August, 2002:

Now that a strike has been averted, Drayton McLane can go back to moaning about how much money he loses. We’ve been down this road before (here and here). As before, the Chron is as critical of McLane’s claims as they once were of Enron’s business model.

I don’t doubt that the Texans have diverted attention from the Astros, but c’mon. Counting the preseason, they’ll play maybe four or five home games before the World Series. Not all of those games will occur when the Stros are at Your Name Here Field. The Rockets don’t even start playing until October. Are you saying that people would rather sit at home and watch local news coverage of the Texans and Yao Ming instead of coming out to the park? If so, McLane has a bigger problem than he thinks.

Finally, as is the case with so many other teams, the Astros create their own payroll woes by overpaying for replaceable talent like Orlando Merced and Jose Vizcaino, a fact that goes largely unnoticed when they start whining about how they can’t afford to keep Lance Berkman and Roy Oswalt. It’s a simple matter of priorities and budgeting. Why are you tying up capital in non-essential commodities when you know you’ve got more important expenses looming? I’ll bet McLane doesn’t run his grocery distribution business that way.

A deal has been reached between the MLBPA and the owners, at the last minute as so many predicted, thus averting a strike. Woo hoo!

I am a bit concerned that the players have agreed not to challenge “any contraction moves in 2007”, but that’s a long way off and things may change by then. $DEITY willing, Beelzebud Selig will be selling used cars and not doing any more damage to the sport.

Meantime, I wholeheartedly agree with the following sentiments from the Baseball Prospectus, written on Wednesday when a lot of people thought there’d be a short strike:

Anyway, the strike–I hope that no one who has made any comment about not coming back after a strike comes back. I don’t want to hear “oh, I meant an extended strike”. Nope, you should have written that on the sign you held up for the cameras.

I don’t go telling my lovely and talented wife I’m going to leave her when she doesn’t (uh, for instance) clean the cookie sheets she’s cooked on. I don’t threaten it because I love her, and I understand it’s part of the package. Professional sports are no different–it takes an immense amount of money to pay the best athletes in the world on the field, and those same athletes are going to want fair compensation for their services. That they’re going to argue about it sometimes shouldn’t surprise anyone. Would it be in the best interests of everyone if the owners stopped seeing the players as an exploitable resource and instead as potential partners in growing the game? Sure. But there aren’t a lot of companies, much less industries, who have that kind of enlightened vision.

If your relationship with baseball, or any professional sport, is so filled with jealousy and anger that you can’t enjoy the beauty of the game and the talent of its players because management is inept, go watch Friends (which has been beset by labor, money, and drug issues throughout its history) and forget all about the greatest sport there is.

A seven-day strike that gets us four years of labor peace (and, likely, increasing competitive imbalance, but I digress) and clears out the angry, “players are overpaid” crowd? Sign me up.

Play ball!

Via the Daily Kos comes this report from ESPN’s Jim Caple that George W. Bush is among 60 non-players being considered by a screening committee for inclusion on the Hall of Fame veterans’ ballot. Caple gives this notion the dismissal it deserves, noting that FDR, Reagan, Nixon, and even George H. W. Bush have a better case for the baseball Hall of Fame than Dubya does.

The Veterans’ Committee, I should note, has been the big black box of Hall of Fame ballotting for some time now. In the past, it was little more than 18 old ballplayers who got together and picked a supposedly deserving yet overlooked player who was no longer eligible for enshrinement. Unfortunately, since the committee met in secret, it was highly susceptible to lobbying by one guy on behalf of his cronies. As Bill James documented in his excellent history of the HOF The Politics of Glory, when Frankie Frisch was on the Veterans’ Committee in the 1970s he helped induct quite a few of his teammates from the 1920s, many of whom (Jim Bottomley, Chick Hafey, Ross Youngs, etc) fall far short of standards.

The list that Caple writes about is part of an effort to de-emphasize this group, and a long overdue effort it is. Fortunately, the overall list is a lot more serious than the inclusion of Dubya would indicate, and the voters will have their hands full. I can see a few names that stand out to me (Gene Autry, Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog, and Marvin Miller are all good choices) and quite a few more that will send me scurrying off to do some research. I applaud the effort and am optimistic that the 15 finalists will all be worthy of consideration.

