Baseball

Everyone else has weighed in on the threated baseball strike, I'm sure you're all waiting on my opinion. So here it is:

Fortunetely for me, The Mets have already gone on strike. Two weeks before the rest of the league. After hovering around the .500 mark for most of the year, they have decided to make a statement and lose 12 games in a row. That'll show those owners

Ok. Irate Met fan rant aside, I don't see any the owners and the player's association coming to any kind of agreement any time soon. It is obvious that Major League Baseball needs to have some type of system in place to even the playing field (no pun intended) between the small market and large market teams. There are some teams and owners that will simply spend as much money as needed to put the best available players on the field. Other owners simply want to turn a profit, however small, and put only as good a product on the field as needed to attract the viewers and fans. So there needs to be some kind of salary cap in place to set a top limit (and bottom limit too, while we're at it) as to what a team can spend on players. That seems like it might be simple enough, but one of the big problems is that the owners aren't all on the same page with this. Baseball doesn't have a national television and/or radio package like football does. There aren't big network bidding wars for the rights to carry football every week. Each baseball team had there own regional deal for television and radio. And the televison deal that Cablevision paid the Yankees is a lot more money than what the Milwaukee Brewers are getting from whatever outlet carries their games. So why should the Yankees have to curtail the spending of the operating money they earned simply because the Brewers don't get as much money to be on TV?

To make the situation worse, the concept of revenue sharing has been introduced. This is a plan in which revenue from each team is pooled and then paid back out equally to each of the teams in the leauge. This would allow some of the smaller market teams to be in the running in spending to get top name players. Again, why would the owner of the Dodgers (Rupert Murdoch) want to pay the Montreal Expos part of the money he earned?

But the owners DO understand that something needs to be done. They see the bidding wars between the deep pocketed teams going on for the big players and know that they are escalating these salaries. They need to put in some system(s) to rein in the salaries and to level the spending power of all the teams or baseball is going to be in trouble.

So enter the player's union. The player's union doesn't care about the health of the game. They don't care about the solvency of the owners. They certainly don't care about the fans. To be fair, I don't think the owner care that much about the fans either, except for the fact that the fans are the consumers that the owners are trying to attract. The player's union is concerned with one thing. To get as much money for as many players as possible. Always. Forever. If Major League Baseball determines that for the health of the league they need to eliminate two teams? Nope, that's 52 players that will be out of a job. Want to get rid of the horrible aberration of the designated hitter? Nope, that's 15 or 16 players that would be out of a job. Want to put in a salary cap to help put some parity back into baseball? Nope, no way will we let our players suffer because the owners can't figure out their business. And by suffer, I mean get, 8 million dollars a year instead of 10.5 million a year. The player's union will strike. I don't think there is much doubt about that. They don't want any changes made to the current system. And the owners really need to make some kind of change before the league falls apart. A strike is really the only thing that is going to exert any pressure to get an agreement done.

The only thing is that I think the strike will backfire on the players. I think the owners are prepared to hold out for as long as it takes this time. I think that the owners are going to settle in for a long seige. I mean, most of them are losing money (or so they say) anyway. Why not save the payroll, shut down the operating costs and sit in the bunker until the smoke clears.

Then there is the ever-popular court of public opinion. That's you and me. As the instigators of the strike, the players are going to take a serious hit here. Especially when September 11th comes around and there isn't any baseball. Baseball, and the Mets in particular, really helped the nation get back to business as usual when the games resumed. Not having baseball on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks will be particularly hard to swallow. A handful of citizen going on strike to ensure that their millions keep rolling will not sit well with the rest of the nation. You can bet that the player's union will keep trotting out the big stars to give sound bites about how evil the owners are and how the fans are their first priority. That's crap by the way.

The other ticking clock that will be going on in both the owner and player's collective heads is exactly how long can there not be baseball before the fans turn their back on the game? A number of people will immediately give up on baseball completely as soon as no one suits up after August 31st. And they will not come back. And there is another number of people who will never give up on baseball, no matter how long they strike. The question is about the people in the middle. With every day of the strike passing, baseball will lose more and more of their fanbase, many of them for good. How long can a strike go on before there isn't enough of a fan base to support the product anymore? I think that a large number of people will really give up on baseball this time. The average fan has been burned one too many times at this point. Baseball has already lost its grip as America's game and the football season is just starting up this time of year. I don't think that the player's union has really though this one all the way through. The union has "won" everytime there was been a strike or lockout in the past. I think they feel they can't lose. I think they're wrong this time