Fowled Away

Los Angeles Times ^ | 25 August 2002 | Bill Plaschke

[BluesDuke]

SALEM, Ore. -- The Chicken is barking.

His breath comes in short, loud bursts, straining to escape the narrow opening in his foam beak.

He sprints through the warm night, off the faded field, into a windowless concrete storage room, plopping down on a folding chair.

Outside, in the aluminum bleachers that ring this tiny baseball stadium in the Northwest woods, the laughter dies.

Inside, the Chicken gasps.

"Was it funny?" he asks.

Full story here.

[BluesDuke]

Read the full story. The Charlie Chaplin of chickens deserves tribute. And although I know - in my heart and by the evidence - that the major league owners, as usual, are wrong, wrong, wrong this time around, too, there are times when I would like to give only too many of today's major league players a swift kick in the sliding pads to remind them that, dammit, you are allowed to have fun playing baseball. Maybe this began with the 1970s New York Yankees - the Chicken was booked for a Yankee Stadium gig and Mr. Personality himself, Thurman Munson, threatened to run him off the field (he did likewise with Detroit Tiger fun-loving rookie Mark "The Bird" Fidrych), and he was joined by no few teammates in such sentiments. That prompted former Yankee star Jim Bouton, then working as a sports anchor for New York WABC-TV, to say on the air, on that night's sports report, "What's the big deal? Easy. I've seen a lot of games lately where I thought the Chicken should be playing."

Read the full story (remember - we cannot post the full text of a Los Angeles Times piece here, alas) and appreciate.

[scab4faa]

[Reaganwuzthebest]

Maybe this began with the 1970s New York Yankees - the Chicken was booked for a Yankee Stadium gig and Mr. Personality himself, Thurman Munson, threatened to run him off the field...

Would rather have seen Greg Nettles run him off, he had a wicked left hook. If I'm not mistaken, he laid into Mark "The Bird" Fidrych once, nailed him in the arm. Those were the days when baseball was a game.

[Nachum]

I saw the piece. The Chicken is just sooo funny. Had the fun of watching him at a USC basketball game years ago. He was hillarious.

The players are just so full of it. The heck with them. All of this proves that they are just a bunch of overpaid babies. I told my children that if the players strike, I will never take them to another game. I will take them to minor league games or college games but no more major league spoiled brat baseball.

[goldwater was right]

Greg Nettles is from San Diego, original home of the Chicken, and I'm sure Greg appreciated the "fowl" antics of Ted Giannoulas inside the suit than most ball players would have. Methinks the players angry with the Chicken were only upset that he was more entertaining than they were.

[BluesDuke]

The players are just so full of it. The heck with them.

May I commend to your reading these? Yes, I wrote them. But I think you may appreciate them.

Baseball's "Labour Trouble": Overdraft at the Memory Bank?
Information Bankruptcy: The Owners Ponder Reviving a Bomb

Perhaps Jim Bouton said it best, after all: As much as I don't think the players deserve all that money, I think the owners don't deserve it more. The owners, as usual, are demanding the players stop them before they overspend, misspend, or malspend yet again. Not to mention demanding, in effect, that the players continue to abet financing incompetently governed and managed clubs. Substitute "government" for "owners" and "taxpayers" for "players" and an awful lot of people carping about the players would be singing a very different tune, indeed.

Remember: Have you ever come back from a game marveling at the way Jerry Reinsdorf struck out Jeffrey Loria with the bases loaded and two out in the bottom of the ninth? Have you ever wondered just how on earth Tom Hicks (don't get me started on him - him talking about "financial discipline" is tantamount to an establishment Remocrat or Depublican talking about tax cutting...remember: He is the owner whose team had the worst pitching in baseball in 2000, with a team ERA over five, and who decided the way to plug up those run leaks was to spend the equivalent of a well-developed, smartly-dealt, and intelligently-signed serviceable pitching staff on...a shortstop) took John Moores yard when he wasn't supposed to be able to hit an underhanded curve ball? Did you see the way Mike Illitch went into the hole to take that RBI base hit away from Jerry MacMorris and turn the double play falling to his opposite side?

I haven't, either.

[Reaganwuzthebest]

Nettles had a temper but I don't think he would have ever hit Chicken either. Any player who did should be escorted off the field permanently.

[BluesDuke]

If I'm not mistaken, he laid into Mark "The Bird" Fidrych once, nailed him in the arm.

He did. What I'm trying to remember is whether or not The Bird, who had as puckish a sense of humour as anyone in the game, playfully threatened to sue the Chicken for plagiarism...

