Thank you Donald Fehr
During my lunch break yesterday, I finished reading Marvin Miller's autobiography "A Whole Different Ballgame." I then arrived back at my desk to find that Miller's long-serving successor as head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Donald Fehr, was resigning his office at the age of 61.Like his predecessor, Fehr deserves credit for so admirably running one of America's strongest unions, and doing so in the face of such unjustified and unhinged public and media opposition. In Major League Baseball, it makes little sense why fans so frequently and vehemently side with billionaire owners against millionaire players in labor disputes, especially when we consider that it's also the players that the fans prefer watching in action. (Although I hear Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy makes an exciting flourish at the end of his signature when he signs team contracts.) This bizarre fan behavior starts to make more sense when we consider that the owners can boast the support of the propaganda machine-- that is, most of the game's beat writers-- and that they actually pay the salaries of many of the broadcasters. (There's no advantage quite like being on the side that pays the bills and controls the access to information.)
Fehr has been at the receiving end of quite a few columnists' barbs this week about his delay in agreeing to steroid testing early in this decade, but his biggest mistake was ever agreeing to testing in the first place, as it's a massive violation of worker' rights to have privacy invaded without a court's burden of having to show cause. He hesitated on confidential testing because he didn't trust the owners, and sure enough, as Ray Rotto wrote on Monday, confidentiality turned out to be "handled by the Easter Bunny Department, over in the Tooth Fairy wing of the Santa Claus annex."
Tracking through the litany of labor disputes over the years requires more space than Marvin Miller could cover in even 424 pages of his book, but sufficed to say that baseball players and their union leadership have had to battle over the years for rights and freedoms that other American workers take for granted.
As examples,
- In your job outside of Major League Baseball, it's inconceivable that your employer would hold the rights to your employment services in the industry for the course of your entire life. (Pitcher Jim Bouton once jokingly asked an attorney for the National League if club owners would consider lifting the Reserve Clause for a player once he reached the age of 65. "No," the lawyer said with a straight face, "because the next time you'll want it reduced to fifty-five.")
- Your employment services cannot be sold or traded to a different company located in a different city.
- Your employer has probably not been granted a special exemption from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 under a bizarre determination that the company (which I'm presuming here to be for-profit) is not engaged in interstate commerce.
- Your boss has likely never hired a so-called "commissioner" to oversee the office, a man permitted to make unilateral decisions "in the best interest" of the company, even outside the Constitutional rights of due process and privacy, and limited only in his ability to act against the majority will of the cartel of owners who keep him employed.
- He or she has likely never tried to cap employee salaries during a period of unprecedented company growth.
- Your boss has more than likely never acted in concert with other employers to hold down wages, being found guilty of such a crime over three consecutive years in a court of law.
- And I sincerely doubt also that your employer has enjoyed the added benefit of over 100 years of great consumer appeal for his/her product, as well as year after year of record-high profits.
- Chances are that he or she has not had the luxury of doing business with negligible material costs in production or service, or that he or she has enjoyed 500 percent and more market value increase for the company or franchise in less than 10 years' time.
- I'm guessing that the physical plant that houses the business likely isn't leased on extremely favorable terms by municipalities eager to serve your boss' needs and serve him or her with tax-free interest on bond issues on plant improvements and/or replacements.
- The person in the corner office where you work doesn't necessarily enjoy access to an ample supply of skilled employees and cut-throat competition to gain employment.
- And it's additionally unlikely that your boss has the right to blackball or conspire, as part of a cartel boycott, against the skilled employees of his or her choosing.
After 26 years of fighting to help get players their fair share of baseball's exorbitant profits, yet having to deal publicly with being the villain, Donald Fehr deserves combat pay from the players as part of his retirement package. He should get several hundred "thank you" cards if nothing else.
To Mr. Fehr, upon the announcement of your retirement yesterday, sir, I say thank you for all you've done for so many of the men (and their families) that have been my heroes on the diamond, and for the blows you've struck for all of us who work every day ourselves and call ourselves fans of the game. Because of increased competitive balance among the franchises and an end to the culture of game-fixing caused by player slavery (that plagued the game during the first half of the 20th century), we've all shared, as fans, in some of the gains won by players. I count you too, Mr. Fehr, among the heroes.
posted by CM @ 11:24 AM
13 Comments:
It's hard for me to be on the side of organized labor, but I too will congratulate Mr. Fehr for being successful at his position. Some of the things you listed are truly outrageous and need to be dealt with.
