Strike 4

Strike 4
The baseball deal will either make the game worse for fans or it'll be a sham that won't hold salaries down. The owners came close to wrecking the season for this?

Let's start with the short form. The crisis was phony, the issues were a crock and the deal is a sham. Well, it's about 50-50 that it will turn out to be a sham. No matter what anyone says, it has yet to be proven that the basic agreement worked out between the baseball owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association will ultimately hold salaries down. That was the whole purpose of commissioner Bud Selig's campaign from the outset, and the truth is we don't know if it will work until some big-name free agents' contracts are up for negotiation.

Meanwhile, what we can say unequivocally is that the rest of the deal is a sham and that both the short- and long-term results of it are going to make baseball less popular. It will, however, have the short-term effect of making the owners bigger profits.

Let's jump right into it: The luxury tax that the two sides agreed to will either keep salaries down or it won't. If it does, then there will be less spending by the richer owners and therefore less money to throw into the pool for the less-richer owners. If the tax doesn't succeed in retarding spending, then we're all right back where we started from, because the revenue-sharing mechanism is entirely meaningless if the owners aren't stimulated to spend. And what good Republican really thinks that raising taxes ever stimulated spending?

Not Bud Selig, that's for sure. So in all likelihood there will be less money for the less-rich teams over the next four years than there was for the previous six (which amounted to, by the way, $674 million). And guess what? After all this talk of "competitive balance," there isn't a word in the basic agreement about compelling the small-market owners to spend a dime on salaries.

Let's stop for a moment and talk about competitive balance. At today's press conference, Bud Selig reiterated that this was "all about restoring competitive balance." To say "restoring" competitive balance implies that there was a time when baseball had competitive balance. Now when would that time have been? From early in the 20th century to early in the 1920s when the New York Giants dominated? From early in the 1920s to early in the 1960s when the Yankees dominated? Exactly which era of "competitive balance" are we trying to restore? Could he possibly mean the era of competitive balance that was ushered in when players earned the right to become free agents? In point of fact, this has been the greatest era of competitive balance in the game's history.

Baseball's financial situation is often contrasted negatively with that of the National Football League's and, in some cases, with the National Basketball Association's. "There is a greater chance for a team to make the playoffs," the refrain generally goes. Well, of course there is, at least in theory. But it has nothing to do with the level of competition and everything to do with the illusion of competitive balance created by the greater number of playoff spots available. The NFL offers 12 playoff slots to baseball's eight, and the NBA offers a ridiculous 16. (In other words, nearly 60 percent of NBA teams are destined to make the playoffs, no matter how crappy their seasonal performance.)

But how does it all wind up when it comes time to play for the championship? Since 1981, five years after free agency had a chance to kick in in baseball, 20 different teams have played in the World Series, while in the supposedly competitively balanced NFL, only 18 different teams have played in the Super Bowl. (The NBA has seen just 15 different teams play in its finals.) Remember, baseball didn't have a World Series in 1994.

Baseball suffers in this comparison with other sports because of a period when the Yankees happened to win a few World Series. (Wasn't it about time for that to happen anyway?) Still, since 1996, when the Yankees won their first World Series in 18 seasons, there have been 7 different teams in the World Series and 8 different teams in the Super Bowl. What exactly is there in the NFL structure that made it necessary to risk the entire baseball season to emulate? And speaking of this baseball season, as we go to press, three of the six divisions in baseball are currently being led by small-market teams (Oakland, Minnesota and St. Louis) while one, Arizona, was an expansion team just four years ago. Arizona, by the way, was the second expansion team (the Florida Marlins were the first) to win the World Series. No expansion franchise has ever won the Super Bowl or the NBA finals.

If Selig's plan works out, though, there will be one way in which baseball will emulate the NFL that will be entirely unexpected and unwanted: Do you remember a few years ago what the struggle between players and owners was supposed to be about? Does anyone now remember that it was supposed to be about players not switching teams so often? That the main evil of free agency was that it encouraged players to change teams all the time and thus undermine the fans' identification and loyalty? (Studies later proved that players didn't switch teams any more under free agency than before, but let that pass for now.) Well, has anyone noticed that the NFL salary cap is currently having that effect? That the fans in Baltimore and across the entire nation scarcely had a chance to learn the names of the world champion Baltimore Ravens before spending restrictions scattered the greatest defense in NFL history all over the league?

Perhaps it doesn't matter that much in football, where most players, particularly the usually anonymous linemen, aren't all known or recognized by the average fan. But you can damn well bet that a similar effect is going to be noticed in baseball, where real fans can tell who's sitting in the bullpen by the way he crosses his legs. Get used to it: If this luxury tax accomplishes what Bud Selig wants it to accomplish, then from now on the primary engine for moving players from team to team won't be free agency or voluntary trades, but deals on teams by spending restrictions. You who supported the owners during the labor negotiations: Is this what you wanted?

And then, on the other hand, there's always the chance that once again the luxury tax will not retard spending, which means that when the time comes to go through this mess again -- and make no mistake about it, contrary to all the phony good will that was oozing between player reps and owners on the podium -- Bud Selig will have forced just enough rope from the players with which to hang himself.

My feeling is when has redistribution of wealth ever encouraged competition or excellence?

It punishes success and rewards failure.

Speaking of an ordinary business you would be absolutely correct. And even in an extraordinary business, such as a professional sports league, dollars alone do not encourage or ensure competition or excellence. That said, bear in mind this: baseball is, technically, as much a departmental franchise business as it is a contrivance of independent operations, and in that context it is not improper for a certain elemental sharing of the revenues. I had that in mind when I suggested that one of the most grievous errors baseball's business model and economic apparatus commits is the lopsided gate receipt split between home and visiting teams. (About that much, the National Football League has things just about right.)