[BluesDuke]

Actually, the 1970s Yankees were no more enamoured of Mark (The Bird) Fidrych's act than they were of the Chicken. There were exceptions, though - Graig Nettles was one of them. When Fidrych faced the Yankees in a nationally televised game 28 June 1976, while the Yankees were busy insulting the popular kid (Billy Martin kept throwing things at him while he was on the mound, saying smugly after the game, "I was just feeding the Bird", and Thurman Munson actually threatened to clock him if he even thought about trying "that act" in Yankee Stadium, which tells you a lot about why Thurman Munson reminded people of Clarence Darrow saying he never wished a man dead but read a great many obituaries with a great deal of pleasure), Nettles appreciated the kid's act. Of course, Nettles was a bit of a flake himself.

Anyway, when he came up to hit and saw the Bird talking to the ball (a Fidrych staple), Nettles called time and talked to his bat. "Now, don't you listen to that ball," he was quoted as saying. "When it comes in here you just hit it right up into that upper deck up there." Nettles ended up popping out. "Goddamn," he said after the game, "I just realised I was using a Japanese bat. Doesn't understand a word of English."

[Reaganwuzthebest]

Yes I do remember vaguely Fidrych threatening to sue Chicken. The "Bird" was a nut anyway, most likely an Alice Cooper act to freak out players, for a while it appeared to work because he had his pitching moments. Only thing was he was gone as fast as he came, only lasting 5 or 6 years fortunately.

[Nachum]

Thanks for the links. I read both of the pieces and I still think the players are full of it. The one line that jumped out at me in the first one was the part that said the players saleries accounted for 50% of the expenses of major league baseball. Well how about that! No wonder it costs more to go to a baseball game than to Disneyland!

The players wanted this fight. They have done everything in their power to make it happen too. They cry foul at the "Greed" of the owners. Big deal. The players are compensated beyond their wildest dreams of yesteryear and can jump from team to team to get the highest pay. Nobody has any team loyalty. It is just about the money. (the Chicken is too low class for the millionaires)- They still want to strike. It is not enough- they want the profits. "Look how much the owners make!" they scream. "Well they're going to pay!"

A Rod signed a contract for over 100 million and it is not enough. They are going to get the fattest contract in pro sports and they have also screwed up the greatest sport in the world doing it. No longer can you follow a player's carreer on one team. He puts himself out to the highest bidder. He screams "antitrust" if the other owners want him to stay on the team he's on. The owners are greasy business men to them. They are nothing but money grubbing Enron types! Oh- but the players well they are noble and capable of no wrong. They play the game we want to watch. If it is money they love, and not the game, than it is money they shall have.

Just not my money. Not any more.

[BluesDuke]

The "Bird" was a nut anyway, most likely an Alice Cooper act to freak out players, for a while it appeared to work because he had his pitching moments. Only thing was he was gone as fast as he came, only lasting 5 or 6 years fortunately.

Fidrych's act was no act - those who have known him over the years say that really was the way he was...and still is, after all these years. Bill James has theorised, and it makes an awful lot of sense in retrospect, that Fidrych's routines had a partial root as well in a highly competitive nature: (W)hen you cared this much about winning baseball games, of course you would talk to the ball. (James also believes, not implausibly, that Fidrych's not being a strikeout pitcher may well have meant him destined barring injury for maybe a ten-season career at best.)

What happened to him was, he tore knee cartilage in spring training in 1977 after his sensational rookie season and, overenthusiast that he was, he tried to come back too soon - seven weeks - and actually reeled off a six-game winning streak, but he subconsciously altered his throwing motion to keep stress off his knee, and on 12 July 1977 he felt pain and stiffness in his shoulder. That was the beginning of the end, although he opened 1978 with a pair of complete game wins and still had a 2.47 career ERA to date. He stayed with his rehab programs diligently, by all accounts, but in 1978 he learned the hard way that while he was so diligently rehabbing the shoulder and knee he learned, from a team of orthopedists, that his pitching arm muscles had atrophied completely.

Fidrych tried one more comeback, in spring 1983 with the Boston Red Sox. Thomas Boswell has told the story of Tom Seaver, freshly returned to the Mets, facing Fidrych in an exhibition game at the Mets' field (thus the absence of the DH). Seaver stood in to hit and knew to himself that he could have hit anything Fidrych was throwing by then with a cardboard tube. Boswell swore that Seaver - who had endured his own physical miseries - took pity on Fidrych, then turned to Boston catcher Rich Gedman, and said, "Just tell him to throw it out there and I'll hit into a double play." Gedman did, Fidrych did, Seaver did, and as Boswell wrote, True to baseball's hard reality, that act of mercy only saved Fidrych for another inning and another shelling.

