Time for baseball to stop pretending everything is okay

Major League Baseball will probably never have a salary cap, which is tragic. As much as most baseball fans would like to cling to the fact that baseball has crowned seven different champions over the past eight years, it's now apparent that was just a faze, and a cover up for the real problems that the game still has. Parity really is non-existent.

This actually does not have to be another Red Sox/Yankees rant. As much as I would like to see a salary cap destroy the high the Red Sox are on, like the one the Yankees were on in the late 90's, it isn't just those two financial juggernauts ruining America's pasttime. The payrolls of the high-market clubs are skyrocketing. The Mets and Angels don't have the baseball gods smiling on them like the Red Sox and their horde of obnoxious bandwagoning fans do, but they are spending ad nauseum and will almost assuredly steal a playoff spot from a grittier and more deserving team that doesn't have the financial resources to hold up over a 162-game schedule.

It would be nice to enjoy the nice starts that teams like the Orioles, Athletics, or Marlins are having. But this isn't a 16-game season like the NFL. Eventually karma gets to the little guys and kicks them in the gut. Rest assured that on the flip side, the Red Sox will have a player overcome a heart attack or an awful bout with pneumonia in the midst of another title run, and ESPN will run twelve stories on them in a span of a week. A team like the Blue Jays, meanwhile, will stick around until August, suffer one or two key injuries, start losing, then blame it on that. We've all seen this movie before.

It's April, and the writing is already on the wall. It's time for baseball to start assessing the problem. Predictability is no fun in sports.