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I’ve tried for a day now not to reply, but I just can’t help myself. I fail to understand the essential difference between the schmoe who’s a ballplayer and the schmoe who’s an owner – are you suggesting that owners are somehow a higher order of being, and therefore inherently worthy of their millions or billions? The evidence against this hypothesis is substantial. And in any case, the owners came by their fortunes in the same diverse ways as any other group of the wealthy – some inherited it, some earned it by their own efforts, some earned it by wise investments, etc. Anyway, you might just as easily say that without shipbuilding, car dealerships, pizza delivery, TV stations, trash hauling, etc., Steinbrenner, Selig, Illitch, Turner, Huizenga, et al. would just be schmoes like the rest of us.
As for the players, well, whatever they make, they’re making it through their own efforts. I’d have thought that would make the rest of the schmoes out there respect them more, rather than less. The problem, I think, is that nearly every American male played a fair amount of baseball as a boy, and while we know intellectually that the game at the major league level is light years ahead of sandlot or Little League ball, it looks and feels the same. We all want to think that with a little effort we could be out there playing the game professionally as well. One look at an NFL or NBA player would disabuse most of us of any such ideas in those sports, but baseball players look a lot more like us – you’ve got fat guys like David Wells and Mo Vaughn, short guys like Rafael Furcal and the Giles brothers, mild-looking guys like Greg Maddux, etc.
In reality, however, making the major leagues in baseball is much less of a crap shoot, a lottery, than in other sports. Think about it: the ranks of the NFL are peppered with guys who have ample native athleticism and a whole lot of talent, who signed baseball contracts out of high school, washed out in the minors, and went back to college to play football, and then into the NFL. There are instances of this in basketball as well. In almost every case where an athlete has managed to play baseball and another professional sport, they’ve been a bigger asset to their team in the other sport than in baseball. One could argue that that’s even true of Bo Jackson, who would be the closest thing to an exception I can think of. Brian Jordan might be another, though he was only a Pro Bowl defensive back once in his brief NFL career, and has been an MLB All-Star only once – had he stayed with football, he likely would have become one of the premier DBs in the game. Vince Coleman is the only guy I know of to be cut from an NFL team and then succeed in baseball. Danny Ainge, Henry Bibby, Dave DeBusschere, and Michael Jordan were all more successful at basketball than baseball; I don’t know enough about Dick Groat’s NBA career to make that call.
Every year, the teams in major league baseball draft hundreds of players – many times more than the NFL, NBA, and NHL combined. Most of the players drafted are outstanding athletes; all are among the most talented players in the country. Only about ten percent actually make it to the majors, however briefly. The fraction who do are the ones who work their butts off in the minors and learn how to play the game. NFL and NBA players are expected to be able to play as soon as they’re signed, and many are able to remain employed simply on the basis of athleticism and native talent while they learn to play the game on a professional level. That happens very rarely in baseball. Usually, even the most talented players need a couple of years of playing the game every single day for months at a time to have developed the skills and instincts required to even make a major league roster as a fifth outfielder or utility infielder. Hundreds of extremely talented players are released every year without ever having set foot in a major league clubhouse – they didn’t work hard enough. For the ones that do make it, the process then begins of having to work just as hard or harder to remain in the majors (unless you’re an aging no-hit, used-to-be-able-to-field middle infielder, in which case you can always catch on with the Braves if Bobby Cox is still managing).
Playing baseball well enough to compete for a job at the major league level is so incredibly difficult that comparing it to winning a lottery seems ludicrous to me. Some of the owners have earned their positions, some have been handed them; all of the players have earned theirs.
As for their “general tone”, the players were in an untenable public relations position. They knew that the fans don’t give a hoot about the lies and distortions that Selig’s minions were mouthing, or about the real issues involved in the negotiations – they’re complicated and boring, even to many of the players. They knew that the owners would be able to depict them as greedy, ungrateful brats, and that the public would buy it. I followed the negotiations fairly carefully, and I didn’t hear much from the players’ side at all, except “we hope we’re able to reach an agreement without a work stoppage”. On the other hand, signalling that they were unwilling to strike would have resulted in the owners either locking them out over the offseason, or unilaterally imposing new terms. The only leverage the players had was to strike during the season.
Right. My point was to counter your assertion that the owners had no control over the business before this CBA, not to argue that they shouldn’t have it.
Well, the players agreed to a luxury tax (which was in place under the expired agreement, albeit in different form), but held the line against a salary cap. They agreed to greater revenue sharing, which needed to happen, even if the MLBPA would rather not have done it. They agreed to steroid testing as an investigative tool to determine to what extent steroid use is a problem in the game, but there are no penalties for testing positive during the first couple of years, or for a first offense after that – the players had agreed in principle to this quite a while ago. The owners gave up on contraction at least until 2006; the players agreed not to file a grievance to force collective bargaining on the issue at that time if the owners do elect to contract two teams. The owners gave in on arbitration, suspension with pay, club contribution to benefits, minimum salaries (including salaries for minor league players with split contracts), formula for determining total club debt, the Commissioner’s personal slush fund ($10 million, instead of a huge chunk of the revenue sharing and luxury tax money), cost-of-living adjustments to expense allowances during spring training, paying for medical second opinions anywhere in the country, and a couple of other issues. There are others issues, like tradability of draft choices, number of rounds of the draft, etc., where the sides merely agreed on a mechanism to resolve remaining differences. In other words, things are mostly the same as before, or slightly better for the players, on every issue except the luxury tax and revenue sharing.
Don’t misunderstand me – the players would love to have killed the luxury tax and kept revenue sharing the same, but privately they’re bound to be thrilled with the result. Privately, because they also gave the owners what the owners really wanted most out of this: the perception that they finally won one over the players. I firmly believe that the reason it took so long to reach this settlement, and the reason MLB forced out Paul Beeston as president last winter when he was close to a deal with the players, was that certain owners refused to agree to any deal that didn’t at least look like they made the players back down.