But...beyond the better balancing of the gate receipts, up to and including a rightly divided distribution of baseball's national broadcasting revenues and national promotional and marketing revenues (read: Major League Baseball Properties, the MLB-wide licencing arm), it is indeed unwise and unsound for baseball to establish what amounts to a welfare state of a kind. It is absolutely unconscionable that owners who cannot and do not operate their franchises intelligently or at least reasonably, who cannot and do not invest in those franchises wisely and prudently (examples: the Tampa Bay Devil Rays spending everything they had at their outset seasons on high-enough ticket free agents, leaving nothing for building a sensible farm system and player development apparatus; the Texas Rangers, needing pitching in the worst way, spending its equivalent on...a shortstop; the Kansas City Royals, who are still paying for the insanity of the latter Kauffmann years, when Mr. Kauffmann spent like mad without rhyme or reason in order to keep the Feds' hands off a couple of unexpected windfalls, with the upshot that the Royals' competitive teams were fractured and the farm system was depleted beyond sense for too long a time), and who cannot and do not invest and work sensibly enough promoting their franchises in their actual and prospective markets.

There is no reason on earth why George Steinbrenner - who learned his lesson, really, the hard way (think of the Bizarro World that was the Yankees of 1979-91) - should be punitively taxed, in essence, because he does know how to operate a franchise, because he does reinvest a preponderance of his baseball profits right back into his club, because he does have and/or seek the vision to develop newer revenue streams of the Yankees' own by way of creative or at least broad-visioned promotion and marketing, because he does at long last know to engage sound baseball brains and let them do their thing. There is no sane reason why San Francisco Giants owner Peter Magowan should be punitively taxed because he has built not only a well-enough competitive team in a slightly-less-than-huge market but built his own damn ball park, too. There is no sane reason why owners the like of John Moores (who has begun to look an awful lot like he learned basic business practises from some of the Enron upper muckety-mucks), David Glass (the Wal-Mart magnate who has turned the Kansas City Royals into the court jesters of the American League), Jerry Reinsdorf (one of the biggest horse's asses ever to come down the baseball ownership pike, and the real culprit of the 1994 strike that, in Whitey Herzog's memorable phrase, "put the game on a respirator"), Tom Hicks (who spent like the Yankees without the brains of even the Oakland A's, never mind the Yankees, and has the world's most expensive basement dwellers), any team who is stupid enough to employ Cam Bonifay as a general manager (it was Bonifay who took the "economise" edict to the most insane and least-thought out extreme and destroyed one of the most competitive Pittsburgh Pirate clubs in the franchise's history, and who spent the Devil Rays into a pre-ordained oblivion), and any billionaire owner who refuses to invest in his team or take the municipality to court if need be to get his team out of maybe the worst stadium pact this side of the Florida Marlins (you guessed it: Carl Polhad, who is only the most widely-known of those owners who just pocketed their revenue shares under the old deal, and who had no clue as to just what the penurious Cal Griffith stuck him with - in case anyone forgot, the Metrodome was built at gunpoint off the taxpayers' teat, the Minnesota Vikings having threatened to move if it wasn't built and Minnesota's D-F-L cartel naturally showing the spine of an amoeba, and as an offseason gift it was offered to Griffith on the house, and Griffith, idiot savant that he could be, fell hook, line, and stinker for the deal and didn't bother to read the fine print that assigned every dollar of revenue the stadium generated to the Vikings including revenues generated by the Twins' home games - any sensible man would have gone to court to get that deal restructured sensibly), should be handed what amount to tax dollars for welfare of a different kind.

And did I mention that the Florida Marlins still play in a very modern ballpark from which they cannot earn a damn dime thanks to their former owner? That's right, folks: Wayne Huizenga, from when he first owned the team - he already owned the ballpark - assigned all the revenues generated through Pro Player Stadium (nee Joe Robbie Stadium) to the stadium itself, which he owned under a separate entity entirely, and not to the Marlins. Then, he pulled his infamous double switch to try strongarming Florida into building him a new tax-marinated ballpark: first, spending like a Steinbrenner to buy himself a World Series champ and, when that didn't work, crying poverty and commencing what may long be the most capricious fire sale in baseball history, after which he sold the Fish for a huge profit. I did mention that Huizenga still retains ownership of the ballpark through that separate entity, holding the Marlins to a very longterm lease that continues denying them even a thin dime from the park revenues generated by their home games, didn't I?

No, baseball certainly should not subsidize such creatures and their wreckages. But just watch. Don't think for a New York minute that the players won't be watching just what the owners do now that they've met each other halfway on new revenue sharing and "luxury tax" (read: Yankee-punishment tax) plans, and don't think the players aren't aware that just as the former plan the new revenue sharing plans do not require teams qualified to receive revenue shares to invest those dollars in the teams' players or baseball-explicit operations to one degree. Come 2006, things are going to get extremely interesting. And the hysteria media, just as this time around, will be only too thrilled to just whip the fans into a froth of player bashing without bothering themselves to learn or communicate the actual story.

"To say 'restoring' competitive balance implies that there was a time when baseball had competitive balance. Now when would that time have been? ...In point of fact, this has been the greatest era of competitive balance in the game's history."

Why?
Because MLB expanded like Kudzu into MORE *TV* markets in order they increase the biggest part of the cash cow in their business??
Great.

Problem was, is, & unfortuneatly remains?
Most these new expansion teams are added to the ones who already couldn't carry their own weight.
So why the surprise the whole magilla's in trouble?
The solution now then, is for the profitable teams being further diluted to subsidize the existing losers?
Is that right?

I for one will continue to maintain my, "Death Watch" for MLB; &, not *just* because of "who" it is the team owners have picked to run the show, either. :o)
Rather because both management & players STILL have not addressed the cancer killing 'em both; their runaway, selfish greed & careless disregard for the fan.

If there's *any* good news for MLB?
It'd have to be that "Horse Racing" will in all probabilty go first.
Not much to look forward to if you're a baseball fan though, in any event.
I mean I for one can't get *up* for a funeral; of any kind, y'know?

