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America's Pastime

Monday August 19, 2002

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From Columbus, Ohio
(which was not even ON the tour schedule)

NOTE: The first two chapters of the Mullings Dog Days Tour Travelogue are on the website!

• You already know that the average Major League baseball player makes $2.3 million per year. You also know that the average Major League baseball player will go on strike on August 30 if the remaining issues with the owners are not settled by then.

• So, there's really only one question left to answer: Who cares?

• We are now less than three weeks away from the opening of the National Football League season.

• In places like Washington, DC the issue of who will be the Redskins' starting quarterback is much more a topic of conversation than what the tax on baseball salaries should be and at what point should it start?

• I used to be a big baseball fan. I can still name the starting lineup for the 1956 New York Yankees. I can name all four quarterbacks in contention for the job in the Redskins. I can't name a single pitcher - not one - on the Baltimore Orioles.

• I just don't care.

• This past weekend, I cared whether Tiger would be the first man to win the three U.S. Majors in the same year.

• As I wrote this, I was sitting in a bar at the Columbus, Ohio airport having been diverted by bad weather from my expected interim destination - Cincinnati.

• There were eight televisions in this bar. They were all tuned to ESPN, or NASCAR, or the PGA.

• I sat in that bar for three hours. No one asked if there was a baseball game available.

• Major league baseball players have already done enormous damage to themselves by just SETTING a strike date.

  SIDEBAR:

  Last week sportswriters breathlessly announced that the baseball players had NOT set a strike date. Obviously they had set a date; they simply didn't announce it. Were sportswriters lied to by the baseball players and their union? Or were sportswriters complicit in the lie? Where's the outrage?

  END SIDEBAR

• In the olden days of baseball there was a thing called the "reserve clause" in all professional baseball contracts. That simply meant that, from the moment a player signed his first contract with his first team, that team owned that player forever, if they wanted. They could pay him what they wanted. They could not play him if they wanted. They could trade him if they wanted - and then his NEW team owned him for life.

• If a player didn't like it, he could retire. But if he came out of retirement, he STILL belonged to the last team that owned him.

• Then a guy named Curt Flood - to whom every major league ball player should give a percentage of his salary - sued to get rid of the reserve clause and, although the courts found for the owners, it was the beginning of the end of the reserve clause.

• Major League Baseball owners have been among the most arrogant group in the history of sports. That arrogance led them to another embarrassing defeat when the baseball players' union accused the owners of "collusion" in keeping players' salaries under control.

• This time the court found for the players. A new owner - like the current President of the United States - found that a significant portion of his team's revenue went to pay the $280 million fine imposed upon his co-owners for acting contrary to baseball's collective bargaining agreement.

• Players, then, have had ample reason to distrust the owners and their union has served them well, winning concessions players in other big league sports only dream of.

• The issue now is: Is the union serving the Game of Baseball well?

• The answer is easy: No.

• By making the same errors as the owners made when THEY held the upper hand, the Game will suffer in the end, and the $2.3 million dollar a year gravy train will, like Amtrak, grind to a halt.

• Baseball players have ample reason to dislike and distrust the owners. Now, baseball fans have a reason to dislike and distrust the players.

• America's pastime.

• On the Secret Decoder Ring today: A quick history of Baseball's "reserve clause", A nice photo of the Potomac River, and the usual things:
  --END --
  Copyright © 2002 Richard A. Galen

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