What is the 60-40 rule? :? it's the mlb rule that says how much debt a club can have in relation to it's revenue (club can't have 40+% debt in relation to it's asset value). how the assets are defined is a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo that i really don't understand. the 60/40 rule is basically what caused the pittsburgh firesale...which netted us ARam for a couple low salary players since the pirates needed to dump salary. basically, it is a de facto salary cap. The "newly interpreted" 60/40 rule only counts long-term player contracts as debt. In other words, player salaries for the current season don't count against a team's debt total, only the future balance of long-term contracts. Since neither Ramiriez nor Lofton had a contract with the Pirates beyond 2003, their trade had nothing to do with the 60/40 rule and was more or less just a beaseball descision. This new interpretation of debt of the 60/40 rule was cooked up by Selig around the time of the last labor negotiations. (The rule itself has been around since 1983.) While Selig claims he was merely efnorcing a rule that had previously been ignored, what he really did was change two interpretations of debt; the aforementioned long-term contracts and also any debt associated with the construction of a new stadium. (He also set the "value" of a franchise as twice it's yearly revenue for no apparent reason, but that's beside the point.) The goals of these interpretations were twofold; reduce the number of (and length of each individual) long-term player contracts and force teams seeking new stadiums to find public financing. The 60/40 rule isn't a salary cap as teams can still spend $300 million on one-year player contracts and it woud be perfectly kosher as far as the 60/40 rule is concerned. While it doesn't have much of impact on the amount of a contract, it is a big reason why really long-term deals (5+ years) have beeen so rare over the past few years. are you sure the 60-40 rule didn't cause the sale of ARam? I remember they had Giles, Benson, and ARam who all had huge raises the next year. Benson was originally the one tabbed to keep salary down until he was injured a little before the trading deadline and no one wanted him then...and they shipped Giles out too (not sure why). the trade was about money, not restocking the farm system or anything like that. ah, i found an article from way back when: http://www.post-gazette.com/pirates/20030724rebuildbuc2.asp ARam had a contract with the Pirates for 6 million the next year and he was offloaded b/c of the 60-40 rule. i was wrong about the 60-40 rule being a de facto salary cap. :oops: