Bud Selig and his Big Mouth

[geschinger]

We can argue about time-frame, but the basic point is the same: The union maintained the Ostrich Strategy about roids longer than the owners did. We both agree that was wrong. I think the core reason for that was the entrenched battle lines between the owners and the union. I do not believe that the union was pro-roids for the sake of being pro-roids. I believe it was mainly a symptom of something larger: the stance of "never give an inch" to the owners. Given the history, I think that stance is both very understandable and unwise.

There isn't much to argue about the time-frame. MLB started pushing for testing in 1991 and it's been an issue raised and shot down in CBAs ever since. I think your point would be an understandable excuse for the union if this was only an issue from the past couple of years but that is not the case here. When we're talking about 15+ years I think it goes well beyond never giving an inch to owners espcially when both sides have been cooperative on many other issues in CBAs negotiated in that time frame.

[Mad Mark]

A couple of points:

While players don't last very long, the "positions" of owner, commissioner, or union chief are virtually lifetime sinecures. The interests of the groups who will hold their positions longer are vastly different than those of those who will be around a brief time. The fans--if they are considered at all--only come into play if they stop spending money.

I still believe that 100% local revenue sharing negates the need for a salary cap, because it acts as a de facto cap. It doesn't put a floor under salaries, but certainly puts a roof on.

If you're a mid- or small-market owner, you constantly find yourself fighting a two-front war: vs the union on one hand and vs the large-market owners on the other.

While MLB is absolutely hidebound in dealing with "old" revenues (mostly local broadcast and gate) it's surprisingly nimble and forward-looking in sharing "new" revenues (MLBAM, etc). I think some owners are looking for an inbuilt solution to the revenue problem to come from the eventual "nationalization" of most revenues through the MLB Network and the internet. Time will tell.

[RShack]

So, it is just a coincidence that the sports with more parity have a salary cap to go along with revenue sharing?

Do you even realize how much the owners have done to institute revenue sharing over the past 20 years? Do you realize that they had agreed upon proposals during each of the last two negotiations that significantly increased the degree of revenue sharing amongst the clubs, but the union wouldn't discuss the corresponding measures from their end?

Why is it you think it is reasonable to expect an owner to voluntarily share the revenue from an RSN evenly amongst all the clubs AFTER the owner has invested 10s to 100s of millions of their own money (or investor money) in the RSN to get if off the ground? That is a pretty good deal for the other guys. They get to take ZERO risk at all, but then profit equally when the RSN becomes hugely successful.

Why is it you think it is reasonable to expect an owner to share revenues equally, but it isn't reasonable for the players to agree to certain structures and limitations on salaries? What happens when all 30 clubs have an equal part of the pie, no salary cap, and owner X who is worth 3 billion decides to spend another 30 mil per year on salaries because he knows that owners A-L are worth "only" 300 million and can't afford to do so?

It truly amuses me that you seem to think the salary caps prevalent in the other sports just happen to be there but that the "real key" is the revenue sharing. If I'm the owner, there is ZERO chance I'm instuting an equal profit share unless I'm sure I can control costs. Anybody who doesn't see that just doesn't have much of a mind for business IMHO. You seem to want socialism on the profits, but free market capitalism on the expenses. LOL, yeh, that would work like a charm...

I also think it is amazing that you can't see the difference between an equal share of the profits from the proceeds from other entities that aren't affiliated AT ALL with the teams and profits from an RSN that was STARTED and is OWNED by the team. The NFL TV packages are being paid by CBS, Fox, NBC, and ESPN which are wholly independent companies. The baseball money is a whole different animal. Again, this isn't a hard thing to grasp IMO.

You seem to me to be a union guy who thinks people with a lot of wealth are always trying to screw the little guy. Maybe I'm wrong, but that is how it comes across to me. That simply isn't so most of the time IMO regardless of how many movies we watch that portray the uber-wealthy that way. Not everyone is Gordon Gecko or Donald Trump. Most aren't as a matter of fact. Some of the owners are heartless SOBs, but many of them are not at all.

You continue to refuse to address the basic issue which is that Fehr has been the one unwilling to negotiate on virtually ANY issue during the last several CBAs. He won't even negotiate on things like steroids; an issue that was not even really tied to a monetary "loss" for the players as a whole.

At this point, I think we'd be better off to agree to disagree and move on.

Jeez, man, take a pill and chill. You're the one getting all hot-and-bothered about labor-management issues, not me.

I already said that I think Fehr is a dick, and than I expect Marvin Miller would have handled the roids thing a lot better.

As for the salary cap, just because I don't see it your way, that's no reason to accuse me of having some blind-unreasonable dogmatic position about it, and then taking your ball and going home.

I will be happy to discuss it further, if-and-when you feel like it. Honest.

