...as Joe Sheehan so splendidly puts it in this Baseball Prospectus roundtable on the new Basic Agreement -- a BIG loss for the players, not that you'll hear that from the pandering "greedy ballplayer" columnists that populate daily rags... Sheehan also offers that the CBA "is close to the mid-market owners' wet dream, and doesn't do a damn thing for the game itself."

[3 Stooges voice] Hey! I resemble that remark.

My favorite comment: [quote]Jeff Loria might be the first recorded victim in the forthcoming Fox special, When Manatees Attack: "Mistaken for a limp piece of vegetable matter, the art dealer becomes a midday snack for the normally peaceful but now angry and violent swamp mammals..."

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Buwahaha!

There's some interesting points in the article. The owners smell blood and will go for the jugular in 2006. And the anti-marketing MUST stop; it's surreal to see the owners bashing the product that people pay to see.

[ September 04, 2002: Message edited by: Jim Allen ]

There may be some truth to the "players aren't greedy" mantra, but some people seem to look at them as selfless idols. Sorry, but try as they may I'll never buy into that. Both sides are equally guilty of trashing the game.

The full quote mentioned in the subject for this thread is: "Watching the reaction of baseball fans across the country the last few days, I'm embarrassed; Americans are petty, jealous, economically illiterate bitches."

Well, Mr. Over-intellectualizing Snob, I'm not a damn bit embarrassed. I'm completely convinced that if it weren't for the fan reactions in the last week or so, these usually shameless creeps and liars (players and owners) would have shut down this game once again.

Baseball "Prospectus." Puh-leeeeze. What kind of people are these?

Analytical people. Who acknowledge the economic/shit-we-all-might-die-soon mood of the nation was a factor in the settlement.

Being "selfless" isn't how you secure a market wage in collective bargaining. Go tell the "Friends" cast to make you laugh for 35 grand a year.

And rather than point to the specific elements they discuss which show that the owners are more to blame... I won't.

[quote]Originally posted by Bill W:
Being "selfless" isn't how you secure a market wage in collective bargaining. Go tell the "Friends" cast to make you laugh for 35 grand a year.

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A market wage??????? These people aren't in a MARKET like average working people. The comparison to ACTUAL unions has looooooong since become invalid.

They ARE an actual union; the fact that they're not sweatshop workers doesn't invalidate the reality that there is a MARKET for a skill that draws 3 million people a year to an arena where they pay $6 for lousy beer, or convincing sitcom watchers that six semi-employed pretty people in NYC have huge apartments.

Someone remarked a few days ago on the "great" pre-strike fan signs... 90% of them made me roll my eyes, and several made me shout at the TV. The perennial: "I'd Play for Free." Yes, and no one would PAY to watch you, cuz you SUCK.

Yep, that Joe Sheehan quote: true.

Joe in Philly makes a valid point [insert mental picture of Joe striking Sally Field-esque pose with "UNION" sign held overhead ] but despite the huge sums of money, the players and owners in this scenario are engaged in classic market economics. Each wants to capture the largest share of the economic surplus created by this game. If you believe in capitalism, if you feel like Adam Smith that the invisible hand of the market should be allowed to operate unimpeded, then the threat of strikes will be one of the results. It's not fun, but I'm not sure that I don't prefer it to socialism.

Wow Bill W. Why the animus towards Friends? Because you're stuck in Brooklyn and they live in killer apartments in the Village with no visible means of support? What gives?

I was the one who made the comment about the fan signs. I agree, most of them were lame variations on "You Strike, We Walk", but there were some really good ones. A wheat/chaf thing.
[quote]I'm completely convinced that if it weren't for the fan reactions in the last week or so, these usually shameless creeps and liars (players and owners) would have shut down this game once again

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I would say that it was a big factor at the very least. Who knew that throwing beach balls on the field could be an agent of change? Of course, it'll only encourage the chuckleheads at The Ed.

I re-read the article again and I'm puzzled by something. One is the idea that DC is a viable alternative to move a team to. I'm assuming that any ballpark would be built in the 'burbs, but if they built within DC city limits, wouldn't they need Congressional approval (correct me, please, if I'm wrong but isn't DC's finances basically controlled by Congress?)? And apart from owners using DC as leverage, is there a great groundswell of support in the local area for a DC team? They've had 2 franchises before and both left; it's not like they have a great track record. Since I'm a total cynic, I just see it as a ploy by the owners to get a team there so they can keep lawmakers pacified with the amenities of luxury boxes lest the lawmakers repeal the Antitrust exemption. That's Antitrust, not AntiChrist.

And so, once you get past DC, what other areas are there that can be used as blackmail threats to get new ballparks? Florida is obviously a bust--you can argue all you want about horrible ownership but I just don't get a "We MUST have baseball here" vibe from the Sunshine State; I've always gotten the impression that the owners were counting on displaced snowbirds from Boston & New York to provide a fan base. The Mid-Atlantic South (ie the Carolinas)? Nah, basketball country. Texas? Football country. Etc. I think relocation targets are very limited.