Now, about this line you wrote: Only thing was he was gone as fast as he came, only lasting 5 or 6 years fortunately. "Fortunately?" If that is true, maybe baseball's problems today include only too many fans.

[BluesDuke]

Thanks for the links. I read both of the pieces and I still think the players are full of it. The one line that jumped out at me in the first one was the part that said the players saleries accounted for 50% of the expenses of major league baseball. Well how about that! No wonder it costs more to go to a baseball game than to Disneyland!

Actually, it was less than half, of an estimated (by "going broke" MLB itself!) $2.1 billion in additional revenues over the seven seasons through 2001, that went toward player salaries. MLB has yet to answer the wholly legitimate question of where, since it didn't go toward baseball-related expenses, the rest of those revenues went. And, by the way, the players' salaries have nothing - nada, zero, zilch, bupkis - with how much you're paying to go to the ballpark. Do you really think the owners would cut the prices of the tickets, the concessions, et. al., if they could jam a salary cap (under whatever euphemism they present it) down the players' throats? Think again. The broadcasting monies are paying the preponderance of the players' salaries, not the ticket sales or the concessions.

The players wanted this fight. They have done everything in their power to make it happen too.

Oh, really? Then why was it so that during the 2001 season, the Players' Association - knowing the CBA was coming to expiration after the following season - offered to open negotiations early on that agreement, only to have Bug Selig tell one and all to take a hike and the owners walking out of the talks before they really had a chance to get them off the ground?

They cry foul at the "Greed" of the owners. Big deal. The players are compensated beyond their wildest dreams of yesteryear and can jump from team to team to get the highest pay. Nobody has any team loyalty.

Never have, in fact. Average team turnover in players from 1976-present: 4.2 per team. Average team turnover in players before the free agency era: 4.3 per team. And if you want to bitch about "nobody has any team loyalty," I'd like you to explain to me why it was just wonderful that, before the free agency era, baseball owners could sell or trade players at will, whenever they damn well pleased, and the players had no say whatsoever about it for the most part, but it is just so terrible that, since 1976, the players have had the right they should have had long enough ago, the same right you and I would go on the warpath to protect, to work where they please if the conditions and compensations and whatnot are mutually agreeable? By the way: Of all the Hall of Famers elected by 1980 (meaning, all the Hall of Famers who played before the free agency era), did you know that 75 percent of them played for more than one team in their careers and several played for as many as five?

It is just about the money. (the Chicken is too low class for the millionaires)- They still want to strike. It is not enough- they want the profits. "Look how much the owners make!" they scream. "Well they're going to pay!"

An oversimplification, alas. It is not "Look how much the owners make"; it is, in fact, "Why the hell should we pay for it when they screw their pooches?" And they are right as rain about it. Again, substitute "government" for "owners" and "taxpayers" for "players". Now: You would probably hit the ceiling (you probably did hit the ceiling) when an American business can't compete in a proper market or screws its pooch and fails to sustain its basic operations properly and, thus, goes hat in hand to the government for a bailout. (Think the Chrysler Corporation; think, possibly, United Airlines - whose problems began way before 9/11, and anyone who says otherwise is being disingenuous.) Or, imagine a company management who has so thoroughly screwed up the business operations, going to their workforce and demanding - not asking, demanding - "We got us into this mess but you're going to bail us out of this mess." They'd be arranging a necktie party for that management, and who the hell could blame them?

A Rod signed a contract for over 100 million and it is not enough.

Actually, he signed for $252 million over ten years in 2000. The next highest offer on the table to him, which he might likely have accepted, was a little over $100 million. Who the hell put the gun to Tom Hicks's head and forced him to make A-Rod that $252 million offer in the first place when he knew - he knew - the single most pressing need the Rangers had at the time was pitching? Nobody forced him to make that offer. And he is now paying the price for using money rather than brains to solve his team's most pressing problem. Don't blame A-Rod for signing that deal. You'd have to go an awful long way to find anyone who would reject $25 million a year.

They are going to get the fattest contract in pro sports and they have also screwed up the greatest sport in the world doing it.

Baseball may be abominable in terms of business, but Sparky Anderson's words are still true: We try every way we can do to kill this game, but for some reason nothing nobody does never hurts it. It may be abominable as a business, but it remains subliminal and lovely as a game.

No longer can you follow a player's carreer on one team. He puts himself out to the highest bidder.