But, as a fan, I really have no choice but to side with ownership in most disputes with players, especially if it involves salaries. And that is simply because, I am the one who pays those salaries, by purchasing tickets and merchandise. And, I don't feel sorry for baseball players who have to fight for their salaries. Don't get me wrong, I was very happy for Ryne Sandberg when he became the highest paid player in baseball during the winter of 92/93 by signing a 4-year, $28.1M contract. But, in 1992, the average ticket price for a Cubs game was $10.87, and now, the cheapest ticket for a Cubs game is about $19, with an average price of almost $50.
Thank you Donald Fehr?
I'm glad you brought up the topic of rising ticket prices because I think that's the greatest lie that's told about the rising players' salaries.
Consider: Ballclub owners are capitalists. They're already in the business of making as much money as they can. Whether they're selling tickets, hot dogs, or beer, doesn't it make sense that they're already selling each of those items (and many others) at a price designed to maximize profits? If you can sell a hot dog for $5.50. How does the amount that the secondbaseman is making factor into the equation? Was the club owner underselling the value of his hot dogs before he had to pony up more money for Ryne Sandberg? He must not have needed that extra money.
I contend that the price of tickets and various stadium products have increased only because our willingness to pay has increased.
Happy birthday, Dave! I hope you didn't get any more Cubs apparel or memorabilia for your birthday, because it's the hardcore fans' willingness to spend their money on literally hundreds of team shirts and other items over a lifetime (and of course I include myself :>) ) that are helping to drive up the prices!!
No matter how hard you choose to come down on the players' greed - and that's certainly fair to dispute - they're maximizing profits too. Of course, the real reason is because as Americans we admire rich people because we feel we have it in us to be rich too if we could somehow just find the right angle. We admire their savvy. But while we admire the skill and talent of players, we're also jealous of them off the field.
That's why the most visible players off the field are the most hated. Their real life behavior reminds us they're human, irregardless of their superhuman skills.
We secretly believe they're undeserving of their own talent.
Just like the steroid issue, fans shouldn't be coming away from this without most of the blame. Vote on this issue with your pocketbook. Don't begrudge the players their share. The Reds aren't going to find a young arm to replace Johnny Cueto, but there's a million guys with suits that could replace their owners, and we all inherently understand that.
The baseball union is probably the hardest labor union to crack in this country and become a part of. Haven't they earned the largest piece of the pie?
Who's Johnny Cueto?
Hey, I'm not saying the players are solely to blame, but they are a pretty big part of the pie. Yes, owners are trying to maximize profit, and to do that, you have to first cover your expenses, of which player salary is the largest, and fastest growing.
A salary cap with a reasonable annual increase would slow the growth in player salaries, and hence ticket prices.
Yes, the player's union is tough to get into - just like the country club at Bushwood (what a dump). But, look what their members get compared to every other working person in America. A minimum wage of $400,000 per year that includes at least 3 months off - 5 months if you're a position player for a non-playoff team like the Reds. An average salary of over $3.2M, and contracts that pay you the full value even if you break your pelvis having sex with your underwear model girlfriend (or maybe even Madonna).
If there's no cap on profits, you can't have profits on salaries. But I can see the appeal of a salary cap in the interest of league parity.
I think a salary cap is utterly un-American, but the last few years I've found myself considering it. I think it works in other leagues. The NFL definitely has its problems, but I often think Major League Baseball should pattern itself economically on what the NFL does. Is there one NFL team that hasn't been a legitimate playoff contender at one time in the last 6-7 years? They don't seem to have the long term, small market droughts that MLB always has.
Yep, the salary cap has sure helped to keep ticket prices down in the NFL and the NBA. Mission accomplished.
Nineteen baseball teams have won the World Series during the last 29 played. Seventeen football teams have won the Super Bowl throughout the 43 year history of the game. NO sport has more parity than baseball.
The Yankees won 20 World Series in the 40 years between 1923 and 1962. They've won 6 in the 46 years since. Thank you Marvin Miller, Donald Fehr, Curt Flood, and free agency for GIVING US parity.
I think we are arguing different things and I think the thing I want to argue about is an endless circle because everyone - owners, players, and fans - share in the blame for higher ticket prices.
Owners are greedy (like the vast majority of business owners in the US), players want to get paid as much as possible for the services they provide (like every worker in America), and fans seem to be willing to pay $400 for their family to see one baseball game from seats that don't make your nose bleed.
