high school, starts to get a bit depressed. With no hope of a trade in sight, he doesn't play up to his potential for the rest of the season. So he comes back and has a better season the following year. Still, no one wants old Will, whose career numbers rival a New York City trash pile in August for odor.

Sure, Joe has free agency. If he's not traded before his contract is up, he may move on to another club. Now Joe is three years older, competing with players who still have to have their  pants Vulcanized to keep the sunbeams shining out of there from burning a hole in their uniform.

Joe has become a victim of... the Green Cap.

The Comiskeys of the game were skinflint miserly tyrants who exploited baseball players miserably and should rot and turn in their well-padded graves for eternity.  The pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, though, and the players are killing off the game almost as fast as the employee-owners of United did in the airline.

Does a player who has made it past the green cap, endowed with the bounty of baseball, have the inalienable right to stay there without challenge purely because of the weight of their salary?

You may remember the NHL, that league that had a strike that lasted a year.  They came back with player salaries in better line, but more important, you have actually started to see guys with million dollar contracts get sent down again.  Yessir, there was some very expensive ice-adjacent real estate on benches around the American Hockey League this season (AHL), as veteran players whose numbers weren't good discovered that they're not immune from losing their job to the minor league talent just because of their weighty salaries (See "The New NHL").  The most interesting thing was how well so many of them took the notion that they had to improve, or their major league ride was over.

We pay player salaries, and pad the owners' pockets. Fans want to see the best players take the field, not the richest.

Of course the ultimate culprit in the green cap conspiracy is you, the baseball fan. All of these guys depend on your fundamental laziness. As long as you keep shelling out for mediocrity, they'll be happy to keep serving it up and pocketing your cash, quietly praying to PT Barnum, the patron saint of hucksters and fleecer of suckers. You want to see them shake in their boots. Watch 100,000 letters hit the MLB and MLB Players Association offices asking them to end the green cap.

This is not about Red Sox red or Dodger blue. The only  color that major league players and owners understand is USD Green. So I'm putting on my green cap in protest. 

 - Brian Ross

If you want to protest some of baseball's best being stuck under the green cap join me!