Just like any other worker - at any level of work, from the assembly floor to the accounting department to the office managers to the shift supervisors to the executive suite - whose contracts have expired, whose terms of contract have been fulfilled, who are bound no longer, legally, to anyone, and who have (and should) enjoy the right to determine the proper value of their services. Otherwise, see my earlier comment about "loyalty". To which I would add only that the free agency era actually did begin because of a challenge brought about by a player who was refused - oh, the horror! He wanted to stay with his incumbent team! - a no-trade (or at least an approved-trade) clause in his contract. His name was Andy Messersmith.

He screams "antitrust" if the other owners want him to stay on the team he's on. The owners are greasy business men to them. They are nothing but money grubbing Enron types!

When the owners - under then-Commissioner Peter Ueberroth's orders - opened their books in 1985, oh my my but did the independent economists engaged to review them find some things. In simple terms, the owners then were caught red handed cooking the books. And various independent analysts now (like Forbes magazine, not heretofore renowned for an anti-management bias) suggest that such book cookery continues among only too many of them, particularly given that the opportunities to hide baseball income elsewhere are even more abundant considering many if not most of today's owners own baseball teams as only a portion of their entire enterprise operations.

Oh- but the players well they are noble and capable of no wrong.

I have never suggested any untoward nobility toward baseball players - or any professional athletes. (Which reminds me - how come the NBA saw fit to promote the living hell out of Michael Jordan, who was at one time making more than most baseball players and who was not necessarily as completely simon-pure as his image suggested, but MLB's idea of promoting its marquee stars is to run them down at every opportunity as a bunch of greedheads, as if basketball, football, or hockey players aren't at least as "greedy" if not maybe more so than baseball players are? Think about it. How many enterprises do you know where the division chiefs promote the business by denigrating their divisions and their products at every turn. In case some baseball hawks have forgotten, baseball's product is the baseball player. Nobody buys a ticket to a baseball game to see the team's owner.)

You can do as you like with your entertainment or leisure dollars, of course. But I would implore you to think very hard about what I have just said, anyway.

[Reaganwuzthebest]

The "fortunately" comment was mainly due to his antics. I can respect good pitchers, no matter what team, but talking to the ball seemed a bit fruity, although his rookie year was phenomenal I'll give him that.

Tom Seaver always came off as a gentleman, the story about taking pity on Fidrych is completely believable. For a time he was a Yankee announcer, sort of wished he stayed on but left after a couple of years. Him and Nolan Ryan were the two finest strikeout pitchers of the modern era in my opinion, with Seaver fanning well over 3500 batters. Too bad he didn't play for the Yankees. What an addition he would have made to those seventies teams.

[BluesDuke]

You can get detail on much of what I said above from Doug Pappas, who chairs the Society for American Baseball Research's Business of Baseball Committee. A lot of the information I conveyed actually came from his intense enough work on these issues.

[BluesDuke]

The "fortunately" comment was mainly due to his antics. I can respect good pitchers, no matter what team, but talking to the ball seemed a bit fruity...

Aside from the point that we have both probably seen crazier on the field (think, for one, of Jimmy Piersall shuffling around the bases backwards when he hit his 100th career home run in 1963, as a Met), who cares if it was a bit "fruity" (it wasn't, for one thing)? We sit here and carp until we are out of ink about how unentertaining so many players are, and when one comes along we think it's just a little "fruity," just a bunch of "antics." Sure we love to watch professionals. But without the characters, what a deadly dull time at the park it would be, too.

Him and Nolan Ryan were the two finest strikeout pitchers of the modern era in my opinion, with Seaver fanning well over 3500 batters. Too bad he didn't play for the Yankees.

Tom Seaver struck out 3,640 batters...but Randy Johnson has now struck out 3,675 batters and counting. He is also on pace to tie Nolan Ryan's tally of six 300+ strikeout seasons. But don't even think about naming Nolan Ryan in any league with Seaver or the Big Unit. The Franchise and the Unit are ten times the pitcher Nolan Ryan was.

Seaver, by the way, almost did become a Yankee. When the Reds were ready to let him go following 1982, George Steinbrenner got awful tempted to pull the trigger on the deal. According to Damned Yankess authors Bill Madden and Moss Klein, Steinbrenner flinched for once because he didn't want to be hammered as trying to show up the new Mets' management over the clumsy way the old Mets' management let Seaver go in the first place. The Mets did get Seaver back, of course, only to let him go in that insane free agent compensation pool, leaving him unprotected thinking nobody would claim him (yeah, right) - and leaving the White Sox to snatch him up and, as fate would have it, have him win his 300th career game against the Yankees...in New York.

[Nachum]

Once again, thanks for the links. It always interesting to see the numbers. Unfortunately I am unimpressed by either the numbers of profit or the numbers for salary. I have no problem whatsoever with the owners making money. Hell, every business in America wants to. The idea that baseball was called to a congressional hearing is a total farce. If one can indict baseball for hiding the money, one can indict most business in America. The real problem is in the values of the country, not in the oversight on our pocketbooks.