We've disagreed before and got along just fine. I don't see why we can't do it now.

Or, if not Right Now, then at some other time. Really. No kidding.

[Mad Mark]

Tech:

The one area where I'm going to disagree with you is the thought that an owner would pump their own money into payroll if revenues were 100% shared, and salaries were uncapped. 1) I just don't think that's the way most rich people operate, and 2) if the did try it, they might get away with it once, but I believe the rest of the "owners' club" would slap them down pretty hard.

[Migrant Redbird]

... I expect Marvin Miller would have handled the roids thing a lot better.

Think so? Union icon Miller rips 'witch hunt'

"Everything I've read in the last few days is unfair and anti-union, but that does not mean I agree that (union members) are without blame," Miller told ESPN.com. "When they agreed on a testing program, I said, 'They're going to regret this, because you're going to see players going to jail.'"

Uh, Marvin, if any players go to jail, it's not going to be because they tested positive for steroids. It's going to be because they lied to federal prosecutors. You do recall the Martha Stewart case, don't you?

The fact is, the players association position has always been for the maximum protection of their members from being held responsible for their actions, regardless of that players guilt or culpability.

Something which is being ignored here is that those using steroids were criminals, and protecting them from being exposed amounts to being an accessory after the fact.

The players association should have been even more aggressive about eliminating cheaters from the game than the owners. They abrogated their responsibility to their members -- not just the players who had to compete against those seeking unfair advantage but the players who were endangering their health through the use of dangerous chemicals without appropriate medical supervision.

[geschinger]

I just can't justify how it makes business sense to agree to socialize the profit side of the business (which is what full revenue sharing does) and simultaneously agree to free market capitalism on the cost side of the business (player's salaries). I can tell you that there is no chance I'd ever agree to that sort of situation. I'd be taking all the risk.

IMO complete revenue sharing is not necessary but zero revenue sharing on local media makes no sense either. For example, the NY Yankees are benefiting immensely by televising games which include an opposing team. The opposing franchise should get a cut of the revenues generated in those games? I don't think we need to throw everything into a pot and split it evenly, we just need a system that compensates franchises fairly on the local media side of the equation.

[Mad Mark]

I just can't justify how it makes business sense to agree to socialize the profit side of the business (which is what full revenue sharing does) and simultaneously agree to free market capitalism on the cost side of the business (player's salaries). I can tell you that there is no chance I'd ever agree to that sort of situation. I'd be taking all the risk.

I can easily imagine a scenario where a Paul Allen type of owner would decide to inject 50 mil of his own money into a crop of free agents to put his team over the top. 50 mil sounds like a lot of money, but it isn't nearly as much to a guy like him that is worth billions as it is to the 20 other owners that are wealthy but worth 10 times less...

You could be right. I think the percentage chance of your scenario happening is much lower than you do, but I do understand your concerns. I'm just always looking for some way to level the revenue field, figuring that the cost side of things will be (relatively) self-sorting.

[RShack]

VaTech, you said that I had failed to respond to the particulars you mentioned.

So, I will... in the interest of making a good-natured effort to convince you that you're just wrong ;-)

So, it is just a coincidence that the sports with more parity have a salary cap to go along with revenue sharing?

Pretty much. Correlation vs. causation, etc.

Now, I'm not exactly sure how different the various big-time sports are re: parity. However, I do know that within baseball there is greater parity now than there ever was back before the players made big money. How can you assert that lack of parity in baseball is due to the lack of salary cap when the lack of parity was far more pronounced in the years when player salaries were 100% dictated by the owners? If you wish to correlate lack of parity in baseball with out-of-control player salaries, history would seem to say that it's a negative correlation, not a positive one.

The claim that the crucial financial diff between MLB and other sports boils down to the salary cap seems completely arbitrary to me, bordering on the disingenuous. The truly striking difference has nothing to do with players, and preceded the emergence of mega-rich athletes: the relationship among owners. In the other sports, teams are effectively franchises in one industry, and that industry's rules about relations between owners are explicitly aimed at parity for the good of sport and health of the industry. MLB is the radical outlier here, with teams jumping through all manner of tricky legalities and accounting hoops to hide the big revenue streams, so that absolutely nobody really knows what the true financial picture is. In today's world, it all comes down to the TV money, and in that dimension the owners are not honest with anybody, including each other.

Do you even realize how much the owners have done to institute revenue sharing over the past 20 years? Do you realize that they had agreed upon proposals during each of the last two negotiations that significantly increased the degree of revenue sharing amongst the clubs, but the union wouldn't discuss the corresponding measures from their end?

