Baseball's "Labour Trouble": Overdraft at the Memory Bank

I did my best, ladies and gentlemen...for love of the game.

Bump...for love of the game...

Great post!

Thanks Blues. I could never understand all this crap. Now I, at least, have a clue.

Have you got a guesstimate as to how long this strike might last? Are we gonna miss another WS?

Here is an article from todays Dallas Morning News, expressing Hick's opinions. Don't laugh at the irony of the article.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/topstories/stories/081702dnspohickslede.247d8.html

By KEN DALEY / The Dallas Morning News

Rangers owner Tom Hicks said Friday that if baseball players carry out their threat to walk off the job Aug. 30, the strike will be a long one. In fact, he will insist on it.

"I think a majority of owners, including me, would probably like to have even stronger cost-containment than we're talking about right now," Hicks said from a yacht off the coast of San Diego. "If they do choose to go on strike, I'm confident ownership will not allow a repeat of 1994. We need to fix baseball and not just have another Band-Aid solution."

Hicks said he fully expected the union to set its strike date Friday, calling the postponement of the decision earlier in the week "a maneuver for the benefit of public relations and not substance." And while Hicks said he is optimistic a settlement can be reached before the strike date, he will urge fellow owners to make a work stoppage count if it occurs.

"For the good of baseball, we need to have cost-containment and competitive balance," Hicks said. "People know a strike wouldn't be good for the game, but what is worse is to put our fans through this every seven years. I think a lot of owners would have a preference for a hard salary cap like football has. That would probably be better for baseball, but that's not what we're negotiating this time."

What owners are seeking, in addition to increased revenue-sharing, is a payroll tax of 50 percent for teams exceeding $102 million in payroll. The Rangers opened the season with a $105 million payroll, which ranked third in the majors, but Hicks promised he would comply with the proposed tax threshold.

"Every team in baseball that has any kind of business sense would try to manage its payroll to stay under that tax threshold," Hicks said. "There might be one or two that wouldn't, but that's a decision those teams have to make. Certainly, I can assure you, the Texas Rangers wouldn't be among them. If this system is implemented, the Texas Rangers will be under the threshold."

With the Rangers mired in last place and on pace to lose 93 games, attendance at The Ballpark in Arlington already was down 343,287 from last year through 60 dates. That 16 percent drop could worsen if the strike threat angers fans, and Hicks said he would understand.

"I think [fans] should be concerned; I don't blame them," he said. "This is a tactic. If we get an agreement between now and the 30th, that's terrific. If not, it will set off a chain of events that won't be good for anybody.

"If it happens, I just hope we as owners make sure we fix baseball for good. And I'm confident we would. I think it would be very different from 1994."

But not all owners might be able to withstand a shutdown as long as Hicks. Mike Ozanian, the senior editor who compiles the annual franchise valuations for Forbes magazine said, "The players have already been paid for almost all of this season. However, the owners stand to lose more than $1 billion from TV and ticket sales if a strike forces the cancellation of the postseason. Teams cannot afford such losses because many owners already have too much debt. And their personal businesses have been suffering as a result of the weak economy and beaten-down stock market."

The last paragraph says it all in my opinion.

Excellent work.

You done good, Duke. I just posted at link at the ATRW thread.

Thanks. That brings up another question.

Is a permanent fix even possible?

I have my doubts.

Just judging from the personnel trying to make the permanent fix, one would have to conclude, very doubtful.
Selig is a used car salesman type and has an agenda, Reinsdork and Hicks seem to have their own agenda.
I would find it easier to believe the owners if they would put a workable plan on the table, instead they huff and puff and lie about how much money they are losing.
The wild card, IMO is the bankers, are they willing to underwrite the risk of a WS cancelling strike?
Keeping in mind the tenuous state of the economy anyway and the exposure the big banks are already facing, and I would think a midnight deal will be reached.

I hope you're right.

A little late to the party, but many thanks for the ping !

I hate to see a .225 hitter making 10 million, or a 5 and 9, 5.09 pitcher making 20 Mil.

Unfortunately, there are too many teams relative to the amount of talent out there. If there were fewer teams, the worst pitchers today would have to either drop into AAA ball or else be willing to severely undercut the salaries of the better pitchers. The latter threat would help push down the salaries of those pitchers who remained in the majors.

Have you got a guesstimate as to how long this strike might last? Are we gonna miss another WS?

