What do Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Cliff Lee all have in common? They are all really good at what they do, and are atrociously overpaid.

If the contracts from the Rangers, Phillies and Yankees offered to Cliff Lee were combined, the total would be over $400 million. $400 million. To put that in perspective, Lee could pay the entire Pittsburgh Pirates payroll for the next eleven and a half seasons.

Lee didn’t even take the biggest contract and wound up with a poverty-level $120 million over the next five years with the Phillies. Now, tell me how the Padres, Pirates and A’s (the teams with the three lowest payrolls in 2010) are supposed to compete with a team who just signed a contract to pay one player as much as the three teams’ combined payrolls. I’ll tell you how: they can’t.

Baseball needs a salary cap. In the current system, it is nearly impossible to get ahead if a team’s front office can’t put at least seven zeroes on every paycheck. Implementing a salary cap not only prevents players from getting $20 million or more per year, but it also gives a shot to teams whose front offices don’t have unlimited budgets. The MLB is a broken system, proven by one team: the Tampa Bay Rays.

The Rays are the epitome of the salary cap dilemma, as they practically were robbed of numerous key players this offseason after making great progress over the past few years.

Let’s go back to 1998, when the Rays were an infant organization. They finished that season 63-99, and didn’t have a winning season until their breakout year in 2008 when they made the playoffs. Since then, the Rays have been thrown into the conversation in the very top-heavy AL East due to star players like Carl Crawford, Carlos Peña and Rafael Soriano. But this offseason, the team of stars that the Rays assembled over the past few years disappeared in a couple of days. Peña was signed by the Cubs for $10 million, Crawford was signed by Boston for $142 million and Soriano has yet to sign, but will not be coming back to Tampa as the Rays try to lower their payroll from $72 million last season.

The Rays’ front office did everything they could possibly do to stay competitive in the MLB. They made smart trades, good free agent signings and well-advised coaching selections. But they weren’t able to write the big check, rendering them helpless in the salary cap-era while teams with ballboys paid as much as the Rays’ back-up first baseman. Hopefully, Major League Baseball will fix the problem, before players start earning as much as the GDP of third world countries.