Knowing that professional sports have become more business oriented than actual sporting, it's harder and harder for even casual fans to stomach what is happening. In case you've been living under a rock MLB is dealing with skyrocketing salaries, a team that spent 250,000,000 this off season just to sign 3 players, prices continually going up, $6 for a beer served by someone making just over minimum wage, a commissioner that has reportedly earned 18,000,000 last year, and a drug testing policy that is arguably more lax than even the NBA. To sum up the situation, people (not just fans) are getting fed up.
To address the drug/steroid problems, one can't help but come back to the money issues. That being said, I'm trying to avoid that topic but it will come up.
I enjoyed this editorial:
http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-dwyre-a-rod10-2009feb10,0,3614747.column
2 comments:
I agree with the editorial. I love baseball but I hate all the secrecy. Expose everyone. Let it be known that they cheated. And the fact that the players union has so much pull in the sport is frightening. The push for larger and larger contracts is going to cause a collapse if they don't rein in the union. Small market teams like our Brewers will falter even with improved attendence. And the lack of a salary cap accentuates the possibility for failure. And all those fans in New York, Boston, and L.A. who keep telling us small market fans to deal with it and to spend more money if we don't like it will only have each other to play against. And lets not get started on publicly funded stadiums...
The secrecy is found everywhere though... not just MLB. The reality is that a union in any sport or business tends to have an obnoxious amount of influence as to what happens. Right or wrong, that's how things are.
I agree that there's a need for a salary cap like in other sports but i think it should be much more severe. Salary cap goes into effect and that's where it sits for x years (maybe 4-5) before renegotiation. I think by year 3 we'd see some very interesting effects. You'd have teams who kept cap room available for the future and those that blew it all right away creating 2 classes of financial management of teams.
Would we see the Yankees and BoSox floundering by then or would they still be competitive? Would this benefit small market teams in the long run?
I personally believe in a partially public funded stadium. It's undeniable that it's good for the local economy starting with the construction workers who break ground all of the way down to the part time people working at the concession stands. My issue with that though is that if the public has a monetary investment in the stadium then the owner/league should make more gestures to show gratitude towards the local tax payers who have helped foot the bill.
The thing i liked the most about this article was the suggestion of celebrating a "clean" player. I'd take it a step further and also have the fans and writers vote on who exhibited the most "class" of the season and enshrine them in a memorial.
Then again i'm just a random blogger that rants about whatever is bothering me so what could i possibly know? :)
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