As far as the notion that only broadcast dollars are the primary source of revenue to the business of baseball, it doesn't make any sense to me at all. Are you suggesting that money means nothing to the team's bottom line? 30,000 to 50,000 people buying tickets, paying for parking, buying food and knick-knacks over a season per game have no preponderance with profitability? Please.

Ask yourself why the Omally family got out of the business of baseball. Why did they sell the Dodgers? Why did Wrigley sell the Cubs? Was it because they saw a great profit in it? Just maybe they sold out because of the current situation in baseball. Just maybe it was the public oversight, the unionization of the players, the massive saleries, and the new headaches in running a modern baseball fanchise. It was too much like a business and a lot less like a sport. You know, if I was an owner I wouldn't like talking to a players union either. The players- and the owners (for that matter) can't have it both ways. It can't be the national past time and a crass commercial venture for both parties. Now it (negotiation) is no different than the Entertainment Unions (SAG, AFTRA, EQUITY) coming to bargain with the Ad Agencies or the Studios. I fully expect the owners to try rolling back salaries in the future and the players to strike again and again. Everyone will cry foul at the other and point the finger of avarice at one another. So yes the players wanted this fight. They fought for free agency. They unionized. They threatened a strike

I'd like you to explain to me why it was just wonderful that, before the free agency era, baseball owners could sell or trade players at will, whenever they damn well pleased, and the players had no say whatsoever about it for the most part

You know, I don't know many true fans of the game who ask that question. The answer seems obvious to me, but is not a satisfying answer to a player or those who are on the players side in this. The reason was that the game depended on the ability of the teams to trade for equal value and to have first crack at new talent if the team was a low in the standings. It is the same principal that football and basketball operate on as well. If the players have the freedom you say we would be on the warpath over, than it destroys the stability of the game itself. I see similar things happening in football, hockey and basketball. That's why teams like the Yankees and Lakers can win year after year. Their owners pony up more dough to get the good players by free agency.

The original article on this thread is about The Chicken. Why do you think Frank Thomas chased him away? Why do you think the players don't want him around?

I have thought hard about it.

Maybe it's because he's not a dues paying member of the union and it's just not profitable for the owners. It is just sad that the players are no better than the owners. I don't like spneding money that reality. My entertainment dollars can be very well spent going to places that welcome entertainment like the Chicken.

[BluesDuke]

Once again, thanks for the links. It always interesting to see the numbers. Unfortunately I am unimpressed by either the numbers of profit or the numbers for salary. I have no problem whatsoever with the owners making money. Hell, every business in America wants to.

I have no problem with the owners making money, either. I do have a problem, however, with the preponderance bitching that all they are doing is losing money when a) it is simply not so, and b) they either refuse to allow independent eyes examine their books or refuse to allow those who have done so to discuss those books and those numbers. I can guarantee you that if any other business in America had suddenly hit a real or alleged financial crisis and someone was not allowed to audit that company's books reasonably, there would be criminal investigations. Why should baseball be exempted from the same sort of scrutiny, especially since damn near all the teams play in facilities the taxpayers paid for?

The idea that baseball was called to a congressional hearing is a total farce. If one can indict baseball for hiding the money, one can indict most business in America.

Aside from the point that Congress made no such indictment, it is merely disturbing but not exactly a farce for Congress to call baseball in for hearings. Baseball enjoys, after all, an exemption from antitrust law. And it is also an extremely sweeping statement to say that "if one can indict baseball for hiding the money, one can indict most businesses in America." That sort of statement would get blown away, properly, as evidence of an anti-business bias were it to be said regarding any other business whose captains stood accused of "hiding the money." Surely you know better than to suggest all American business hides the money, even as I know better than to suggest that all baseball owners do likewise. I suggest merely that a preponderance of them do; I do not suggest that all of them do. And, as a matter of fact, one owner who does operate his club the proper and right way - re-investing a preponderance of the operational profit back into the club, leaving (he learned this the hard way, true) competent middle and upper management alone to do what he pays them handsomely to do in sustaining his club and its developmental apparatus - is the primary target of the redistributionist crowd in the game, the crowd which demands greater "revenue sharing" around the clubs but does not demand to know, in fact, just why on earth it was that the already existing revenue sharing rules did not include requirements that those teams qualified to receive revenue shares invest those shares back into their teams, while isn't it so convenient that baseball could yet again claim to have been losing money when in fact baseball was not losing money across the board.

