September 3, 2002 – Prospectus Roundtable: Strike’s End
I’m not clear on the timing of this discussion, which appeared today but seems to have been taking place while we were all waiting for an end to the strike.
I have a few comments, of course.
I love BP. I admire their determination and I admire a lot of the work they’ve done. I enjoy the annual book and I read the website. But there are always some problems:
I won’t go into all of them here. Maybe someday. But the problem with their fierce belief that the players sold out to the owners, and their comical confusion about why, fails to acknowledge one prime fact: The Players Association has actually seen the Owners books.
When BP writers talk about the obscene profits that the owners have been making, and compares them with the more obscene profits they’ll be making under the new agreement, I have a hard time lining up in support.
No, I don’t trust the owners (even though they write a nice paycheck to me every week during the season), I believe that their financial condition is a good bit stronger than the “books” they showed Congress demonstrated. But if the players decided to approve revenue sharing and a modest luxury tax, I can only think it’s because they see that the revenue imbalance in baseball is a real problem.
The mantra of BP is to take an objective view of the facts. The facts we have here are that an active and rock solid group of workers made some concessions to allow the restructuring of the economics of their business. These workers have shown themselves, in the past, to be very smart and very savvy. To act now as if they’ve screwed the pooch seems to me to be an extremely subjective judgement.
Having said that, it’s hard to see how this agreement fixes any of the very real structural problems baseball has. But if the owners who receive the revenue sharing spend it on improving their teams, there is some hope that the game will win out over cynicism.
Me, I’m cynical enough that I worry.