The revenue sharing you're talking about is pocket change compared to the great cause of teams living in highly disparate tiers of money: TV money. AFAIK, the owners have never ever agreed to take steps towards addressing this core issue. They won't even tell anybody the truth about how much money is there that they won't talk about. So, while the owners insist on not taking an industry-wide approach, and instead are dug into an arrangement that essentially boils down to each owner "looking out for Number 1" rather than approach parity in MLB as a whole, they want the players to agree to give up the very same "look out for Number 1" approach that the owners insist on doing among themselves. I fail to see why the players should negotiate away their own ability to "look out for Number 1" when the owners insist on following exactly that strategy for themselves.

Why is it you think it is reasonable to expect an owner to voluntarily share the revenue from an RSN evenly amongst all the clubs AFTER the owner has invested 10s to 100s of millions of their own money (or investor money) in the RSN to get if off the ground? That is a pretty good deal for the other guys. They get to take ZERO risk at all, but then profit equally when the RSN becomes hugely successful.

You've said 3 things here. I agree with 1 but disagree with the other 2.

1. Owners have prior investments in RSN's. I agree that this makes it more complicated. However, the root of this problem lies with the owners themselves. Had they done what Rozelle got the NFL to do, this splintering into different TV empires without some attention to the common interests would not have happened in the first place. But, let's not worry about that. The situation is what it is, and I agree this is a complicating factor.

2. Owners take great risk to do this, and therefore deserve the rewards. I'm not buying that, simply because MLB is effectively a legally protected monopoly cartel in which owners do not truly take risks. If you disagree, please tell me who the last guy was who lost his shirt from owning a MLB franchise. The idea that they are somehow indepedent businessmen who are putting investment at risk is a farce. MLB is a government-sanctioned monopoly in which the owners divvy up the USA into fiefdoms without any risk of competition. The owners control which people are permitted to join their little cartel club, and finances is not the over-riding criterion. The owners also arrange that everybody in their little club makes out like a bandit. So, the idea that they're taking a big risk is nonsense.

3. You imply that the alternative to the current insane tiered-wealth arrangement is equal sharing despite different levels of investment. It's not. Just because things are at one far-extreme does not mean that the sane thing to do is to leap to the other far-extreme. I don't want that much parity, just like I don't want a salary cap. I want neither one for exactly the same reason: it devalues excellence and winning, when the whole point of baseball should be excellence and winning.

I think the sane thing is to have each team just split the *total* revenues for each game with whoever they're playing. If the MFY's don't play anybody, then the MFY's aren't worth squat. If you simply split total revenue related to each game between the teams who play that game, then the MFY's still wind up way richer than anybody. The diff is that they'd only be about 3 times richer instead of 50 times richer. That's fine with me.

Because I think teams should be encouraged to compete, rather than behave like some cheapskate owners do, I think that split of game-revenue should not be 50-50. I think whoever wins the game should get more. Because I don't know squat about what all the revenues really are, I have no opinion about exactly what the split should be. 51-49 or 60-40, I have no idea.

Why is it you think it is reasonable to expect an owner to share revenues equally, but it isn't reasonable for the players to agree to certain structures and limitations on salaries?

As you can see, I don't think the owners should share equally. I think they should share substantially, in a way that acknowledges different market sizes and that rewards winning. It will always be harder to be the Pirates than the MFY's. I don't mind that. But I do mind the insane and completely arbitrary magnitude of the disparity in team resources.

It truly amuses me that you seem to think the salary caps prevalent in the other sports just happen to be there but that the "real key" is the revenue sharing.

Why? I am still waiting to see any compelling argument that the salary cap will fix anything, or that the lack of one causes severe problems. Personally I think that much of the sympathy for a salary cap is a knee-jerk reaction to rich ballplayers that has not been thought through, combined with our society's anti-union sentiment of the last couple decades. Somehow, it's fine for owners to form a monopoly-cartel, but when players form a union that's somehow a bad thing. That doesn't add up right to me.

The reason ballplayers are so rich is because of decisions the owners made, not just about signing guys, but about the things the owners *insisted* on about FA, etc. I can easily see how having very rich teams and very poor teams hurts parity. A salary cap won't fix that. It's treating a symptom rather than the cause. A salary cap will simply cause the rich teams to find new ways to exploit the tremendous differences in team wealth, just like they did before player salaries mattered. The MFY's went to the WS 4 out of 5 years back then, like clockwork.

The MFY's can have a $200M payroll for all I care. The players don't make them do that, and spending like that doesn't get them to the WS nearly as often as they used to back before players were rich. The Phillies aren't a rich franchise, but they go to the WS way more than they ever did before uncapped FA. As long as we have 25-man rosters and lots of good ballplayers, nobody can corner the market on talent. As best I can tell, people go crazy urging a salary cap just because the NFL has one. I could care less about that. However, if I was a big Ravens fan, I'd be really pissed that the cap won't let the Ravens keep all their linebackers by paying them what the Ravens would happily pay them if it wasn't for the stupid salary cap. That goofy arrangement doesn't sound like free enterprise to me.

You seem to me to be a union guy who thinks people with a lot of wealth are always trying to screw the little guy. Maybe I'm wrong, but that is how it comes across to me.

Well, when I was a kid, the reason I had a roof over my head and food to eat was because my Dad had a union job. Worked his butt off too. Time-and-a-half over 40, and double-time on Sundays. So, I fully admit to being sympathetic to unions, since that's what let me to go college and is what mainly built the middle-class in the first place. IMO, the anti-union sentiment of the last couple decades is a perfect example of middle-class people getting duped and suckered by propaganda that hurts their own interests. However, I fully agree that the union we're talking about here has zilch to do with middle-class anything.

As for the idea that rich guys try to screw the little guy, I think that varies a whole lot, and it's based on what society accepts. While individual rich guys might be good guys who are fair, I think that rich guys as a group will indeed screw little guys if society says that's OK. It's always been that way, nothing new about it. I do think that over the last quarter-century our own society has become much more accepting of rich people screwing little people, and I think that's a bad thing for society in general and for working people in particular. But I don't see how that's relevant here, since the salary cap issue is mainly a battle between millionaires on one side and billionaires on the other. The main reason I tend to favor the millionaires over the billionaires is because they're the ones who actually play ball.

[Mad Mark]

I'm on record as a "no cap" guy. Just to reiterate my thoughts:

Teams share at least 75%--but no more than 85%--of local revenues (local broadcast and gate), from the actual books, not the cooked ones. That money goes into a common pot as generated, and is paid back equally to all teams. No salary cap (or floor) but a requirement that shared revenues must be invested in the team. (Doesn't have to go to player salaries, but must go to something that improves the team, such as scouting, a Dominican facility, stadium improvements or a new Spring Training home).

Like RShack's plan, mine doesn't completely even out all revenues for every team, but closes the gap between the bottom of the heap and the top.

[Moose Milligan]

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3912702

Well Bud, if it ruffles your feathers theres probably a little bit of truth to it now isn't there?

"The reason I'm so frustrated is, if you look at our whole body of work, I think we've come farther than anyone ever dreamed possible," he said, adding, "I honestly don't know how anyone could have done more than we've already done."

Yeah, you've come farther because a whole bunch of heat came down and books were written. Had people not blown a whistle, you still wouldn't care.

How dumb are you?

More importantly, how dumb do you think we are?

[OrioleMagic]

RShack, What a post! I think it is the longest post I have ever seen. I'd rep you but it says I have to spread it around first...:clap3:

[RShack]

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3912702

Well Bud, if it ruffles your feathers theres probably a little bit of truth to it now isn't there?

Yeah, you've come farther because a whole bunch of heat came down and books were written. Had people not blown a whistle, you still wouldn't care.

How dumb are you?

More importantly, how dumb do you think we are?

Judging by the degree of anti-player sentiment, and by the arguments from fans that paint the owners as fighting The Good Fight against those nasty players, it's possible that he has a very appropriate idea about how dumb we are. Face it, it appears that he did get the owners completely off the hook about roids. He blamed everybody in baseball except them, and it appears to have worked. Everybody knows how much Tex is making, but nobody knows or even cares how much Steinbrenner is making. It's the owners who freely choose to pay players mega-contracts, but somehow that's the players' fault, as if the players make them do it. Bud knows who's paying his salary and giving him big raises, and he knows why. So, while I think he's behaved like a pimp for the owners rather than as a statesman for baseball, can you really say he's dumb?

[geschinger]

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3912702

Well Bud, if it ruffles your feathers theres probably a little bit of truth to it now isn't there?

Yeah, you've come farther because a whole bunch of heat came down and books were written. Had people not blown a whistle, you still wouldn't care.

How dumb are you?

More importantly, how dumb do you think we are?

Do you honestly disagree with his comment? They've come a lot further than I ever thought they could. I still don't think they would have ever had the union agree to testing if not for the heat that came down, books that were written and people blowing the whistle.

[RShack]

RShack, What a post! I think it is the longest post I have ever seen. I'd rep you but it says I have to spread it around first...:clap3:

Thanks for the kind words. I used to make even longer posts from time to time, but they just made people mad and triggered snide remarks, not about the content, but about the number of words. (I figured that if people didn't wanna read them, they'd just skip them. Silly me.) I think message boards are pretty much a sound-bite kind of medium, not just here but everywhere, so long posts just go against the grain. While I'm sure that I'm too wordy, the main problem is that sometimes short answers just don't work.