The real problem is in the values of the country, not in the oversight on our pocketbooks.

Of course it is. But, I repeat - when you have an industry demanding the taxpaying public continue building it new working facilities (ballparks), it is right, proper, and legitimate for that taxpaying public to ask whether said industry, or at least share enough of its captains, are playing shuck-and-jive with the money. How the hell did an industry which made by its own estimates $3.5 million in revenue in 2001 manage yet to lose a claimed $519 million? And isn't it strange that, in any other industry, a CEO claiming great things were happening because under his inspired leadership the company blew $519 million despite $3.5 million in revenues last year would be lucky if his golden parachute didn't have a hole in it when they pushed him out of the plane to the unemployment office...while Commissioner Bud Selig (himself a walking, talking conflict of interest) made those very claims for baseball 2001 and got himself rewarded with a contract extension and a pay raise?

As far as the notion that only broadcast dollars are the primary source of revenue to the business of baseball, it doesn't make any sense to me at all. Are you suggesting that money means nothing to the team's bottom line? 30,000 to 50,000 people buying tickets, paying for parking, buying food and knick-knacks over a season per game have no preponderance with profitability? Please.

In the beginning - like in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the owners in their infinite wisdom did everything in their power to stop baseball from being broadcast (they feared, falsely enough, that broadcasting the games would kill the game, driving down attendance, blah blah blah) - broadcasting dollars didn't mean as much to the owners or the game as a whole. That was then; this has long, long, long been now. I would advise you to ponder something else in the bargain: in 1985, the independent audits of baseball demonstrated that a number of clubs were actually assigning the revenues from tickets, concessions, parking, and the corollary functions, to places other than the teams themselves. (The St. Louis Cardinals assigned their very profitable parking revenues to a company having nothing to do with either Anheuser-Busch, who owned the team, or the Cardinals themselves; most of the owners today having baseball as part of a corporate group, they have multitudinous opportunities to hide baseball revenues in order to plead the poverty case, and it is very possible that many of those owners do so.) Sometimes, they don't even assign a majority of their own broadcast revenues to the team. (The Atlanta Braves for years enough counted only the Atlanta-area revenues their games were bringing in on WTBS, without counting the flood of bucks coming in from WTBS's "superstation" revenues from around the country.) And the practise may well still exist today.

Do you realise, for example, the real reason why the Florida Marlins were put into the pickle they got put into? Permit me to review it with you: Their original owner, H. Wayne Huizenga, owned the ballpark, then called Joe Robbie Stadium...but he assigned all revenues from all the Marlins' home games to the ballpark, which he owned under another incorporated entity, and not to the team, and that included luxury box revenues and the like. Huizenga tried to strong-arm a new taxpayer built stadium (exactly why remains a mystery, since Joe Robbie - now Pro Player Stadium - isn't even close to being a white elephant) for the Fish and, when Florida taxpayers told him to go jump in the lake, he first bought (well, rented) himself a World Series team and then, getting another no, cried poverty and dismantled the team almost overnight. Then he sold the team...but he still reaps the revenues from the Marlins' games, since he still owns the stadium. (To my knowledge, the Fish are the only team in baseball history who plays in a stadium owned by their own former owner.)

You know, if I was an owner I wouldn't like talking to a players union either. The players- and the owners (for that matter) can't have it both ways. It can't be the national past time and a crass commercial venture for both parties.

Who says? On the one hand you have no objection to the owners making money, on the other hand it can't be the National Pastime and a crass commercial venture? Who can't have it both ways now? Baseball, like it or not, has always been as much a crass commercial venture as a game, notwithstanding the efforts of maybe one, two, or three owners to make it otherwise. (For the record, these owners were William Wrigley, Sr. of the Cubs in the 1920s and 1930s, and Tom Yawkey of the Boston Red Sox. I would go to my grave swearing that had there been more owners like they, there might never have become a Major League Baseball Players' Association. They may have worked within the discredited reserve system, too, but Wrigley and Yawkey treated their players like human beings and not like chattel; and, they paid them fairly and squarely and didn't try to beat them down in contract talks, never once forgetting that people didn't pay their good money to come out to the ballpark to see the team's owners suiting up to pitch or hit.)

Now it (negotiation) is no different than the Entertainment Unions (SAG, AFTRA, EQUITY) coming to bargain with the Ad Agencies or the Studios. I fully expect the owners to try rolling back salaries in the future and the players to strike again and again.

