Are performance-enhancing drugs still a problem in baseball today?
I think we’ve made great strides. Is it 100 percent clean? Not sure — I’d probably be naive to think that it was. But the penalties involved — Manny Ramirez missed 50 games this year without pay, a $7 million loss — end up becoming a very valuable deterrent in our fight to prevent the performance-enhancing drugs being part of the culture of baseball. Is there something wrong with the financial structure of Major League Baseball? There is such disparity between the payrolls of the small-market teams and the giants. From our standpoint, we see it as an opportunity to run a more disciplined business that has to rely on smart, consistent decisions. As a smaller revenue team, we can’t make the mistakes that a larger market club can get away with. Baseball has a revenue-sharing system, which at least helps. It doesn’t solve the challenge. But it does level the playing field a bit. Strictly a baseball question: Do you think with the nucleus of this team now you will be competitive next year o