"Say I: They are indeed faster, but what they deliver is more spectacle thrill for the buck. Baseball - a pastime, ladies and gentlemen - delivers more emotional bang for the bucks and the emotion endures. Baseball as a business may be abominable as too long practised, but baseball the game is incomparable in its beauty and timelessness."

Beautifully said; I'd tend to agree 100%.
Too bad all the principles of this sport -- at the professional level -- apparently have consistently failed to recognize their place & responsibility in maintaining the *timelessness*, eh?
A damned sin; if, not a crime what they're doing & have done.
I pray this sentiment is repeatedly woven into the chapters of the book you're writing, too.

Off topic a tad, here; but, lemme tell you of an experience my bride & I had this past summer.
The fight club I belong to gave a demonstration this past summer prior to our local minor league baseball team, the "Evansville Otters," game.

If not for my wanting to show support for our club's "Delta Team," I probably wouldn't have attended this baseball game; however, I am glad to all get-out now, that we did.
It was you I thought of several times throughout that evening, btw; &, for these reasons...

"Kids" (late teens early twenties) all vieing for that long-shot chance at the major leagues -- epitome of The American Dream -- made for excellent competition to sit back & enjoy on a hot, August night in southern Indiana.
Ticket price were $5 & $6; with, the $6 buck tickets putting ya right on the sidelines, in the first 5 rows of seats.
Means the $5 seats weren't too bad, either.
Hot Dogs & Brats, $1.50...peanuts, .75...*16* oz "Tall Boy" Buds or Millers, $2.00 & our entire evening was done for less than $40!!
*That* (easily) makes this event the best entertainment value in Evansville by a country mile.

The place was CRAWLING with kids, too.
The Otters paid three poor sots to don HUGE costumes on this sweltering night -- an *Otter*, a "Mr. Baseball," & local newspaper mascot -- to walk around hugging these kids who wanted their "give-a-way" school lunchboxes signed.
There was even a "playground" complete with various types of equipment to occupy those kids too young to appreciate the game; &, all placed well outa harm's way.
Incidentally?
Because of the kids we summized explained the no smoking (of anything...) being allowed anywhere in the stadium.

Between every inning was *some* kind of promotional give-a-way mainly geared to the kids & sponsored by our local merchants; whereby, the fans could get involved & have a chance at taking *something* home as a prized reminder of their night spent with this baseball team.

This event was an especially "Family Friendly," affordable venue to find in this day & age.
One which promoted "Mom & Apple Pie" from the moment one stepped foot on the grounds of historic Bosse Field.

I'd guess the stadium seats no more than 3,500; &, on this ordinary night, attendence was a whopping 2,800 paying fans.

Now...I'd bet the game -- MLB -- used to be a lot like this at one time???

Are you getting a picture of *where* MLB went wrong, Mr.K??
I sure did; &, it *only* took me about 3 hours to understand, too.

...the time it took to play 9 innings of good, old fashioned baseball.

I for one will continue to maintain my, "Death Watch" for MLB; &, not *just* because of "who" it is the team owners have picked to run the show, either. :o) Rather because both management & players STILL have not addressed the cancer killing 'em both; their runaway, selfish greed & careless disregard for the fan.

Don't blame the players for that "disregard." You don't really think the owners are going to just slash ticket prices if they push player salaries down significantly, do you? Reality check: They'll charge the fans whatever they think the market will bear and it has nothing - nada, zero, zilch, bupkis - to do with how much they're paying their players. (The preponderance of player salary monies come from broadcasting revenues and have done so for a very long time. As a matter of fact, the specific issue which provoked the forming of the Players Association in the first place - the pension plan, back in the 1960s - became an issue because of the fattening national broadcast revenues.) And while you do have baseball players who can be jerks on a level with those who seem to crawl all over the NFL and the NBA (not to mention the goons in the NHL), the fact is also that the owners - especially those tying their dinghies to Bud Selig's ship - have spent at least a pair of generations promoting their sport as if they hate the sport's guts.

For the life of me I cannot and probably will never understand who gave them the bright idea that the way you promote your sport was to market it as something equal to trying to sell a skunk as a room freshener. I mean, come on - the NBA pays salaries that are at least as bloated as those paid to baseball players and often as not more so, comparatively speaking, and yet the NBA, as a league and on a team-by-team basis, tended more to promote itself and its players especially on a basis of, "Look how great we're doing that we can afford to pay these guys like that and why not, since you're not coming to the arena to see us write the paychecks or make the deals, you're not going there to see Mark Cuban make the buzzer-beating alley oop!" And however non-malleable any fan might be, sooner or later if you keep hammering away with an attitude of, essentially, "Come on out and see these greedheads who we want to believe are bankrupting the hell out of us and have a ball!," fans are going to begin believing it whatever the actualities happen to be.

Beautifully said; I'd tend to agree 100%. Too bad all the principles of this sport -- at the professional level -- apparently have consistently failed to recognize their place & responsibility in maintaining the *timelessness*, eh? A damned sin; if, not a crime what they're doing & have done. I pray this sentiment is repeatedly woven into the chapters of the book you're writing, too.

Reality check: Baseball's "good old days" weren't that great.

- Not when for how many years baseball's owners treated their primary product - baseball players, the reason the fans go to the ballpark in the first place - like chattel to be disposed of at their whim.

- Not when, for example, Jimmie Foxx could be strongarmed into a salary cut despite winning the American League's Triple Crown because he hit a couple of homers less than he did the year before. (No wonder Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics had two periods of greatness surrounded by several longer periods of mediocrity; well, that and his stubborn refusal to think about building a farm system, the same stubborn refusal that kept the original Washington ["First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League"] Senators as near-bottom feeders for most of their pre-Minnesota life outside a couple of pennants, one World Series title, and a few years of first-division competitiveness...a very few.)
- Not when Babe Ruth, the game's greatest gate attraction, could be strongarmed out of his offseason and very lucrative barnstorming by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis (who suspended Ruth for 42 games to begin a season after the Babe all but said of Landis's order, "Who does he think he is to tell me what to do off season?" and the Babe was right as rain).

