Yankees’ president criticizes Rays, Marlins for revenue-sharing dependency: ‘Take some responsibility’

New York Yankees workforce president Randy Levine criticized the Tampa Bay Rays and the Miami Marlins’ reliance on receiving income sharing cash from larger-market groups all through a panel at Sportico’s Invest in Sports convention.

“A lot more focus has to be on individual teams to do better and not just rely on revenue sharing,” Levine said, according to the Associated Press. “You can’t have two Florida teams averaging 15,000 fans. You can’t have it. You don’t go into an NFL stadium or an NBA area and notice that. 

“And I believe that there is been a dependency factor that is were given to recuperate. … The commissioner has executed an out of this world task, however now it is on particular person groups. Instead of complaining and whining, ‘We want extra money,’ you were given to take some accountability.”

Levine is proper in no less than one recognize: the Rays and the Marlins did rank close to the ground of the majors in attendance. Tampa Bay checked in at twenty seventh by way of averaging slightly below 18,000 enthusiasts in step with recreation. Miami ranked twenty ninth at simply over 14,000. For comparability, the Oakland Athletics averaged a majors-low 10,276 enthusiasts in step with recreation after possession and control salted its personal land in an ongoing effort to relocate to Las Vegas within the close to long term.

As the Miami Herald noted, Major League Baseball’s laws dictate that “teams pool 48% of the revenue they earn, and the total amount is then split evenly and given to each team.” That association aids groups who — not like the Yankees — would possibly lack different high-end income streams of their marketplace.

Both the Rays and the Marlins made MLB’s postseason this yr. The Yankees didn’t.

Of direction, this isn’t the primary time that Levine has expressed his distaste of a side of MLB’s income sharing coverage. Back in 2016, for example, he said that the Yankees’ revenue-sharing bill was “very burdensome” and “unfair” compared to “to teams in our market that pay 10 times less than us.” 

It will have to be famous that the MLB Players Association has up to now filed grievances towards each the Rays and the Marlins regarding their loss of spending and, in particular, their utility of revenue-sharing price range. The MLBPA subsequently refused to drop those grievances as part of the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations. The statuses of the ones grievances — together with doable consequences and timelines for solution — stays unclear.