In fact, I see no evidence that Montreal really gives a damn either; small cult following aside, even when they were good, they had trouble drawing fans (as have Pittsburgh and a few others). A good argument could be made that a hideous stadium and some of the worst ownership in sports history have done a good job of killing off fan interest but there's no getting around the Double Tax/Weak Canadian Dollar Whammy that makes players not want to go there and keeps the ownership locked in a "develop them here so they can prosper elsewhere" cycle (in English soccer, the Expos would be called "a selling club"). Who knows what would have happened if that incredible 1994 team hadn't been derailed by the strike and had gone on, as many predict they would have, to win the WS? If, if, if........

[ September 04, 2002: Message edited by: Jim Allen ]

[quote]Originally posted by Jim Allen:
I re-read the article again and I'm puzzled by something. One is the idea that DC is a viable alternative to move a team to. I'm assuming that any ballpark would be built in the 'burbs, but if they built within DC city limits, wouldn't they need Congressional approval (correct me, please, if I'm wrong but isn't DC's finances basically controlled by Congress?)? And apart from owners using DC as leverage, is there a great groundswell of support in the local area for a DC team? They've had 2 franchises before and both left; it's not like they have a great track record.

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In defense of D.C. as a baseball market.

The baseball park should be built in Northern Virginia, to be closer to the fan base and to avoid/minimize the problem with the adjacent Orioles. But the MCI Center (assuming it's still called that) was built on prime downtown D.C. real estate for the NBA and NHL franchises. It can be built within District limits.

As far as it losing two teams goes:

1. The first team was moved to Minnesota, redubbed the Twins, largely because the owner was a racist idiot named Calvin Griffith, who moved to the Twin Cities because he heard that there was only 10,000 blacks (or some such number). He also once said: "Black people don't go to ball games, but they'll fill up a rassling ring and put up such a chant they'll scare you to death." "We came (to Minnesota) because you've got good, hard-working white people here." That's not a reflection on D.C. to lose an owner like that.

2. The second Senators team was moved by another idiot, Bob Short, who bought the team with the purpose of moving it to the growing Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. He had no intention of building a viable market in D.C.

3. Metropolitan Washington cerca 2002 is a completely different place than it was in 1961 when it lost the original Senators. Back then, it was one of the smallest markets in baseball. It was basically a poor, backward southern town. It's now a much larger. It is the focus of the nation's fourth largest Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA), bigger even than the two-team San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose SMSA. More importantly, it is a very wealthy market, with personal incomes among the highest in the country. What's interesting is that Washington-Baltimore has historically been a one-team market (except for an 18-year period of 1953-1971), even back when St. Louis and Philadelphia were two-team baseball markets. Back when the Senators were in business, and Baltimore was only a minor league town before the Browns moved to Baltimore(St. Louis's Browns, not Cleveland's), Baltimore was the larger component of the Washington/Baltimore metropolitan area. Now that Washington and its inner suburbs have grown sufficiently to become the larger component of the metropolitan area, the baseball team is still in the smaller of the anchor cities: this time, though, it's Baltimore. It's like if baseball decided that there would be only one team in New York, and it had to play in: New Haven. Or L.A. gets one team, and it plays in: Riverside. It makes sense that a major league team play in the focal point of the fourth largest SMSA in the country.

ASIDE COMMENT: I stopped reading the article that started this thread when it got to the point that the writer called baseball fans "petty, jealous, economically illiterate bitches." I'm a baseball fan. And for me: Life's too short to put up with people insulting me. I turned on the players too, for legitimate reasons, but the idiot who wrote the article seemed to think that there was no logical or defensible basis for opposing his position. He's entitled to his opinion. I'm entitled not to read it.

CITT, thanks for the historical info. Calvin Griffith, yikes.

[quote]Originally posted by Charlie in the Trees:

I stopped reading the article that started this thread when ... the writer called baseball fans "...economically illiterate bitches."

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C'mon CITT, I know you can discern when a rhetorical flourish is used to make a point. Like Eminem!

Actually, a similar argument was made in last Sunday's NY Times (less gangsta verbiage, of course) by Ira Berkow:

"No one hangs a sign for George Steinbrenner: 'Own 4 the Love of the Game.'"

Skilled Ballplayers and Fans Who Are Brats (regist. required)

I don't like "baseball fans" either, if you define them as the 80% of the folks around me at the park who don't know or care what's happening on the field, leave their seat every 2 innings, mistake routine flyouts for homers, or bellow variations of "Burnitz f**king sucks" endlessly til they leave in the 8th inning to beat the traffic.

[ September 05, 2002: Message edited by: Bill W ]

I'm actually less bothered by athletes making super-huge salaries than CEO's or movie stars. At least with the athletes, they get their positions by being verifiably superior to other candidates.