And here's a moment, frozen in time....
Posted on 08/24/2002 12:00:21 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
A week ago, the Baseball Union set a strike date for the end of the month. The baseball players have shown that they're not playing around when they vow to strike, because there have been eight strikes in baseball in the past 30 years.
This has to do with, of course, money. A new economic system is being proposed for Major League Baseball, but the players are worried about their salaries being cut if this system is put in place. Presto, the automatic solution is to quit working.
The planning of a strike on the 30th -- and another World Series canceled -- is upsetting to me and many other baseball fans.
You have to understand: I grew up on the baseball field, with my brother playing baseball and my sister playing softball. I started playing – T-Ball at least – when I was four, but even before then, I was playing in the dirt somewhere at a game.
In recent years, I have played competitive baseball. My siblings and I have all been on competitive teams and traveled across the country to play in tournaments where a 100+ teams participated.
Not only have I been around baseball my entire life, I've supported Major League Baseball by watching the games on television, traveling far distances to MLB games, as well as buying a lot of baseball paraphernalia. My favorite team has always been the losing Chicago Cubs and I've never once wanted the Yankees to win a game.
My dad is a baseball fanatic, as is my sister, my brother and myself – even my mother likes to watch baseball and follows the games.
The game of baseball is one of the smartest, difficult and most complex games ever created. Abner Doubleday invented the game in the 1830s and the complexities still boggle the mind of players and fans.
A small ball is thrown up to and sometimes over 100 miles per hour to a batting plate 60 feet away, where a batter with a thin bat has to move his hips, bring the bat around, find the ball, and generate enough bat speed to meet the bat with the ball – this is all done in less than a second.
However, that description is just a tiny fraction of what comes into play with the game of baseball. Yet, even just that complex, nine players must work together to win at this game. No wonder baseball is America's pastime.
Sadly, the game has come from a time where players were loyal to their managers, teams and teammates, to a day and age of greed – and it has nearly come to a point where money is the only tangible factor that comes into play when players makes decisions on which team to play.
After all the players have been blessed with over the years, more is still demanded. They're worried about a cut in pay raises, but I was under the impression that a million dollars in one year was more than enough money for anyone.
The blessings that they have received are all from the baseball fans. Therefore, they owe it to the fans to do whatever it takes to prevent a strike. But money is everything to these guys.
The baseball strike is set for the end of the month. I hope the strike is called off – not only for the benefit of the fans, but also for the benefit of the players, because many fans won't come back.
I have supported baseball for as long as I have been able to, but what do I get back in return? A slap in the face by greedy people who play a children's game as a source of income.
If indeed, the baseball players do strike, I vow that as of the strike date, I will never watch, read, or have anything to do with Major League Baseball until this generation of players are gone. Will you join me?
Greed has taken over the game and it's a sad sight.
The only thing that is gonna screw up the game is a strike.
You're certainly not alone. I'd imagine most sports fans fell that way, but try their best not to think about it.
I used to be so into the tactics (my love was football, but the same thing is happening there so it's a valid point for discussion), but the other aspects of what was happening with football began to taint how I felt about it
As far as football is concerned, it's the wild celebration after every single play that really irks me. A linebacker stops an opposing running back after gaining 7 yards on first down, and the celebration of the tackle would lead one to think (if one didn't know any better) that the team playing defense just won the Super Bowl. It wasn't too many years ago where players went about their business on the field like professionals, and after making a decent play they acted like they had done it before and will do it again. Most of today's pro athletes are children by comparison. There aren't too many Cal Ripken Jr.'s left.
The free agency changes of the sixties began the change in baseball for the worse. And I say this without regard to legal arguments on either side, but rather a personal comment on how it made me not care about the game I loved as a kid.
As is pointed out in Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions, different decision-making systems work under different organizational frameworks. Socialism (the redistribution of public and private incomes by the government) is an inefficient decision-making system for a society. It warps the profit motive and destroys the information-carrying potential of prices. But also, because it is a governmental system that is mandatory, it cannot be escaped.
Profit sharing in businesses are, on the other hand, often very rational and competative agreements. They are very frequently necessary to maximize the competativeness of a business or corporation.
For example, you may have six or seven Radio Shacks in your town owned by the same person. Are they socialist because the yearly profits are pooled into one acount? Is it socialism when, as a new store is built, the new store is subsidized by the profits of the old stores until the new store can develop a client base? Or, is it socialism to pay the employees based on seniority and not the amount of work each actually does (so a more productive person who has been there four years gets paid the same as someone less productive who has also been there four years)?
All of the above are cases where collective agreements make good business sense, due to the need to take temporary losses for long-term profitability (or, in the case of the workers, the difficulty of defining "productive" in a manner that will be cost-effective for the business to regulate and reward).
ONLY A GOVERNEMENT CAN BE SOCIALIST! I'll say that again, so the ecomonic illiterates out there might have it sink in: Only a government can be socialist!
What you decry as "socialism" as simply different internal organizations for a business. Perhaps that is the problem: people mistake the teams for the businesses, whereas it is really the league that is the business (that's why it needs the anti-trust exemption from Congress). Besides, how can anyone decrying "socialism" in business then support a "collective" bargaining agreement in the first place? Because neither are "socialism," so long as the government stays out of it...
"Why the difference between our figures and the MLB's? For starters, MLB includes "non-cash" charges in its cash flow numbers. Specifically, the league subtracts ballpark depreciation expenses. For teams that finance their own stadiums, like the San Francisco Giants and Detroit Tigers, ballpark depreciation runs over $5 million per team annually.