UPDATE: Edited to fix the parenthetical list of bad Hall of Famers. Thanks to Mac for the assist.

It’s hard for me to convey the depths of my despair when I read articles like this about baseball’s labor wars, but I’m going to try. There’s just so much distilled ignorance and misinformation, it’s almost awe-inspiring.

Let’s start at the beginning:

Alex Rodriguez offered to slash his record-setting salary if it would help baseball, a novel approach to solving the sport’s problems as it moved within a week of another strike.

“I would take a cut in pay — 30 to 40 percent — if it would make the game better,” the Texas shortstop said Friday at Yankee Stadium. “It’s not a very realistic proposition.”

Rodriguez’s $252 million, 10-year contract is the richest in sports, and many owners have pointed to it as a sign of baseball’s imbalance between rich and poor.

First of all, Tom Hicks paid A-Rod a good $5 million a year more than anyone else offered him. He was bidding against himself. Keep this in mind for later.

Second, while there is undoubtedly an imbalance between rich and poor teams, the definition of who’s “rich” and who’s “poor” is one of convenience rather than reality. As has been noted numerous times by the Baseball Prospectus, one-time sad sack small market franchises Cleveland and Seattle are now considered “haves” while poorly run teams in Anaheim and Philadelphia – metro areas with far more people – are beneficiaries of revenue sharing.

Third, as any fan of the Orioles, Dodgers, Mets, Red Sox, and Rangers can attest, being rich is no guarantee of being a winner, while teams like Oakland, Houston, Minnesota and San Francisco demonstrate that teams with limited financial resources can still win and win consistently. Yet owners continue to peddle the lie that only the rich teams win and only the rich teams can win, and damn few sportswriters call them on it.

Finally, A-Rod’s salary isn’t the problem. The problem is the plethora of players who are essentially replaceable in terms of talent but who are paid as if they’re star quality. Rosters are littered with such examples. The really galling part is that cash-poor teams are often the worst offenders. Had the Pirates not thrown guaranteed contracts at the likes of Kevin Young, Derek Bell, and Terry Mulholland but instead used their roster spots on kids from their farm system who’d be earning minimum salaries, they could have afforded to sign Barry Bonds as a free agent for the $18 million salary that he now earns. Think about that.

Meanwhile, former commissioner Fay Vincent predicted baseball won’t be able to avoid its ninth work stoppage since 1972.

For the record, only three work stoppages – not all of which have been player strikes – have actually resulted in lost games. They were in 1972, 1981, and 1994. That doesn’t really change any of the current issues, but again, it’s lazy reporting.

Some owners, such as Texas’ Tom Hicks and San Diego’s John Moores, said in the past week that baseball needs revolutionary change, but Manfred is confident he can work out an agreement owners will ratify. Moores said he would prefer a yearlong shutdown to a bad deal.

And here we come back to Tom Hicks, who bought the Rangers, spent money like Imelda Marcos at a going-out-of-business sale, and now is bleating that “revolutionary change” is needed. Never mind the fact that he paid too much for A-Rod (who’s still worth whatever you pay him) and the fact that he followed that up with the signing of other high-price low-yield veterans like Andres Galarraga and Ken Caminiti, he says we must now impose strict controls to make sure that other stupid owners like himself can’t do that again. He has all the credibility of an Arthur Andersen executive saying that the accounting industry just needs to police itself a little better, but again what he says appears unchallenged in print.

Finally, note that last statement by John Moores. Moores and fellow hardliner Drayton McLane know fully well that “greedy players” will get more of the blame for a strike than they will. They’re willing to force the issue because it plays into their hands. Keep that in mind before you rant about who’s at fault here.

All that said, I still think there won’t be a strike. The sides aren’t all that far apart, and I think they will both be under a lot of pressure to accept some kind of compromise. Even an agreement to keep the existing system in place through the next season, with renewed negotiations during the winter, would do. Until it actually happens, I refuse to worry about it.