A Simpleton's Guide to Fixing Baseball
Of Greed and Ghosts
The owners of Major League Baseball’s teams and its players will begin negotiations soon on a new labor contract.
Oh, joy.
Look, I’ve written plenty about greed in sports here before, but it boils down to one thing: I don’t understand it. If I have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars as a Major League Baseball player, or billions as an owner, do I really need to screw with things to get more? I mean, really screw with things?
Like locking the players out (owners) or striking (players)? I say no - heck, I’ll sign a $5 million advance for my next novel right now, and I’m good.
Major League Baseball is different. They pride themselves on fucking things up, and we’re looking at that now. The agreement between the owners and the players ends December 1, and it will almost certainly get ugly.
There’s plenty they’ll fight over, but it is naturally only about money. The owners want a salary cap, and are willing to concede a salary floor to get one. In English, they want to limit the crazy-town amounts the top players get, while at the same time increasing the minimum teams must spend on player contracts.
Self-control and capitalism issues aside, I agree with the owners.
While I get that nobody wants their income to have an artificial stopping point, we’re not talking about a factory worker making $20/hour being limited to $30. No, instead of owners being able to offer infinity to players, they’ll max out at $100 million per year. Or something like that. And it doesn’t matter: a cap will only impact the best players, and they’re making bags of money now and always will.
Put another way, a top major league baseball player is as rare a commodity as exists in sports. They will not go broke, and I bet they won’t even have to downgrade their private jet services.
Oh, and a cap might tone down the obnoxious spending of teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, and Mets.
Salary floor? Now you’re talking, at least to me. If the MLB Players Association cared about their rank and file, they’d agree to some silly cap number, but demand a very nice floor number, for players and teams alike. Entry-level major leaguers get a raise, and teams must spend a minimum on salary overall. That would fix cheapie teams like the Pirates and Marlins and avoid calamities like what happened to the Oakland A’s.
Will this happen? It’s not so crazy that I need Mr. Roarke and Tattoo, but almost.
And if we’re talking fantasy, can we do the cap and floor thing, and also ditch the ghost runner placed at second base in extra innings? I have yet to hear one advocate, and it’s not baseball. Get rid of it, at least until the 15th inning or whatever.
See how easy that was?
And I’ll go further and say this would be the fan reaction if we had labor peace AND the ghost runner was tossed.