I subtract building depreciation in my business too. Are they somehow implying that baseball statiums appreciate in value instead of depreciate. Seems like the Forbes numbers are not up to standard business practices, IMHO. And even if the Forbes numbers are correct, a $75 million profit for Baseball is an absolute joke. These teams are valued at roughly $10 billion, so a $75 million profit represents a whopping 0.75% return! Shoot, the top couple of players earn more than the 30 owners combined and they don't have one penny invested. So yes, the players are WAY overpaid in a real business sense. They simply are not worth what they are paid. Not even close.
Because for several owners, winning is what is most important. They take gambles on playes and some don't pan out or they get injuried. Players need to get reasonable though and understand what has happened. Nobody is gonna win this round. The strike is lose-lose proposition, and the players need to understand the fiscal reality of the situation.
I just don't think baseball can survive as a major sport if it does not address the competitive balance issue. Fans today, for a number of reasons, are more fickle, and will not support perennial losers.
That would be sad, because baseball is an important part of our culture.
I think a good revenue sharing program, and moving a couple of franchises (Montreal -> Portland, Tampa Bay -> Washington) could help to address some of the problems.
Another thing baseball needs to do is to make sure kids can see baseball on TV or hear it on radio. MLB needs to stop nickel-and-diming out-of-market fans, and put more games on TV.
As it should be.
However, if they feel they're not being paid what they "should" be paid, they're free to go elsewhere.
It wasn't the players who wanted this, AR... it was the owners that wanted it...
They wanted the players to know that "extra" money made by the club would be going back to the players. Hence a "minimum salary".
In fact, the players want neither a cap NOR a minimum.
That being said, I think the players are myopic in their view... may even stupid.
I think the players are worth whatever they can get.
The owners that say they need help are the owners of small market teams that don't have the money to pay the salaries they offer (stupid). So they're caught between a sure-fire losing team due to no talent leading to reduced revenues on one side and on the other side is paying more than can be afforded in an attempt to stay competitive.
So I think the issue is more about saving the small market guys- how can baseball stay alive in so many cities?
THe players, in the union's ultimate wisdom, don't see beyond the arse of Fehr. The union should recognize that something's gotta give - and a strike will bring us to breaking point faster.
I think the solution is neither revenue sharing nor salary caps. I think the free market will resolve all this in time. There'll be no more Expos in Montreal, but baseball will survive - and players that still have jobs will make what the market will bear...as it should be. But the union won't let the total # of players decline - they'd strike (again) first. THoughts?
And here's a moment, frozen in time....
Competitive balance is achieved the old-fashioned way, if at all, by earning it either by spending, by thinking, or preferably by both.
Why move franchises instead of abolishing many of them? Move the Expos to Portland and a new stadium is built until the locxals decide they aren't like;y to have their "fair share" of championships. Washington, DC, has failed twice already. How many times to we have to massage national politicians ids by giving them an immediately handy baseball team that cannot support itself?
If you drastically reduce the number of franchises and concentrate the talent, pitching will return along with competitive balance to some extent without any of the artificial financial (socialistic???) Mickey Mouse being schemed up essentially as a way of distributing championships and making the game more interesting to gamblers like football and basketball.
If baseball players do not hold strong, the game will be ruined by today's virtual criminal class of incompetent owners. I would far prefer a strike, as lengthy as necessary, which would bankrupt the weak, undercapitalized, horridly mismanaged teams that were created to satisfy overblown egos in minimarkets incapable of supporting MLB than see the game turned into one more venue for those who think that a "fair share" of championships" is some sort of inherent right.
OHHHHHHH GOLLLLLY! Whiner/loser/conspirator owner: I can't afford to compete with the Yankees or the Red Sox or the Braves or the Oakland A's (????) or the Minnesota twins (?????) or the Seattle Mariners (?????) because they have all those fans in that big market and all that revenue. {The fact that I systematically sell every star player when he becomes eligible for a real paycheck because I hate to share the revenue with those who produce it has nothing to do with the poor attendance figures. After all, I am entitled to skim more than any of the players since I am an owner!!!! Why shouldn't I get as much as Steinbrenner? After all, I am accepted at better country clubs than he is and that proves I am a better man! What does performance have to do with income? Performance is for the peons.
Call me economically ignorant if you like but the collective decision-making and rule-making system of baseball, adopted after the Black Sox scandal, courtesy of the maroons on SCOTUS who exempted the Lords of Baseball from Antitrust Laws unlike your business or anyone else's because, after all, it is a "gentleman's game and not a business, smacks of something quite undesireable, if not socialism, perhaps oligarchy, perhaps trust. Their decision-making system is conspiracy and they aren't even very good at that.
Again, no one owns shares in MLB. Burger King, McDonald's and Wendy's all sell hamburgers. If they pool their resources, their advertising money, buy up all available beef, raise the price of tickets (Whoops,) I mean hamburger to astronomical levels for consumers while agreeing to pay not one nickel above minimum wage to any employee, we call this a pattern of anti-trust violations. If it happens in baseball, we call it a sport. Who is ignorant here?
Your point as to socialism is valid but hardly justifies the owners behavior.
Good point. Although the Rangers have proven that you can spend an absurd amount of money and still end up with a bunch of cadavers on the field, the Florida Marlins HAD to blow their team apart after winning the World Series because they lost too much money winning it.
I hope you don't hope to be stupid! Maybe you hope to make $2.5 million, but surely you don't hope to be stupid?!
BTW it's the myopic view of players that is stupid, not the players themselves....
Alex Rodriguez 252million?
Meanwhile, NASCAR, no drugs, intense competition, no races on Mothers Day nor on Easter Sunday.
NASCAR is the new AMERICAN sport.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.