Three New York Teams? Why not?

Tim Marchman wrote an article this week for SI and in it suggests that baseball add a third team in New York as a way to help even the playing field.

As Yankees fans and executives will rightly remind you, when the team adds expensive players like Vazquez, they're not just playing fairly, they're doing so within rules designed to constrain them. Nearly all of the penalties that baseball collects from teams whose payrolls exceed the luxury tax threshold, for example, comes from the Yankees. That doesn't change the fact that they and the Mets have an inherent and unfair advantage over even other teams in huge, rich cities.

According to the measure used by the Office of Management and Budget, the New York metropolitan region numbers about 19 million people. In other words, New York has one MLB team for every 9.5 million people. Chicago, by this measure, has one for every five million people, just as Miami and Atlanta do. Los Angeles has one for every 6.5 million people, as do Dallas and Philadelphia. (This doesn't even take into account New York's vast, inherent wealth.)

As we learned a decade ago, baseball at large is quite willing to jury-rig a silly tax system that only works against the Yankees, because everyone else benefits, be it poor teams getting handouts or rich teams who see the Yankees ever so slightly chastened in their spending. With the collective bargaining agreement coming up for renegotiation, a bad economy and a Yankees team that looks like it will be ferociously good over the next few years even if the likes of Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera begin their inevitable decline, it's quite likely that their continued high spending will provoke some new set of ineffectual regulations meant to reign them in a bit.

The better solution would be to place a third team in New York. That would bring the town's population:team ratio down to the level of Los Angeles or Philadelphia, and with the same number of people and dollars chasing more baseball, would quite likely bring Yankee spending down a hair without doing anything punitive or unfair. The main holdup is baseball's archaic territorial rights system, which has also trapped the A's in Oakland when they should really be in San Jose. Anyone who cried foul last week on hearing that the Yankees had snared yet another great player would be far better served writing a letter to the commissioner about how stupid that rights system is than they would be to grouse about it over a beer. The address is: Commissioner Bud Selig, 245 Park Ave., New York, NY 10167.

I'm not sure this would stop people from trying to break up the Yankees -- they did pretty well when there were three New York teams the first time around -- but I like the idea anyway. As long as the team plays in the NL. There is only one American League New York team and that's the Yankees, and it shouldn't change.

But bringing a third team back to The City That Never Sleeps would be great, even though it's very unlikely that this will ever happen. But if it were to happen I think Brooklyn should get the team. After having the Dodgers ripped away from them it's the least they deserve.

Would you like a third New York team?