As a staunch capitalist, I shouldn't be upset because this is the simple and undeniable law of supply and demand setting market prices for players and tickets. I suppose if I want baseball to become a more affordable form of entertainment in America, the best thing I could hope for would be another strike to piss off fans and then the law of supply and demand would tilt in favor of the consumer that is still willing to go to a game.
I also like the idea of a salary cap for competitive reasons (and this is coming from a fan of one of the big spenders - though not a wise spender). Yes, I know the data says there is a lot of parity in baseball, but ask the Pirates, Royals, Orioles, and Reds what that parity has done for them lately.
I would never ultimately support a salary cap, but parity is debatable. All I know is that 2 years ago the Dolphins were one of the worst teams in NFL history and now they're a playoff team so maybe I have an overly rosy view of the NFL right now.
I know you love that World Series statistic, Chris, but it's misleading. There are five or six teams who are playoff contenders now and every year (Red Sox, Yankees, Dodgers, Angels, Mets, and even the ultimately-choking Cubs) and every year in the coming decade, every one of those teams will still be in the running because their balance sheet makes it so they have their pick of August free agents and never have to rush minor leaguers to the bigs.
The difference in championship parity is the nature of the sport. In football and basketball, the best team always wins. In baseball, it's whoever has two pitchers and two hitters get hot in October, so the regular season is almost as meaningless as basketball's.
In fact, Chris, I'll throw your statistic back at you from the other angle. Why are all those various and random teams that have won World Series over the last 29 years (29 is random, by the way, seems you're spinning the numbers) never the team that proved themselves the best over the grueling 162 game season?
The NBA is crooked in its own way - because in a sport where you only need one dominant player with a decent support to win the league, the league sees to it that those players eventually end up with the Lakers and Celtics.
Though I don't have the sentimental attachment to it, regardless of economics or salary caps, football is ultimately the truest team game, because it's the hardest for one player to dominate. The teams that win the most Super Bowls earn it by being the best run organizations, not just the teams with the highest payroll or the team with Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant.
Let's look at it this way. If you were to blow up the entire system in MLB and sit down at the table and start from scratch with the goal of creating a sport where 30 teams in very diverse geographic and economic markets would be competitive - would a salary cap be part of the new plan. I argue that it would.
If we imploded the established system, the players would hopefully realize there's no need for the owners at all. We could have a player-owned league, cutting out the middle men who are unnecessary suits, and ticket prices would be cheaper.
Socialized baseball!!
First of all, 29 years was not a random number on my World Series stat. It was actually precisely 30 years-- 1979 to 2009, and there are 30 MLB teams-- but of course, I had to subtract one of those because, in 1994, as Federal Judge Sotomayor determined, baseball owners chose to place "the entire concept of collective bargaining on trial."
Since you guys seem to favor anti-statistical anecdotal evidence over actual statistics-- the Miami Dolphins did indeed go from a bad team to a borderline playoff team in one season, but I don't have to even leave the state of Florida to point out that the Tampa Bay baseball Rays went from 96 losses in 2007 to the CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES OF THE WORLD also in just one season.
Here's another stat with a random date range for you-- there have been 9 different World Series Champions over the last 9 years. That's never been accomplished in any other professional team sport, yet in baseball, it's not even the record-- 10 different teams won the Series between 1978-1987.
There are 30 baseball teams and 8 playoff slots. Do we really have to do the math here to determine whether it's unusual to have AT LEAST five or six teams that annually compete for playoff spots?
Of course, it's your stats that are skewed, Aaron, because you want to make it seem as if small-market teams are at a disadvantage, yet your perennial Dodgers-- "yours" because you mentioned them-- have actually only been in the playoffs 5 times in 20 years, which is less than the statistical average, and the New York Mets have only been in the post-season 3 times over the same 20 years. Yuck.
Why not mention the more successful Cardinals, Braves, Indians, Astros, and Twins? Probably because they're in smaller markets that supposedly can't compete.
In the 1980s, we were told that Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia were markets that couldn't compete. Remember all those empty seats at Braves games on TBS? Now those clubs are either on top or have gone through periods of not only competitiveness, but in the case of Atlanta, dominance.
It would probably surprise both of you to know that Kansas City is actually a larger metro area AND television market than St. Louis. Further tipping the scales of justice towards the Royals, the Cardinals' majority owner is a journeyman baseball executive from mid-to-small-size cities like Dallas, St. Louis (twice) and Cincinnati, with no significant assets from other industry. