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There's really two things going on here, percentage of gate and general revenue sharing.
Concerning percentage of the gate for the visitors (and I believe this should apply to all other revenues generated at a game) the visiting team provides a service of great value and should be paid for that, just like any other vendor of services on game day would be paid. Let me add that this is nothing new. Despite the home and away argument the value of the service of the visiting team at a big market location is greater. Their talent is the same, but its the same as a bartender making more at a fancy bar than at a dive bar.
There seems to be difficulty with the concept that the same service/product is worth different amounts depending on context. Yet we all have experience with it, for example, that a bottle of water will cost more at a convenience store than at a grocery store. And despite that convenience stores sell a lot of bottled water.
Really, the same thing applies to star players. WHERE they play determines their value. Its not that small market teams can't afford star players... most teams make a good profit... but its that a star player doing the same thing has more value in a big market.
This portion is actually not revenue sharing but rather payment for value of services. And paying the visiting team for the value they provide has been going on almost forever. Rightly so.
Actual revenue sharing, that is, giving money to poorer teams because they are poor may work in OOTP - we'd have to know how the code is written - but probably doesn't work well in real life. The reason is giving a business money without an incentive or a requirement to spend it means the owners will probably stick it in their pockets. And as with the bottled water example, we have experience with this too.
After the economic crash ten years ago businesses were given money, like breaks on employment tax, with the idea they'd use the money to hire people. They didn't. Because a business doesn't hire someone it doesn't need just because it has some extra money. By 2012 the S&P 500 companies were sitting on the biggest pile of cash in their history. Because where there's demand, where there's a profit to be made hiring someone, companies will do it and can (unless there's rare situation of lack of capital, which hasn't been the case in a long time.) So the money gifts don't result in the desired behavior.
So revenue sharing as designed doesn't do much to make poor teams competitive on the field much of the time. It just redistributes the industry's profit. But it COULD increase on field competition if there was a requirement it be spent to improve the team. And better on the field competitiveness is good for the industry as a whole.
As far as teams competing against each other, they do in games but otherwise do not except in markets where there is more than one team looking for the consumer spending. In single team markets, financially, the teams are competing for the entertainment spending on all events in their area.
Yes, they compete against each other for players, but its not so much competing against each other as what the player is worth to the team, IOW, whether he can help the team make money by winning or by being popular (for the effect of a popular player putting fans in the stands, think Ralph Kiner in Pittsburgh in the 50s.)
So what does baseball (the industry) really need? Well, it needs some good teams that often win but enough other almost as good ones so there is some doubt about the outcome. And it can't have teams that are weak for decades at a time, so weak they can't draw either at home or on the road.
Unless baseball is going to get rid of the small market teams, it needs to improve them through revenue sharing that is structured so that recipients will spend the money on better teams.
Oh, and no DHs in the HOF. They're not real baseball players. <G>
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