- Not when the American League's owners could collude to choke off Bill Veeck's share of the visiting gate on the road, which finished what Anheuser-Busch's buying the St. Louis Cardinals began and forced Veeck to sell the St. Louis Browns before they would be allowed to move to Baltimore. (Veeck had actually sought to move the team - which had been destroyed by a prior ownership who practically used the team as debt servicing - in 1952; he knew without being asked that once Anheuser-Busch bought the Cardinals, and could plow all that Budweiser money into the struggling Redbirds, the Browns didn't have a hope to survive, not even after Veeck sold the Cardinals Sportsman's Park.)

- Not when Charlie Comiskey cheated a pitcher out of a contract bonus for a 30-win season (pitcher Eddie Cicotte had won 29 games by the beginning of the September 1919 stretch drive but was benched almost inexplicably by manager Kid Gleason) and may have helped provoke the gambling scandal that wrecked his club and damn near wrecked baseball.

- Not when Landis himself - who occasionally did think with foresight - suggested that a player who was sold for straight cash should receive a percentage of the sale price. (Landis commented regarding future Hall of Fame outfielder Earl Averill, who refused to report to the Cleveland Indians unless he got a cut of the sale price they paid the minor league powerhouse San Francisco Seals for the rookie; Landis, for all his power, had no authority to rule on such deals, but the imagination runs riot at the kind of future fiscal mischief that might have been avoided had his thinking about that matter prevailed and the owners actually adopted it.)

- Not when then-Yankee general manager Ralph Houk could violate baseball's own rule and fine pitcher Jim Bouton $100 a day for every day he continued a contract holdout following a 20-win season in his second major league year (the irrepressible Bouton told reporters he was going to add $100 a day to his contract demand for every day he was fined; Bouton knew Houk's tactic was illegal but, under the old and discredited reserve system, had no redress to fight it on its illegality - the Yankee pitcher prevailed, basically, by way of Houk taking a lot of bad press over the hassle). Not when then-Kansas City Athletics general manager Eddie Lopat could promise a player a decent raise when seeing the player at the winter baseball meetings, and then when sitting in Lopat's office to sign the deal, when the player reminded Lopat of the promised raise, Lopat's only two words were: "Prove it."

- Not when the Brooklyn Dodgers, from 1947 through 1956 the best and maybe the most popular team in the National League, couldn't fill tiny Ebbets Field to capacity except down the stretch of a pennant race or for a World Series - because Ebbets Field, which had been allowed to go to seed while the heirs of Charley Ebbets squabbled over his estate more than they squared away running the Bums, had been a) allowed to go to pot (not even Larry MacPhail's early 1940s facelifting of the park could save it), and b) victimised by its own neighbourhood's growth (the area of the park was comparatively sparse when it was built in 1912, but by 1939 it was impossible to park a car there unless you got to the park early enough to get one of the 700 actual park-related parking spaces).

- Not when maybe the most famous baseball game of the postwar era was played in a park with 56,000 plus seating capacity and was filled not even half the way: Game Three of the 1951 National League pennant playoff, which ended when The Giants won the pennant! The Giants won the pennant! on Bobby Thomson's walkoff three-run homer.

- Not when Yankee owners Dan Topping and Del Webb could practically handpick a business associate as the new owner of the former Philadelphia Athletics, who moved the team to Kansas City, thus allowing the Yankees to use the Athletics as a virtual farm club for most of a decade. (The Cleveland Indians, famously, said of a deal in which they traded a young but raw outfielder with a little long ball power named Maris to the A's, "We should have known he'd end up a Yankee if we traded him to you.")

- Not when (and don't get me wrong, I'm as enthralled with the mystique of the Brooklyn Dodgers as anyone who was born a month after This Year was Next Year at last - in 1955) New York teams spent more time in the World Series than any other franchise through 1964. (Between 1947 and 1957, only three franchises who weren't in New York played in the World Series - the Cleveland Indians, the Boston/Milwaukee Braves, and the Philadelphia Phillies. You can look it up.)

The players' fault? Try again. They had no say in where they played. (Here's something I wasn't aware of until very recently: a) Of the 127 Hall of Famers who played in the pre-free agency era, 80 percent of them played for more than one club and enough played for as many as five. b) Player turnover in the pre-free agency era was an average 4.2 players a year per team; player turnover since the Messersmith-McNally decision has been, on average...4.3 players a team. Boy that's a huge difference...not. But for some bizarro reason people think there's something evil about baseball players having a say in where they work like any other American worker does.)

And, as Allen Barra said elsewhere, if you really think the owners are going to cut ticket and concession prices at the ballparks just because they might be paying less salaries over the next few years, George Steinbrenner has some land he'd like to sell you to build a ballpark. In New Jersey. (And if you think going to a baseball game might be expensive, you sure haven't tried spending a Sunday at the stadium with the NFL or any night in the arena with the NBA lately.)

I have nothing but good things to say about minor league baseball; I enjoy watching those games as often as I enjoy watching The Show. But don't kid yourself. If you want to know why MLB got family unfriendly to any level, look to your clubs' owners, ladies and gentlemen. Or, at least, look to those who haven't got even half the vision of an organisation such as, say, the Los Angeles Dodgers - who have been running the past few seasons a habit of different area children escorting the Dodger starters to their field positions to start games, with the players autographing a baseball for each of these children, a practise the Dodger players to a man have enjoyed, even (when he was a Dodger) crotchety Gary Sheffield. If a baseball team's management puts similar effort into making a family-friendly atmosphere, wouldn't the family friendly atmosphere might return to the other major league ballparks? Remember - it is not the players who set the ticket and concession prices.

And it sure as hell isn't the kids who make players' lives outside the ballpark impossible to live at times. For years I thought the stories about Mickey Mantle's rudeness with fans away from the park were astonishing - until I read a story one-time Yankee first baseman Joe Pepitone told (in his jaw-dropping autobiography, Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud) of an incident in a restaurant, where Pepitone and Mantle (who shared an apartment in New York in 1966) were having what they thought was a quiet dinner. According to Pepitone, a small boy came up to their table and practically yanked Mantle's arm as he was lifting a forkful of food to his mouth, asking The Mick for his autography. Pepitone said (and he was in the best position to know) that Mantle was badly startled but still held his cool, saying to the boy, "If you'll wait until we finish eating, son, I'll be glad to sign for you."

Reasonable response to a kid who didn't know better, right? Guess again. Within moments, said Pepitone, the kid's father was in Mantle's face bawling him out for "rejecting" the boy's autograph request. And I'd be willing to bet you that was far from the only time Mantle or a lot of ballplayers close enough to his visibility level got that kind of treatment away from the ballpark.

And I'm going to tell you from personal experience that I have seen major league baseball players acting with nothing but courtesy and friendliness with fans away from the ballpark as long as the fans are not rude, pushy, or imperious with them. Doesn't matter whether it's a big name or a scrubeenie. Baseball players in a few senses are like entertainers. They give us pleasure to watch playing baseball, and we pay good money to watch them do it, but it doesn't mean we own them away from the ballpark, whether they're active players or retired.

Maybe we spend so much time obsessing on the pro athletes who are jerks that we don't stop to think about the preponderance of them who, for all their money and all their entrenchment, are just people when they're not in uniform on the field or on the court. (Maybe, too, instead of spending so much time obsessing on the pro athletes who are jerks, we might start wondering just why the hell team owners still want to employ them anyway when, in Whitey Herzog's phrase, "their PR is going to kick you in the ass?" Consider this: Jerry Reinsdorf, White Sox owner, was the main instigator of the 1994 baseball strike. (Herzog: "He put the game on a respirator.") Preaching "financial responsibility" and all that jazz. Preaching about overspending on player salaries and all that jazz. Guess what he did when the strike was over in 1995 - he opened his vault and told Albert Belle not to leave until he helped himself to $55 million for the next five years, which came down to annual salaries of three million dollars higher than the top annual salary in the game at the time. For Albert Belle. Reinsdorf, Mr. Financial Responsibility, who loves lecturing his players on how to behave on and off the field, and he overspent at the first opportunity for one of the most disreputable people in baseball in the 1990s. What a surprise that Belle continued to be a jerk until his hip forced his premature retirement and only then did he seem to get a clue about how to act like a human.)

And, like all of us "just people," perhaps they, too, have a difficult if not impossible time suffering rude fools gladly. I only know that if someone is rude to me, I have nothing further to say to such a person no matter what the situation or circumstance, and I would be likewise whether as I am now - living in a scrubeenie job and hoping against hope to get one more crack at professional journalism - or whether I had just won (like that's ever going to happen to me) the Pulitzer Prize.

But you're never supposed to think of it in those terms, of course. You're only supposed to think that those who entertain us become our personal property in a sense. And never mind the superstars who close the deals and perform the Big Moments. Think for a moment about those whose signature moments are moments of grand disaster. Do you think they get nothing but gallons of the milk of human kindness?

From your ancient history: Fred Merkle, he of the infamous baserunning mistake as the winning run was crossing the plate for the New York Giants during a white-hot pennant race in 1908. Merkle was never allowed to live it down; in fact, managing in the minors after his playing career ended (he was actually a decent first baseman - in fact, in 1918, Merkle was on the roster of the team whom the Giants played in that infamous 1908 game: the Cubs, who were the Boston Red Sox's last World Series conquest in '18), Merkle was so rattled by players continuously addressing him as "Bonehead" that he finally quit baseball on the field and became a scout. (You can look it up: Merkle is the scout who discovered a pretty good pitcher named Sudden Sam McDowell.)

Ernie Lombardi was famous as a huge, built-like-a-bull catcher with a live bat and an immovable force behind the dish. Yet he was pilloried for a play in the 1939 World Series, when on a brutally hot day in which he complained of dizziness at game time, Lombardi was plowed at the plate by oncoming Yankee runner Charlie Keller, and was knocked unconscious long enough for another Yankee run to cross the plate. They call it "Lombardi's Swoon" and "Ernie's Snooze Play" to this day, and Lombardi was assailed almost mercilessly for lying down on the play. People forgot that Keller didn't earn the nickname King Kong because he was built like Freddie Patek. Lombardi was said to have been so haunted by the play and the criticism - even though the Reds the next year won the World Series with Lombardi behind the dish - that he actually attempted suicide a couple of years later (he may also have been affected by the suicide of teammate Willard Hershberger), actually telling his shocked wife, "Don't try to save me, please!"

Johnny Pesky was only half kidding when he said, remembering Enos Slaughter's half-crazed run from first to score the World Series-winning run on a single, "To this day people think I'm a piece of sh@t because of that play." (Pesky, playing shortstop, was the cutoff man on the play, and - caught somewhat off guard by Slaughter rounding third and heading home, something of an unexpected play even given Slaughter's run-and-gun style on the bases - hesitated just a moment before throwing to the plate; teammates swear they were hollering at him to throw home but the crowd noise in Fenway Park made it impossible for him to hear their calls.)

Bill Buckner, who loved living in New England, finally moved his family all the way to Idaho (where he still lives) because he finally reached the limit to how much personal abuse he could stand over his 1986 World Series error. (How would you like to play catch with your youngest son, who wasn't even born when you made That Error, and then when you miss a throw back from the little kid, he says, "That's OK, Dad, I know you have trouble with grounders." Buckner learned the hard way that the kid heard about the play from some adult whose brains were planted in his arse. Maybe if he hadn't had it thrown in his face every place he went in the years since he might have developed a sense of humour about it sooner. And he has, at last: he recently went to Shea Stadium - he's a longtime friend of Mets manager Bobby Valentine, who invited him to a game - and when he spotted Mookie Wilson, the batter on That Error, now the Mets' first base coach, his greeting to Wilson was, "Mookie, what do you say you hit me a few grounders?")