If the owners really wanted to roll back salaries, they'd quit doing what Tom Hicks did regarding Alex Rodriguez and a bunch of journeymen. Rodriguez himself wasn't even looking for half of what Hicks ultimately offered him - why the hell didn't Hicks pay attention to his actual market value? Who forced Hicks to pay almost $35 million total for journeyman pitching that wasn't going to get the team ERA down much past 4.50? Who the hell, in effect, bids against himself for a shortstop when he needed pitching way more than he needed a shortstop?

If the owners really wanted to roll back salaries and do it the right way, the honourable way, they would start paying attention to how Billy Beane runs a ball club (as he does in Oakland) or how Walt Jocketty (in St. Louis) runs a ball club, and ignore how the like of Tom Hicks or Cam Bonifay (general manager of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays) run clubs. (The D-Rays from the outset broke the bank signing up expensive free-agent types and had nothing left to build a farm system with, and little if anything left to trade intelligently with. Sound familiar? That's only how Cam Bonifay built and broke a very good Pittsburgh Pirates team practically overnight.)

So yes the players wanted this fight. They fought for free agency. They unionized. They threatened a strike.

Since when are these crimes? We're not talking about an air traffic controllers' union here, for one thing. So they fought for free agency. You think the old reserve system was a godsend, where baseball players had no control over their working lives? Why deny them rights you'd go to the mat for for any other worker, on the floor or in the executive suite? (By the way, I don't know if you remember this, but if the old reserve clause had actually been enforced as it was written, strictly construed, rather than abused and shuck-and-jived by the old-time owners, players would have become legitimate free agents after no more than two years with their incumbent club.)

I'd like you to explain to me why it was just wonderful that, before the free agency era, baseball owners could sell or trade players at will, whenever they damn well pleased, and the players had no say whatsoever about it for the most part

You know, I don't know many true fans of the game who ask that question.

There are a lot more such fans than you think who ask that question. And have. And, as a matter of fact, at least one baseball commissioner (and a most unlikely one, considering his continuing image) asked kind of the same question, or a question quite relevant to that matter, though it's not really a well known story:

When Earl Averill (a future Hall of Famer) was bought by the Cleveland Indians from the Pacific Coast League powerhouse San Francisco Seals, the purchase price was some $30,000. Averill asked how much of the price was to be his. Told that none of it would be, Averill all but told the Indians to take a hike. That caught the attention of then-Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis...who sided with Averill! Landis, for all his suprerogatory power, had no authority to rule on player sales or contract dollars, but he did say, in fact, that he saw nothing untoward in the idea that if a player could be sold, the player should be entitled to a percentage of the sale price since it was the player, after all, who was the object of value. Averill and the Indians eventually negotiated a deal whereby Averill got a $5,000 bonus (very big money in the 1920s-30s), and he became an Indian and began his Hall of Fame career. Now, I wonder: How much of what subsequently followed involving the players and money might have been avoided or done differently if Landis's thought had become an operating rule of the game? (About a decade later, St. Louis Cardinals catcher Walker Cooper was sold to the New York Giants for $100,000 - the highest known sale price for just a player yet; then-Cardinal owner Sam Breadon unloaded Cooper because Cooper was seeking a salary raise - and it is intriguing to think of how that deal might have gone, or even whether the Cardinals would have sold their star catcher, if Cooper had been entitled to a portion of that sale.)

The answer seems obvious to me, but is not a satisfying answer to a player or those who are on the players side in this. The reason was that the game depended on the ability of the teams to trade for equal value and to have first crack at new talent if the team was a low in the standings. It is the same principal that football and basketball operate on as well. If the players have the freedom you say we would be on the warpath over, than it destroys the stability of the game itself.

I repeat: In the pre-free agency era, player turnover per team averaged 4.3 players, and post-free agency the average player turnover has been 4.2 (bear in mind that there are more teams). If anything, since the free agency era baseball became more competitively balanced than it had in the pre-free agency era. Was the game that stable when the old-time New York Yankees were winning the pennant for what seemed like eternity? Was the game that stable when the St. Louis Browns couldn't draw in one season what even the Colorado Rockies can draw in one night? (You can look it up.) And as for teams trading for "equal value," you sure don't remember how many times teams made deals for reasons having nothing to do with purely baseball reasons and everything to do with personal issues, with players again having no say whatsoever in the matter - Harry Frazee's sale of Babe Ruth, his number one gate attraction, to the Yankees in 1920 is only the most obvious example. And, in the 1950s, then-Yankee owners Dan Topping and Del Webb used the Kansas City Athletics as practically a Yankee farm team - they had what some (including Bill Veeck) believe was all but an incestuous relationship with then-A's owner Arnold Johnson (who was, in fact, a kind of business partner of Topping's). I would dare to suggest that if any investigative reporting were done into the Topping-Webb Yankee era (the mid-to-late 1940s through 1964, when they sold the team to CBS and inadvertently triggered a classic demonstration of how not to operate a baseball team under a corporate umbrella) would likely expose massive conflicts of interest. It would probably pain a good many people to have to think that George Steinbrenner has actually learned how to operate the Yankees more above board than his predecessor owners ever did.

