Play Ball
August 30th, 2002 - 10:45 am
No baseball strike. Not this year, anyway.
But please understand I’m still wary of both the owners and the players.
No baseball strike. Not this year, anyway.
But please understand I’m still wary of both the owners and the players.
Settling this quickly leaves me very much in doubt that any substantive structual changes were actually agreed upon.
It seems all the haggling today was over a difference of 1 or 2 million dollars in the luxury tax for each year of the agreement. 1 or 2 MILLION?? Peanuts for these guys. I think we would have been much better off in the long run if they walked. Neither side seems to realize that its the fans who own the game.
I predict a drop in attendance anyway, then 4 years from now they do it all over again.
Oh, blast, I was so looking forward to a strike.
Yeah, they really needed a strike to fix the game. Usually in a labor dispute I can see some merit to each side (the UPS strike being the previous standout exception). Here, though, what the owners wanted was so clearly in best interests of the sport and the fans that I’m disappointed that they compromised as much as they did.
I am SO disappointed.
Makes me no never mind. Except for my Rams, I’ve pretty much converted to minor-league sports anyway. Go River Otters!
The business of baseball has incurred gigantic opportunity costs over the past 30 years; it really has been one of the most ineptly run enterprises in all of America. Baseball used to hold, by a large margin, the greatest market share of all spectator sports, and they have managed to fritter it away to the point where it can be argued that it now trails stock car racing, which 30 years ago had mainly regional appeal. Dont’ even talk about the NFL. It really does go to show what appeal the game still holds for many that the inept bunglers that comprise the owners, and the short sighted players, haven’t fouled things up even more.
Great, 38 more games of agony for this Mets fan. Maybe they’ll at least fire Valentine for me.
In the rush to get an agreement, they ended up with an agreement that resolved nothing. They got revenue sharing, but with no requirement that the small market teams spend the money on payroll. They got a luxury tax, but at a level so high only the Mets, Yankees, Rangers and Red Sox would pay it, and still at a level most teams won’t reach, and they caved on contraction for the next 4 years so we’ll be stuck with the walking corpses that are the Expos, Marlins, Twins (don’t be fooled by this year’s mirage, when they Milton, Mays and Radke go free agent, this team’s back in the dumper) and Devil Rays for at least that long. The problems will get worse instead of better for 4 years and then we’ll do this all over again.
But this is all rearranging deck chairs on the titanic, this game is too slow for the MTV generation, and would be dying a slow death even without the players and owners tendencies to use their feet for target practice.
Blah. I was all into a strike, personally.
Interesting what Will Alllen said. Maybe the inept management, etc. is partially due to the special government exemptions that baseball receives as a business? Things like anti-trust law exemption, etc. Just a thought.
I wish they would have went on strike!