Remember Mitch (The Wild Thing) Williams? The Cardiac Kid himself, the guy who almost thrived on coming into a game, letting it pin him to the wall so he could fight his way out of it for the save after all. The Series-winning walkoff homer he threw to Joe Carter was the second game-winning homer he gave up in the 1993 World Series. Williams returned to his house after the first one to discover nails spread all around his wife's vehicle in the driveway and death threats awaiting him. I hadn't known that just because a guy's a little on the cocky side it gives you the right to put him or his family in danger when he makes a pair of fatal World Series mistakes.

How about Ed Whitson, when the former Padres pitcher signed a big free-agent deal with the Yankees in the mid-1980s? Whitson became such a target of fan abuse when his Yankee term began shakily that he nearly cracked up, especially when he, too, began finding carpenter's nails under his tires, receiving death threats, and getting sucked into a classic brawl by Billy Martin. That's where the idiot brigades among Yankee fans showed they may or may not have learned their lessons in fan deportment from Philadelphia Phillies fans (whose treatment, egged on by a cannibalistic Philadelphia sports press, of Mike Schmidt was a disgrace).

And how about the guys who threaten to break records that no one, for whatever perverse reason, wants anyone to break? Roger Maris got death threats during his chase of Babe Ruth (not to mention a nasty round of press abuse when, returning to his own home in Kansas City during a Yankee road trip, he found a phalanx of reporters camping on his lawn, made his way through them, then as he went inside he hollered, "Please leave me alone here. This is my home," as if it were a felony offence for a man to demand his space on his own grounds!), and Maris's lack of glibness got him painted unfairly as a lout in the press, compounding his miseries. Then, when his production tailed following 1963, he was pounced on mercilessly by a public whom the Yankees conveniently forgot to inform that Maris had suffered a wrist injury that kept him from ever being the power hitter he'd become again. For that matter, the Yankees didn't bother telling Maris himself, either, just how badly he had been injured. Very smart. And there were at least a few books written about Henry Aaron's approach to Ruth's career home run record, including the grotesqueries like death threats that dogged Aaron until he sent Number 715 into the left field bullpen. (The best of those books: George Plimpton's One For The Record).

But then there was Donnie Moore's pennant losing home run pitch to Dave Henderson in 1986, bringing him so much abuse in subsequent years that he was finally driven enough out of his mind to fire at his wife before shooting himself to death. People who knew him have said Moore compared himself to Ralph Branca, who threw the ball Bobby Thomson belted for The Shot Heard Round The World - but I bet you nobody told Donnie Moore what Branca's priest told him: "God chose you because He knew you would have the strength to carry this burden." Branca's career faded soon enough after that pitch, but Branca's life wasn't ruined. Then, again, maybe Brooklyn Dodger fans were just a little more inclined to empathy to failure than other fans...

Those are some of the reasons why I found it absolutely heartening to see the way in which Arizona Diamondbacks reliever Byung-Hyun Kim was treated after his back-to-back disaster in last year's World Series. When the Series went back to Arizona, and the Snakes won those stupefying Games Six and Seven, amidst the celebration on the field Diamondbacks general manager Joe Garagiola, Jr. spied Kim wandering almost alone in the outfield. Garagiola pointed to the Jumbotron screen above the outfield and called out, "BK, look up there!" Kim turned and saw his own smiling face on the screen - and got hit with an earsplitting scream from the fans in the park. "It was," Garagiola said later, "49,000 people trying to give him a hug."

Kim was said to have been so touched by the response that he spent more time than he normally does in Phoenix in the offseason (he normally returns to his native Korea for most of the off-season, but last winter he spent a little more than half his off-season time in Phoenix), where he was greeted practically everywhere he went by people stopping only to ask him, "BK, are you ok?" What a surprise that Kim is putting up a stellar season this year - he's one of the top ten closers in baseball this year. Anyone who thinks it made no difference that Arizona fans didn't treat him like the biggest piece of crap in creation over his back-to-back World Series disasters, think again.

What in the end offends us about professional athletes and their riches today? Probably a lot of things, most of which can be tucked into a four-letter word called envy. Maybe a lot of us do wish to return to the days when team owners owned them lock, stock, barrell, and life under the discredited reserve system - I have actually heard people say the reserve clause should be restored. (I wonder if those people realise that, if baseball owners in the reserve clause years had actually applied the clause as it was written, to the strict letter of the clause, baseball players could have applied for free agency after a maximum of two seasons with a club. Two seasons! But never let the truth get in the way of a comfy prejudice, I suppose.)

But I think part of it is that it offends the living hell out of us mortals, when we expect, demand, and insist upon their being heroes but they turn out to be just human beings. We can't be a Mantle, a Koufax, a Mays, a Clemens, a Johnson, a Bonds, an Ichiro, and we resent the hell out of it when a) most players can't be, either, and b) those who can be turn out to be just folks, after all, with just lives to live away from the ballpark. But we don't have people getting into our grilles everywhere we go; we don't have to worry about taking our families out for dinner and wondering when some fan is going to yank a forkful of food out of our arm asking us for an autograph while we're trying to eat; we don't have to fear getting booed or having garbage thrown at us at our jobs when we make a mistake on the job. Of course, however our bosses are getting rich, they're not getting rich selling big-money tickets and charging a fortune for concessions to fans who came to the factory or the office to watch us work, either.

Maybe the fact that those we crack up to be heroes turn out to be just human beings, but maybe it makes us appreciate those who really are the heroes we make them out to be more. And if it doesn't make us empathise with the mere humans among them more, maybe it should.

Enough of my rant.

I believe this is built in. The Devil Rays benefit from the Yankee's excellence in more ticket sales when the Yankees come into town. They share in the Yankees prosperity, without needing to take any of the Yankees earnings directly.