I see similar things happening in football, hockey and basketball. That's why teams like the Yankees and Lakers can win year after year. Their owners pony up more dough to get the good players by free agency.

I have a surprise for you: The Yankees are a more within-the-organisation-developed club than the Lakers are. Fact: The nucleus of the Yankee championship teams since 1996 have been developed in the Yankee system itself, and the rest came as much if not more so from trading than from free agent signings. In fact, one can argue (it has been argued, in fact) that the critical move the Yankees made to begin their mid-to-late 1990s return to championship was their trading of outfielder Roberto Kelly to the Cincinnati Reds for outfielder Paul O'Neill. That deal, in hand with the development of the like of Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and others, was the real rebirth of the Yankees. Because Steinbrenner was so free-agent addictive in the 1970s (when his timing was such that it worked for him, against all sense and sensibility, with three pennant winners and two World Series titles) and the 1980s (when he parched his own farm system to stockpile free agents without rhyme or reason and the Yankees degenerated slowly but surely, until his 1990-92 suspension over the Dave Winfield affair), enough people still cling to the image of Steinbrenner as Mr. Free Agent Checkbook when, since his return to baseball in 1992-93, it has simply not been so.

And perhaps, instead of bitching that the Yankees make all that money and can spend as freely as they want, why haven't other baseball teams stopped, thought about how the Yankees actually do it (they've developed plenty of secondary revenue streams and they promote the living hell out of the team in their target markets), and then gone out and tried to see how they, too, can adapt the Yankee way to their own regions and target markets and thus build their teams up, too? There was no reason for, say, the Kansas City Royals to have been allowed to go as far down the drain as they have gone, and management with foresight, sensibility, and brains could have prevented it from happening.

The original article on this thread is about The Chicken. Why do you think Frank Thomas chased him away? Why do you think the players don't want him around? I have thought hard about it. Maybe it's because he's not a dues paying member of the union and it's just not profitable for the owners.

If it's the Chicken not being a dues-paying member of the Players' Association, well, neither are their coaches and neither are the umpires. If it's not profitable for the owners, I fail to see it, since the Chicken was an unfailing hit wherever he appeared in the major leagues. There are only too many jackasses among the players, even as there are too many jackasses among the owners.

It is just sad that the players are no better than the owners. I don't like spneding money that reality. My entertainment dollars can be very well spent going to places that welcome entertainment like the Chicken.

I enjoy the Chicken, too. And I wish to God the majors would take their heads out of their asses about that kind of entertainment. But it is no further true that all players are such assoholics than it is that all owners are likewise. On the other hand, perhaps it is worth thinking about this, too: Baseball has never lacked for jerks, on the field or in the front office. (I used to wonder what it would have been like if, say, Dick Allen could have been brought to work for, say, Cal Griffith. Hoo boy!) Neither has any other team sport. But in one sense could you really blame some baseball players for turning out to be jerks when they came to realise that baseball, a game they all once loved, promotes itself by ripping them apart - remember, baseball has nothing to sell but the game and its players - what seems like week after week rather than putting its marquee stars up and promoting the brains out of them? Is Shaquille O'Neal really a better person than, say, Jason Giambi or Barry Bonds? But the NBA promotes him as the big snaggletoothed basketball megastar no matter how much of an ass he behaves like, and they point to the millions he's paid as a point of pride - look how great we are that we pay this guy those bucks. Baseball? It rips its players down whether or not the players in question are jerks, bitches pisses and moans about how much players make, and anyone who tells you you can do that kind of "promotion" without it affecting your attendance is going to tell you you need psychiatric attention.

Look at the All-Star Game, before the fiasco of the game itself. How did baseball let the game and the Home Run Derby be promoted? Animating its marquee attractions in cartoon form as overmuscled apes making the Incredible Hulk look like the Incredible Mr. Limpet. That was a stroke of genius...not. Real clever - baseball is hit with questions about steroid use in the game and that's how baseball lets the All-Star Game get promoted? Aside from the implicative of guilty-till-proved-innocent, just what kind of promotional talent is needed to put up an ad campaign which all but says, "So we're using steroids? Big effin' deal!" If I was baseball's CEO (read: commissioner), I would have had people on the carpet post haste and there would have been heads rolling for even thinking about that kind of idea in the middle of that flap. But such is life at Club Bud.