RACINE, Wis. – I’m no baseball analyst, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

And when I picked the complimentary USA Today off the floor in front of my door this morning, I turned to the sports page and saw a story about Mark Teixeira, CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett, and their respective contributions to the New York Yankees this season.

“It’s incredible how important these guys have been,” Johnny Damon told the paper. “I feel like they’ve been worth about seven or eight games a piece.”

AMAZING HOW IMPORTANT THEY’VE BEEN?!?!?

You spent $423.5 million last offseason to bring them in. I’d say for that amount they’d damn well better be important or the Steinbrenners would have every right to be as stuffy and huffy as they have been the last seven or eight years while the Yankees have languished below mediocre by their high-priced standards.

My brother tells me Mike and Mike in the Morning were talking a couple days ago about parity in baseball. How great is it, they apparently said, that there has only been one repeat World Series winner in the last 10 years (Boston) and nobody has won it back to back. Others have been writing about this fallacy as well. It’s been quite the popular topic on ESPN and elsewhere.

A whole bunch of teams have made the playoffs in the last few years as well and there are more than 20 teams with legitimate playoff hopes still alive this year.

Parity, they said. What a great thing.

Parity my ass.

Parity doesn’t mean there are 20 teams with legit playoff chances at the trade deadline in July. Not having a repeat World Series winner in 10 years doesn’t signify parity. Not in my eyes.

If the season were to end today, the American League playoff teams would be Boston, New York, Los Angeles Angels and Chicago. You’ll note that of those four teams come, three come from the largest media markets in the country and the fourth, Boston, consistently has the second-highest payroll in baseball.

And, taking into account this year and the last five completed seasons, Boston, New York and Los Angeles would have claimed playoff spots in five of six years. That means there’s one spot – generally the American League Central division – up for grabs each year, as you can largely count on two divisions and the wild card participants.

During that same time span five American League teams (Baltimore, Toronto, Kansas City, Seattle, and Texas) have failed to make the playoffs even once while three others (Tampa Bay, Cleveland and Oakland) have each made one appearance in the fall. Some of this is due to poor organizational management, no doubt. But some of it is the continued economic disparities inherent to Major League Baseball.

The playoff spots in the National League have been slightly more spread out. Still, Los Angeles Dodgers have made four playoff appearances and the Philadelphia Phillies three (again, if the season were to end today). St. Louis (which I have credited with 1/2 a playoff appearance because they are tied with Chicago for the Central right now) has made it 3.5 times and the Cubs 2.5. Four other teams have two playoff appearances (Colorado, Atlanta, Houston and San Diego).

But even with the different spread of teams, the leaders in appearances are in large media markets and there are still five with no appearances (Florida, Washington, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and San Francisco).

The one weird outlier in all of this research is the New York Mets, who despite playing in the Big Apple, have still managed just one postseason appearance in the last six seasons. That’s in part due, I would guess, to organizational incompetence, partially due to two collapses the last two seasons, partially due to competing with the tail end of the Atlanta Braves’ stretch of divisional dominance, and partially due to sharing the division with Philadelphia.

Mets aside, however, the research indicates clearly that large media market teams continue to have a dramatic advantage when it comes to making the postseason.

They also have an edge in winning the Fall Classic. While 20 teams have made at least one appearance in the last six seasons (again, factoring in this year if the season were to end today), the last five World Series winners were Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Chicago and Boston – respectively the fourth, seventh, 20th, third and seventh largest media markets in the country. St. Louis is an outlier, but the other four are large markets and consistent leaders in MLB payrolls.

And while St. Louis isn’t a top 10 market size-wise, they have in the past fielded $100 million-plus payrolls as well. They’re down to the upper $70 millions this year.

So don’t give me parity. Parity would be when the Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Angels didn’t have a virtual stranglehold on three of the four American League playoff spots year after year.

Parity would be when more teams besides the Yankees could compete for the trio of free agents they paid $423.5 million to sign.

Parity would be achieved not when 20 teams have a “legitimate” shot to make the playoffs at the All Star Break, but when something approaching 20 teams had a legitimate shot to compete in the playoffs once they get there.

This might be parity for ESPN, which goes googly over everything Boston-New York in the postseason. But for fans of the other 28 Major League Baseball teams this is not parity.

Now I don’t necessarily blame Boston, New York, the Angels or the Dodgers for this. They’re just playing under the rules and the system that are currently in place. The fault belongs to Major League Baseball and the Players Association and the lip service both entities play to creating a level playing field for every team. It might look different. But at the end of the day it’s really just more of the same.