Assuming that there will be a strike at all (remember: setting the date does not for once and for all commit you to keeping the date if you think negotiations are improved enough, from the day you set the date to the day of the date, that you feel confident a deal is just a short while away without a strike), a strike could last any length of time. But I suspect that, if former Commissioner Fay Vincent can be believed, a strike this time would not last long enough to put the postseason into a cryonic chamber - because of yet another of the owners' self-possession blunders:

The day the players go out on strike, the banks will give baseball one week to make a deal. And Don (Fehr) knows it. He has all the cards. - Fay Vincent, to the Washington Post, earlier this season.

Now, of course, it is sensible to ask why the hell, if Bug Selig and those of his fellow owners so bleating are so convinced baseball is worse than dead flat broke (which is, I think, proven well enough to be a lie in the first place), those owners who did borrowed up the patootie and beyond in the first place? But it might first be sensible to remind ourselves that baseball owners have and exercise the kind of sensibility that would make them excellent political office candidates if they so desired...

For Tom Hicks to be talking financial responsibility is something along the line of Joseph Stalin accusing anyone else of human rights abuses. In case any eavesdroppers have forgotten, Tom Hicks is the owner whose team was so desperately in need of improved pitching, with league-worst team ERAs over several seasons, that he spent the equivalent of a decent enough pitching staff to lower the team ERA in order to acquire...a shortstop. Even more incredible to remember is that he was, essentially, bidding against himself in so doing, since no one else was offering anything even close to what he finally decided to pay said shortstop.

If the owners want even a beginning to a permanent fix, they will have at least two things that they will have to do at long, long last:

One: They will have to cut the crap and accept more equitable box office splits between home and visiting teams. This is one area in which baseball can draw upon the NFL, if nowhere much else. But to my knowledge the NFL's box office split is 60-40, with the home team getting the 60. A reasonable split, that. Again to my knowledge - I could be very wrong about the actual percentages - the American League uses something like a 75-25 (or worse) box office split between home and visitor, and the National League uses 80-20 or thereabout. Among other "revenue sharings," the box office gate splits are among the most ridiculously lopsided or blindsided across professional sports, period, never mind baseball. And since Bug Selig's clever enough idea of dissolving the separate administrations of the National and American Leagues, there seems to me to be no damned excuse to perpetuate the overly inequitable box office splits that have too long existed.

Two: They will have to agree to a requirement - not a "faith understanding," a requirement - that any revenue shares distributed must be reinvested into the team. The revenue sharing implemented in the second half of the 1990s made no such requirements, and it is probably better than an educated guess that most owners whose teams did qualify to receive revenue shares put the money right into their own pockets. Essentially, this is the crux of why George Steinbrenner explodes like Mt. St. Helens whenever revenue sharing comes up in the discussion: he demands to know, and he is not unreasonable about it, why the hell he should be penalised for his having rebuilt and reconstituted a very successful franchise - with brains (or, at least, with his having learned at last it isn't too bright to keep meddling with the good brains he brings in to run the Yankees) more than money - by having monies siphoned from his organisation, monies his organisation in a nutshell earned the old fashioned way, and redistributed to franchises whose managements have neither the foresight, the insight, or the basic brains to put into their teams and reconstitute them?

In other words: Think of the Yankees as a wealth-generating, wealth-producing taxpayer. Now, if taxpayers (like us rightward folk on the FREEP for example) qua taxpayers think it criminal that the government (well, really, the State, since a properly construed government would not even think of such a thing) should take from them what they have earned and give it arbitrarily to those who have not and have no inclination to earn their keep and development, where is it a crime for the New York Yankees to think likewise?

Granted: Baseball is, essentially, a franchise business. It has its distinctions, like any franchise business. (One such distinction, which the "traditionalists" who lament the "good old days" of the reserve system and player indenture seem to forget, if ever they realised: Baseball the franchise business is selling its work force as the attraction to the public. You don't go to McDonald's because you think someone behind the counter is going to whomp up record french fries, but you do go to baseball games to see baseball players.) And, like any franchise business, there should be a particular minimum of revenues distributed for the basic sustenance and upkeep of each franchisee. Now: How far do you think a McDonald's franchise would be allowed to go by the parent corporation if said franchisee just pocketed those corporation revenue shares rather than putting a reasonable enough percentage of them into his franchise? I don't think this one would go very far, either.

Which brings me to a third thing baseball the parent corporation must repair: its insane promotion. Do you really think that even the longest-serving baseball fans will continue patronising a game whose management is a bunch of franchisees who haven't got clues about promoting their franchises (and who would rather get their hands in the back pockets of those who do - instead of banging on the Yankees, for example, for coming up with new promotion and thus new revenue streams, what the hell is keeping them from thinking likewise within the parameters of their regional markets real and prospective?) or whose idea of promoting the game is to denigrate its condition (albeit a condition they themselves have instigated) and its major product (the players)? Players in the NBA aren't any less "greedy" than major league baseball players. Michael Jordan actually earned better than the major leagues' highest average salary in his prime, and he was also not exactly a consistently sterling citizen...yet the NBA promoted the living daylights out of him and various other players and even went so far as to say how wonderful it was that these players could make so much money because the league was doing so wonderfully! MLB bitches about who's making how much money within seconds after they variously insist upon this or that player taking the money.