You've kind of made my point there, and of course I see the "luxury tax" and revenue sharing deals as being as much if not more a punitive measure against the Yankees in particular. I noticed a columnist the other day making the point that wasn't it just a neat coincidence that the luxury tax and revenue sharing drums started getting beaten in earnest when the Yankees just so happened to return to sustained field success, and the point is well enough taken. In the middle of the most competitively balanced era baseball has ever known, here came the Yankees being managed and promoted and marketed the right way, showing the success that comes from brains ahead of even big bucks, and what one broadcaster called "Bud's Duds" - the "small market" (really small revenue) owners looking not to improve their own products but to make the Yankees and other successful franchises buy them success - couldn't wait to try to find a way into Steinbrenner's wallet.

But the Devil Rays don't benefit from the Yankees coming to town as greatly as you might think considering the wild imbalance of the American League's gate receipt split between home and visiting team. (Not to mention other factors, like what the Devil Rays derive as their share of the stadium revenues from concessions, tickets, parking, and the like, since the Rays don't own their stadium outright. I don't know the Rays deal, though I should think it isn't too difficult to find out its details.)

The Yankees are not going to play their entire road schedule against the Devil Rays, so in a sense the Rays are not benefitting as greatly from the Yankees' popularity as might be suspected, even if they sell out every Tampa date the Yankees do play. This is a key reason why I spoke earlier of remaking the gate receipt split between home and visiting team - they should be more equitable than the approximate 75-25 split in the American League and 80-20 in the National League. Certainly the home team should get the larger share, but the gate receipt share - which qualifies as (if you'll pardon the expression) a corporate-wide matter, rather than a matter strictly for individual franchises (the gate receipt splits policies have always been league rather than franchise policies; a franchise cannot reset its gate split on its own by leagues' rules) - should be a more equitable share, especially given that without visiting teams the home team has no baseball to sell. There were those who made a point of saying that if the American League's other teams simply refused to play the Yankees the Yankees would have to "think twice," but I don't understand why those teams who really might think that way haven't thought of trying to press that point in order to change the gate splits, which, I repeat, are legitimate revenue sharings. Unless, of course, anyone really thinks a baseball team can sell out a ballpark just by holding 162 intrasquad games a season.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think one reason the American League split became what it is came about from American League owners of the 1950s trying to squeeze Bill Veeck out of baseball, especially when Veeck's bid to revive the badly-ravaged St. Louis Browns operation was thrown to the ropes when Anheuser-Busch bought the battered St. Louis Cardinals after then-owner Fred Saigh ran into tax trouble and was forced to sell the team.

Legitimate also would be as I said regarding a rightly divided national broadcasting revenue, generated by and for baseball as a whole, but not the local broadcasting monies, which are generated by and for individual franchises. (It is certainly not the New York Mets' fault that the Montreal Expos negotiated themselves one of the worst broadcasting deals in professional sports, and why on earth should the Expos be entitled to any piece of the Mets' local/regional broadcasting pie?) It's one thing to rightly divide the ESPN or Fox or other network revenues that are paid to baseball the whole entity, and something else again for one club to claim a share of, say, the Atlanta Braves' WTBS revenues. (A sidebar: The Braves long had a practise of reporting only their Atlanta-area WTBS revenues when reporting their annual revenues to MLB, and not including the revenues they derive from their nationwide WTBS revenues, enabling the Braves to look smaller revenue than they actually had been. The Chicago Cubs were once believed to have done the same thing, despite corporate ownership which also owns their superstation outlet and was actually generating more revenues than the Braves were generating.) We will know soon enough what the next national broadcasting pie will be, since Fox's deal with MLB whole is due to expire in 2004. The Yankees shouldn't be entitled to the Devil Rays' local/regional broadcasting shares (assuming the Devil Rays ever overhaul their front office and bring in people with a little marketing and promotional vision), any more than the D-Rays should be entitled to a piece of the Yankee local broadcast shares.

And while I can see your point about it having qualities similar to departments of a single company, the fact is that the laws of reward and punishment aren't suspended in such an arrangement. If you take from a successful department and give to a languishing one, over time you are punishing success and rewarding failure and will eventually end up with less of the former and more of the latter.

Of course those laws aren't suspended and they shouldn't be, either. The Oakland Athletics can tell you about how the laws of reward and punishment work. (My God how everybody gnashed and wailed that the humble A's couldn't possibly compete with such small budget, small market operations. Never mind that only a shortstop playing his position like Bob Cousy kept the A's from going against the Seattle Mariners for the pennant last year; never mind that the humble A's who "can't afford to compete fairly" are shooting the damn lights out and at this writing have the best record in baseball - with a payroll that could be deemed pocket money regarding some owners. There is the difference between a team operated by Billy Beane and a team operated by Cam Bonifay.)

But my point is that there is a certain companywide, company-whole revenue base stream - a stream generated by the company as a whole, not individuated streams by individuated departments or franchises (think McDonald's, for example) - that is properly and legitimately divisible among the departments or franchises for basic operations. Beyond that, there is certainly no legitimate call for Department A or Franchise A to siphon the department or franchise-specific revenue generation from Department or Franchise B. It would be right and proper for McDonald's to distribute its revenues from national, corporate-whole advertising among its franchises, but it would be improper for a given McDonald's franchise or franchise group (there are numerous McDonald's that are owned in groups of restaurants) to claim a share of another given franchise's or franchise group's revenues generated locally or regionally on their own initiative. Baseball (really, any team sport) is like that. Or, should be.

Successful departments should assist struggling ones through hard times, not subsidize them through continued poor operation.

I agree. I probably should have said it that much more directly above. There is certainly no obligation upon any corporation or company to continue propping up badly performing departments or franchises. For those who think it ought to be against the law for a baseball team to pass into history, if its stewards cannot manage and operate it reasonably, and without welfare beyond its legitimate share of the company-whole operating revenue, I couldn't put it any better than George Will did, in a radio interview the day of the All-Star Game: Well, have you flown on Pan American Airways lately? Have you driven a Studebaker or a Hudson? Well, have you watched a ball game on a DuMont television set lately or listened on a Crosley radio? Have you loaded your kitchen with Dormeyer or Knapp-Monarch appliances these days? Filled up your tank with Flying A gasoline? Traveled from New York to Poughkeepsie on the New York Central Railroad? Shopped for bargains and chintz at Woolworth's? Loaded up on your holiday groceries at the A&P?

