« 1) The MLBPA is a | Main | Random thoughts for this, the »
December 18, 2003
Forget for a moment the
Forget for a moment the emotional stake I had in seeing the Boston Red Sox improve their chances of winning their first World Series in 86 years. Let's take an honest, objective look at what the MLBPA did this week. The players' union has made a grave - perhaps even life-threatening - mistake in how it has handled the Alex Rodriguez-Manny Ramirez trade.
The union sent very clear messages this week: 1) It will inflexibly pursue a policy of increasing salaries - not for the average player, but for the elite players in the game... no matter the wishes of the player, its short-term impact on the game, or long-term impact on the business. 2) The union demands lockstep adherence and compliance from its members, even when such unanimity is opposite the best interest or wishes of individual members.
What can an owner infer from this? Make a mistake, and the union will kill you with it... over and over and over again. And they will not give you any opportunity to rectify that mistake - even if that happens to the disdvantage of the individual player in question, or the disadvantage of 24 of his teammates - men in whose best interest the union is also allegedly supposed to be acting.
The union's efforts, they say, were to protect the "integrity" of large contracts, even when a player himself wishes to restructure his own. Let's just ignore the highly insulting notion that players need to be protected from themselves. There's a larger question, the answer to which the union should be forced by its members to answer. How can the MLBPA possibly expect that ANY owner will EVER agree to enter into a contract as long or as expensive as A-Rod's ever again? The owners have now seen that even when a player is interested in restructuring his contract, the union will swoop in with the ruthlessness of a secret police force, prohibiting the player from doing so and coercing out of him a statement of solidarity with the union position. (I mean, really... A-Rod's press statement this morning was about as convincing as those "confessions" that Iraqi or Vietnamese captors have forced out of American POWs.)
A-Rod's contract has deeply wounded his team. The Texas Rangers cannot compete under its crushing weight. And when the owner (who by the way deserves little sympathy, because he's the idiot who offered that much money in the first place) tries to rectify his mistake, the union greedily and rapidly prevents him from doing so. Faced with such blatant intrasigence, no owner with an ounce of business sense will ever sign a contract like A-Rod's again. The owners have seen what the union will do - and rest assured that none of them will make the same mistake. If Gene Orza was trying to increase the likelihood that other players might see contracts the likes of the $25 Million a Year Man's, he ironically has virtually guaranteed the opposite.
Worse still for the players, this move has done the impossible... it has made the owners look sympathetic in the eyes of the fans. Ordinarily, there's only one thing fans hate worse than a guy making $6 million a year whining that it's not enough - and that's a guy who had enough money to drop $200 million+ on a baseball team whining that he's losing money. Most fans seemed to side with the players in the 2002 labor dispute that nearly resulted in a strike. The owners charge $60 a ticket for games, plus exaggerated concession prices, parking, merchandise sales, and they have the audacity to ask taxpayers to fund their stadiums; the players are the ones on the field whom the fans come to see, so the thought went, so why shouldn't they be reaping the benefits? But ask most fans today if they have any sympathy for the baseball players' union, and you're likely to get an unprintable response. What do you call an organization that can manage to turn a group of billionaires into symbolic victims of greed and excess? Simple: the MLBPA.
The union has just handed the owners a propaganda tool like few others in human history. That's not overstatement; it's that bad. The only parallel I can think of, from my lifetime anyway, is 1983, when Ronald Reagan was taking a lot of heat for calling the Soviet Union "the evil empire." Critics were calling him simplistic, inflexible, dangerously antagonistic... and then, the Soviets shot down that civilian Korean jetliner aboard with 273 people aboard and sent it plummeting into the Sea of Japan. And all at once, Reagan went from being dangerous to being right. It might have been the dumbest move of the Cold War; it changed minds and approaches in the West, and barely six years later, communism was dead.
Will the veto of the A-Rod deal be the MLBPA's version of Flight 007, with the magic number being 252 instead of 273? Only time will tell.
There *is* one plus in all this, I suppose. Alex Rodriguez, the poster child for greedy, selfish, egotistical athletes, is going to be forced to lie in the bed he made for himself. Three years ago, he lied and told us all it wasn't about the money - it was about winning. He was happy in Texas, he assured us, and he wasn't just going there for 252 million simple reasons. Well, now we've seen Pay-Rod's lies for what they are; his greed's been exposed. For Alex Rodriguez, it's all about A-Rod, his stats, his paycheck, and his happiness. And even though it is his obscene contract that is responsible for the Rangers' mess, when he realized it, he tried his damndest to bail on his teammates instead of trying to restructure there in Texas. The true measure of the man's character has been revealed, and it ain't pretty. So there is a poetic justice to his being stuck Deep In The Heart Of Last Place.
All in all, however, it's been a pathetic record-setting week for selfish behavior among major league baseball players - and simply a sad week for Major League Baseball.
