Bud Selig can lick it.

As we drift through the doldrums of mid-summer, with NFL training camps just getting underway, the American sporting public practices its annual ritual of romanticizing the long-gone golden ages of baseball in hopes that some of that magic will rub off on the modern game. Baseball was once America's pastime. The crack of the bat and the smell of hot dogs bound generations and marked the coming and going of each innocent summer.
Baseball has stagnated. A couple of decades of poor decision-making by players, unions, and owners, combined with a few factors beyond its control, have turned the once proud ocean liner of Major League Baseball into a sinking ship.
This is not going to be a rant about the many players who have tainted the historic records of the game by using steroids, nor is it necessary to discuss how the advent of satellite television has made baseball a third-tier option to the much more visual sports of football and basketball. These are obvious problems, and have been discusssed at nauseum.
I want to talk about the problem of parity. The absence of a salary cap, and in effect the absence of a level playing field. While teams from the major markets like New York, Boston, LA, and Chicago freely spend every off-season to keep their teams consistently at the top of the stangdings, other teams that don't have the same revenue streams are forced to sell off all of their young talent in order to just stay afloat. The Pittsburgh Pirates, for example, have not had a winning season since the early nineties. Not for lack of talent, just lack of funds to hang onto their talent. You may recognize names like Jason Kendall, Aramis Ramirez, Jason Bay, and Barry Bonds amongst others. All great young Pirates at one point. The problem is that once these players near the end of their contracts, Pittsburgh knows that they do not have the money to resign them, so they trade them for younger, cheaper, less talented players. It is a never-ending cycle. Without revenue sharing, the Pirates and other small market teams will never be competitive. Since the larger market teams have no incentive to agree to a revenue-sharing proposal, there will never be any progress made in that area.
So, an alternate solution. Take a cue from the european soccer leagues. These leagues have no salary cap, and have teams from both huge cities and small towns, just like MLB. Most of these leagues are structured not in equal but separate divisions, as American leagues are, but they are divided into tiers, based on the teams performance in the previous season. The top fifteen or so teams are in the first division, the next fifteen in the second division, and so on. Each team plays their regular season against teams in their division, and at the end of the year there is relegation and promotion. The bottom three teams from D1 go down to D2, and are replaced in D1 by the top three teams from D2, and on and on.
This system keeps the playing field level, and gives everyone something to cheer for. Pirates fans, for example, could cheer for a very reachable D2 championship. When they get promoted, they can cheer for avoiding relegation, rather than just sitting as bottom-dwellers with no real progress being made one way or another. Europe figured this system out about a hundred years ago, and baseball would do well to recognize one of its greatest faults before it is too late. Because like it or not, purists, soccer is coming. Not tomorrow. Not next year. But soon people will spend their summer dollars on soccer matches rather than baseball games, but by then the damage will have been done.