ESPN's Peter Gammons has a wonderful feel and passion for the game of baseball. The time has come, though, for him (and other sportswriters) to take the owners and players to task for their greed and venality. Gammons, thankfully, has eloquently stepped up to the plate, lambasting both parties because they just don't get it. While I don't necessarily agree with Gammons' pairing of a baseball strike with the anniversary of 9.11 (it IS, after all, just a game), baseball IS quintessentially American. That means that there is a trust about to be broken, and neither the owners nor the players seem to understand (nor much care about) the gravity of that fact.
What these billionaires and millionaires and all their high-priced lawyers had better understand is that they don't matter. All those people who lost their jobs and their savings at Enron matter. The police and firemen who can't get raises in New York City, with all its Wall Street green, matter. All those folks whose family stores were systematically run out of business by the Wal-Marts of the world matter. Or teachers, always the bottom of the priority ring, all the way up to those in the academic world who devote their lives to dealing with childhood diseases or osteoporosis and get paid about a fifth of what a rookie backup catcher makes. They matter.
Millions of people matter, including hot-dog vendors and clubhouse kids and grounds-crew workers. But baseball owners and players don't....
To folks who do matter, these rich people pretending to recreate the Centralia, Illinois mining disaster of 1947 is hysterically funny. Although not as funny as it is to the NFL, which will soon be to baseball what the Yankees are to the Souix Falls Canaries. And one of the funniest aspects is that what they don't understand is that their constant bickering over how to split billions is more associated with the sport than the excellence of Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter and Nomar Garciaparra....
This is an industry that needs to seriously re-evaluate itself, its leadership, its business practices, its understanding of the product and its customer. But it's pretty hard for anyone to take it seriously, not when billionaires and millionaires sound like the Kennedy kids fighting over who gets the bigger dish of ice cream.
This is not to say that their aren't legitimate issues in the game that need to be addressed and resolved. Baseball's labor relations, though, have never been about negotiation and compromise. It's been about leverage and PR and spin control- and millions upon millions of dollars. Major League Baseball is the perfect illustration of the theory that money is the root of all evil. What makes that even worse is that neither the owners nor the players seem to get it. Money, it would seem, is no guarantee of perspective or common sense.
Millionaire players and billionaire owners fighting over a boatload of money. What a disgraceful display of misplaced priorities and unabashed greed. A pox on both their houses....
