It always amuses me the people who buy the reasoning that the owners aren’t responsible for the high salaries the players are receiving, that it’s all the players fault. Well someone has to offer the players the higher salaries, and someone has to demand the higher salaries, so it seems clear to me that it is a mutual problem. The whole collusion angle is mistated as well, it didn’t involve the owners offering reasonable salaries to their players and having that shot down, it involved the owners not making offers at all to the players…which is a whole different kettle of fish. I don’t think anybody would objectvely object to player receiving fair compensation, I suspect most people would not mind the best players getting a salary of one or two million a year, as long as there is an equivalent drop in the cost of going to a ballgame. It shouldn’t cost almost as much to go to see a baseball game as a football game, after all you aren’t gonna build fan loyalty by offering a product for eighty games a year that most people can afford to go to only once or twice a year. The high ticket prices which are being driven by the higher salaries are what is crippling baseball. Of course I suspect if the salaries were reigned in to a tenth or a quarter of what they are now, there would not be a similar equivalent drop in the ticket prices.
The second thing that is crippling baseball is the incompetent commissionership of Bud Selig. Faye Vincent got fired partially because they felt he was mismanaging baseball. Since his firing they have expanded into areas that clearly don’t want baseball, they have been caught using Enronlike accounting principles, they have gotten to the point that teams are facing mid season bankruptcy for the first time since the 1800’s, and what do the owners do? They extend the mandate of Mr Bud Selig. If a CEO of any of the companies that are owned by a baseball team owner performed as badly as he did then he would have been out on his ear long ago. Baseball is learning that if the person in charge of the outfit is a car dealer then it will be run like a car dealership.
My 2 cents…slightly tarnished: Keith