And between that and their gimmick-mentality "changes" in the game (the three-division alignment, the wild-card, interleague play, et. al.) which are aimed more at turning baseball into spectacle of a sort rather than enhancing the singularity of baseball as a pastime (a pastime, you don't give a damn how long the game lasts, and anyway, have we forgotten how long football and basketball games last when you factor in not just the TV commercial requirements but all the damn timeouts, fouls, penalties, and the like? You think an average baseball game lasts two hours and change? You sure haven't spent a Sunday afternoon with an NFL team where a game which in theory takes a minimum of an hour to play can take as long as three hours to finish, and football isn't even a game that you could call a pastime...), you could almost make the case that baseball - if you consider the game in no terms beyond its mandarins and their trained media parrots - was overtaken by a suicide wish.

Baseball the game wasn't broken until the owners decided to (quick) fix it. Baseball the business, of course, is a mess. And I can guarantee that businessmen in other lines of work who had handled their businesses the way baseball owners handle baseball the business would have some of the shortest executive careers in history...

I don't understand why they don't just go with some kind of "incentive" system.

There already are incentive contracts in baseball, pretty much spread around the game. But they do have their problems, mostly having to do with people who either can't count or don't know the team's specific playing needs and style drawing up the incentives. To the point where it is entirely possible for a player to sign a contract that makes it more lucrative and secure for him not to achieve than it does for him to be an achiever. (This actually happened with one of Rick Cerone's contracts: he had an incentive laden contract that, by the time you read his incentive clauses and figures, it proved actually more worthwhile for Cerone to be a mediocre catcher than it did for him to repeat his earlier solid performances, in his earlier turns with the Yankees...)

Now, about that .225 hitter making a million: Well, if all you see is his batting average, you'd be right. But if that .225 hitter nevertheless has a .350 or better on-base average, is run productive (in terms of creating and building as well as driving in runs), and is run-preventive in the field, you'd perhaps think twice about making just a blanket "he hits .225, he ain't worth a million." Ozzie Smith all but had to learn to make himself a useful major league hitter, but there wasn't a baseball man alive worth his weight in anything who would have said the Cardinals were idiots to make him the first million-dollar-a-year shortstop in baseball. You look at the player's entire game. Mike Schmidt hit .268 lifetime, and if the only thing you look at was that batting average, you'd write him off in a New York minute...and someone else who saw his entire game would snatch him up and he'd probably get into your kitchen and rattle your pans every time you played against his new team, because this guy was going to help his teams win and play himself into the Hall of Fame for reasons having nothing to do with his batting average.

It works likewise with a pitcher. Maybe you wouldn't pay a 5.09 ERA $20 million...but if he was working in a mega-offence era and the league ERA was six, you'd think differently...to an extent. OK, maybe he's not worth $20 million. Certainly not $20 million a season, but if this is a guy who can pitch at one run below the league ERA, you might think about him as maybe making, say, $10 million over six years. Because a guy who pitches one run below the leage ERA maybe isn't a Hall of Fame candidate (see, God rest his soul, Darryl Kile, for one) but he's a valuable pitcher. Now: Suppose he's 5 and 9 but he's a lights-out relief pitcher who gives you, what, 30 saves a season? How did he get that 5.09 ERA - did he have one or two bad innings in which he did get lit for a few runs? You look at the whole game.

Give you an example: John Smoltz has a not-so-great-looking ERA for a relief pitcher to this point. Look at that strictly and you might think you're overpaying the man. But...the reason it got that way is because, in April, Smoltz got his brains beaten out for nine runs in one bad inning by the Mets, in a game the Mets ended up winning in extra innings. For about two weeks, Smoltz's ERA looked like nine plus. You have to look at the player's or the pitcher's entire game, and how his game fits onto your team, to measure his legitimate or prospective worth (and, remember, you're gambling as much on his prospective worth as you are his performance to date. And that is why they call it gambling).

A little late to the party, but many thanks for the ping !

You never heard of "fashionably late?" ;)

Yes, I have . LOL

heheheheheheh... ;) The good news...the Boston Red Sox and the Minnesota Twins are playing a nice, tight one tonight. The bad news...it's in the Metrodome, a.k.a. the World's Biggest Gasbag...