Besides, this may come as a shock to some people, but contraction is not unheard of in baseball. The Minnesota Twins, believe it or not, owe their existence to contraction in the first place. The National League contracted a few franchises before the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, one of which was its Washington franchise. When Ban Johnson decided to mutate his old American Association into the American League, he added a few of the franchises the National League had contracted, to give the American League an even number of franchises to the National League. One of the new American League franchises: the Washington Senators. (As in, "Washington - First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.")

Worth thinking about, too, in light of the suddenly real prospect that the Montreal Expos just might be a candidate to move to Washington. (Wouldn't it be interesting, if that does happen, if the franchise could be renamed the Senators?)

...for once, I agree with Allen "Make Albert Belle a Role Model" Barra.

Allen Barra wanted to make Albert Belle a role model? That sure did surprise moi...

Allen Barra
Albert Belle's sad exit
He played well enough to get to Cooperstown, but his personality and attitude will consign him to obscurity.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Allen Barra

March 14, 2001 | One of the greatest ballplayers of the last 20 years went down for good the other day from a hip injury, and forget the bang, I don't even think I heard a whimper. Albert Belle, a better ballplayer than Bill Mazeroski, Kirby Puckett or most of the other players elected to the Hall of Fame in the previous decade, will probably never play again, which means that we are spared the spectacle of his long face and somber stare at a Cooperstown podium in 10 or 11 years. What a relief! Suppose they gave a Hall of Fame induction and nobody came?

Don't, as many sportswriters are doing, hedge for a moment on whether Belle has performed well enough to be worthy of the Hall of Fame. There is simply no argument on that count. Belle played for 12 major league seasons and hit 381 home runs -- that's a hard argument to beat right there. Actually, it's far more impressive than that. In his first two seasons Belle played in just 71 games and hit eight homers. This means that, essentially, Belle played 10 full seasons in the bigs and hit 373 home runs. That's right, he averaged 37 home runs a season, and that includes last season, with Baltimore, when that hip held him to 23. I'll bet there aren't five players in baseball history that have done that. It's a good thing that he didn't play for at least two or three more years, even at last season's slowed-down rate, or he'd have approached or exceeded 450 home runs -- and then they'd have to let him in.

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It isn't just the home runs; Belle is not Dave Kingman. Belle's career batting average is just a few points under .300; he led the league in total bases three times, slugging twice and RBIs three times. He drove in more than 100 runs for nine consecutive seasons -- including one shortened by a strike. Before he hurt his hip, he was an OK base runner and capable outfielder.

Unfortunately, the throw he'll be best remembered for was one made on a fan named Jeff Pillar -- I'm using the term "fan" here in its most generic sense -- who in 1991, when Belle was playing for Cleveland, yelled from the Municipal Stadium fans, "Hey, Joey, keg party at my place after the game, c'mon over." Belle had been battling a drinking problem, which is something Jeff Pillar, who thought the $10 ticket he bought entitled him to emotionally torture Belle, was well aware of. Joey Belle, as he was known then, threw a strike into the seats and nailed Pillar in the chest, which just goes to show what even an outfielder with a mediocre arm can do when focused. That Pillar got what was coming to him did not -- nor should it have -- deter Major League Baseball from coming down hard on Belle, who changed his name back to Albert, his real first name.

Albert tried to turn over a new leaf and never quite got there. The memory of the throw and his sullenness with reporters cost him the 1995 MVP award to Mo Vaughn, a polite, articulate, considerate man whom Belle outhit by 17 points and 11 home runs, and, oh yes, Belle's Indians won the American League pennant. There have been incidents since then, a tirade with a manager here, a collision with an infielder (whom he outweighed by 40 pounds) there. There was also a ball thrown at a reporter ... oh, sorry, that was back when he was Joey. And then there was the corked bat back in '94. And what was that all about, anyway? Here's a guy who needs cork like Hugh Hefner needs understanding.

So what can we say about Albert Belle before he slips away from us forever (for surely we'll never see him dropping by ESPN for commentary, or popping into the broadcast booth to swap yarns with Bob Costas)? He gave us a lot of thrills, but how long will even Cleveland fans remember him? How long will anyone remember him beyond the ball that he threw at the fan?

For nearly a decade Albert Belle was one of the greats, not Babe Ruth, quite, but surely up there with Jimmie Foxx, and if he had taken the effort to let us know him a bit, let us inside, or at least shown us that he was happy, for God's sake, to be young and wealthy and so great at a game we all fantasize about playing, then he'd probably get the plaque in Cooperstown that his efforts earned him. As it stands, he'll have instead one more reason to be bitter, one more grudge to hold against the game that he seemed to think was out to get him, the self-fulfilling prophecy his whole career seemed to be heading for from the start. You couldn't call what happened to Albert Belle tragic, but it certainly is a shame.

- - - - - - - - - - - - I wouldn't exactly call that a ringing endorsement of Albert Belle the role model. I said in another comment that I thought people employing him were fools not to consider what Whitey Herzog observed would be his "PR kicking you in the ass". Taken strictly as a baseball player, Albert Belle was a great player. (He was an average outfielder, all told - his fielding average lifetime is just below his league's, .976 for Belle against .983 for his league, but his range factor is .07 above his league. We're not talking Willie Mays with the leather, but neither are we talking about a guy who would kill you in the field.) And he was also the biggest pain in the ass of his time. He alone dictated the reasons why he won't be going to Cooperstown unless he wants to stare at the walls of honour and ponder just why his won't be among the plaques, unless the Baseball Writers Association of America has selective memories. Belle isn't the first and won't be the last player with an outsized talent and an undersized personality.

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