"Communique from the Colonies" - Baseball

Welcome back to my brother Ian. Returned to the USA after his vacation back in England. This time he has chosen to write about Baseball. My brother is a great fan of Baseball. As much as I am of Football if not more !! I hope you enjoy reading his views on your great game.

Before I go any further I want to get this clear I LOVE BASEBALL! If there was one thing I was looking forward to when I moved to America (other than getting married) it was being able to see baseball regularly and at a decent hour of the day. I have been a fan of the game since I first visited the states back in 1985 and I immediately latched onto the Minnesota Twins. I could fill this column with my diverse ramblings of the trials and tribulations of being a Twins fan in England. But that would be getting away from the point.
Baseball is America more than any other sport, in good and bad ways. Few of you, I bet, were left unmoved by James Earl Jones's speech before he disappeared into the cornfield in "Field of Dreams". Fathers played catch with their sons "bonding" with them before the child psychologists had even thought of the term. I have read many articles by writers stating that their fondest memories from their childhood were either playing catch with their dad or, attending a baseball game, with their dad.
But for all the wonderful things that baseball is. It is a sick sport. It also reflects the "haves" and "have nots" of American society. The "haves" are teams like the Yankees who can afford to play single players $15 million a year. Whereas the "have nots" are teams like yes, the Twins, who's entire payroll is about that. So the Yankees keep winning and can afford to pay the best salaries for the best players and so will keep winning. Whereas the Twins and others will find that any decent players they produce will be bought up by the bigger more sucessful teams. Leaving them in the basement.
Any sport needs competition to keep it alive and successful. Pretty soon with all the best players at a handful of clubs any semblance of competition will be gone. Where is the excitement in a sport that sees the same teams winning all the time? There is none, except for the fans of those teams. Even they will tire eventually.
Baseball needs a salary cap just like football has. Look what has happenned there. The St Louis Rams won the Superbowl. 5 years ago you would have laughed at that idea.
I think baseball also needs to reduce the amount of games played. 160? That is ridiculous. You don't really need to play the same team 6 times a season.
By some strange reverse logic I believe that if you play a team less often you are more likely to go to a game. In the first instance if you miss a game there is always 5 other chances to see that team. But if you only have 2 chances that is different. I know they play more games to get more attendances, but surely it is better to have 30,000 go to 2 games than 20,000 go to 4.
It makes sense to me. No, I am not a bitter Twins fan. I just want baseball to be an exciting sport in 10 years or so, so that I can play catch and go to games with my son.