August 24, 2002

4:05 PM

Tony Gwynn knows full well how costly a baseball strike could beBaseball still has not recovered from the strike of 1994, especially in Montreal. The Expos were in the driver's seat for the National League East title when the strike hit in August of 1994. Before the 1995 season began, the Expos had traded several key players to lower expenses. Now the team is on Commissioner Bud Selig's contraction list for Major League Baseball. If the players union go out on strike this year, it could deal a fatal blow to the sport that was once was America's national pastime.
posted by jasonbondshow (20 comments total)

Before anybody says anything about it, yes I know I screwed up the last sentence by putting in one too many "was". My bad.
posted by jasonbondshow at 4:08 PM on August 24, 2002

...
posted by quonsar at 4:20 PM on August 24, 2002

Is it just me, or does that link bring up a page of code for the rest of you?
posted by goethean at 4:28 PM on August 24, 2002

If the players union go out on strike this year, it could deal a fatal blow to the sport that was once was America's national pastime.

Good. Now:

Drop that puck!
Drop that puck!
Drop that puck!
posted by Ayn Marx at 4:39 PM on August 24, 2002

goeth: Just you I'm afraid.. If you were referring to quonsar's link, it's a waveform file, ie you shouldn't open it in your browser but in whatever sound playing software your platform has. The other one just worked plain..
posted by fvw at 4:41 PM on August 24, 2002

Good. Now:

Drop that puck!
Drop that puck!
Drop that puck!

Could not agree more. Hockey's a much better sport to watch than baseball anyway.
posted by jasonbondshow at 4:44 PM on August 24, 2002

Good riddance to baseball.
posted by neuroshred at 5:03 PM on August 24, 2002

Baseball's been running on the fumes of "America's pastime" for far, far, far too long. I'm sick of hearing about the tradition and history of the old ballgame. If they keep on that tirade then it won't matter if baseball strikes or not, all of its fans will have died out by the next decade. I'm pretty sure that Football has been the force of American sports for the last 4 decades.

Baseball's going to join boxing and horse racing as "watch when something supposedly exciting is going to happen so you can talk about it at the water cooler," where it should be.
posted by Stan Chin at 5:09 PM on August 24, 2002

I am not going to shit on baseball (like baseball would need my help anyhow), but I have four words: 40. games. per. week.
posted by adampsyche at 5:21 PM on August 24, 2002

I don't see how these guys get off saying they need more pay and such. I mean, isn't the average income for a Major League player like $2.5 million or something? People like Lance Armstrong, or other olympic athletes should get more attention and more pay than some over weight, over paid baseball players...
posted by ericdano at 6:46 PM on August 24, 2002

Hockey Pundits has been gearing up for a baseball strike for a month now.

It will be sad if this stike continues on. There is nothing like watching an evening game at Edison Field or a doubleheader at Wrigley.
posted by Coop at 7:40 PM on August 24, 2002

I don't see how these guys get off saying they need more pay and such.

It's more complicated than that, but it doesn't make it any less silly. Basically, the labor war is not really between players and owners, but between an alliance of rich players/rich owners, and minimum-salary players/low-revenue owners.

Consider George Steinbrenner, whose team has outspent its competition by millions and has won 4 of the last 6 World Series. If he is forced to institute a salary cap, he no longer has the competitive advantage over owners who have made smaller investments in their teams. That he is paying Jeter, Clemens and Bernie Williams 8 figures is fine with him, as long as fewer teams are able to afford the same players.

Interestingly, the salary cap being proposed by the owners isn't even a salary cap. It's a "luxury tax", which in terminology and practice penalizes the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers and friends for spending more money than their competitors.

When we talk about the "owners" in this dispute, we are really talking about low-payroll teams, who are represented by the commissioner Bud Selig, himself a low-payroll owner of the Milwaukee Brewes. (The phrase "small-market" is a ridiculous misnomer, unless you consider Philadelphia and Miami to be small markets.) Simply put, they want to compete against the Yankees without spending like them. (This is not an inability to pay, by the way -- Carl Pohlad, the owner of the "small-market" Minnesota Twins, has a personal wealth of $1.3 billion.) They are allied, sort of, with the lowest-paid players, since the reduction in salaries at the highest end of the market will improve the minimum and average salaries at the other end.

This has nothing to do with coal miners versus the management. This is strictly a battle of the rich versus the superrich, and which side you are on depends on either the size of your paycheck or the generosity of your wallet.
posted by PrinceValium at 7:54 PM on August 24, 2002

posted by RylandDotNet at 7:59 PM on August 24, 2002

I love your new logo for the MLB Ryland!
posted by jasonbondshow at 8:05 PM on August 24, 2002

If the players union go out on strike this year, it could deal a fatal blow to the sport that was once America's national pastime.

That's what they always say. Baseball could strike for five years and raise tickets prices to $1000 a seat, and the baseball fans would just come crawling back. It's pathetic.
posted by mrhappy at 8:47 PM on August 24, 2002

mrhappy, you're probably right. But attendance still hasn't gotten back up to pre-94 levels, so maybe MLB is indeed on it's way out.

Not that I care; when's the football season start again?
posted by Yelling At Nothing at 9:15 PM on August 24, 2002

The recent World Cup put me over the top for futbol though it has been years since baseball held any appeal for me.

Go Reds!
Go Earthquakes!
Go CyberRays!
Go USA!

You can shut MLB down tomorrow, not problem for me.
posted by billsaysthis at 9:40 PM on August 24, 2002

Having lived in Chicago for the last three years, I've become a huge baseball (Cubs) fan. I've been a soccer fan all my life (Go Reds!!). However, I think soccer will have similar problems as baseball very soon.

In England only three clubs, Liverpool, Arsenal and Man United have money to buy the best players. The other clubs are falling behind. In Spain, the best club, Real Madrid has bought two of the world's best players (Figo and Zidane) the last two years and is now trying to buy Ronaldo for a ridiculous amount of money. This is similar to the Yankees suddenly having a rotation of Schilling, Johnson, Martinez, Glavine and Zito with Rivera as their closer.

Therefore, it is obvious that in a couple of years many clubs will go bankrupt and the big clubs will get even richer. It is silly to assume that the problems baseball is facing only apply to the sport of baseball. In the end all the big sports around the world will have to adopt some sort of salary cap in order to keep the sports competitive.
posted by einarorn at 7:37 AM on August 25, 2002

einaron,

while your comments about european soccer are mostly true, your extrapolation is not. hardly any football clubs have gone bankrupt yet and most are just scaling back after foolishly thinking that tv contracts will save them.
posted by billsaysthis at 11:47 AM on August 25, 2002

Ok, I may have exaggerated. My point is that the smaller clubs will have more problems keeping up with the big ones. It's become increasingly clear that even medium sized clubs (like, e.g. Aston Villa and Everton in England) cannot compete with the big clubs.

If nothing is changed, then the situation will only get worse, and the gap between the bigger and smaller clubs will increase.
posted by einarorn at 4:23 PM on August 25, 2002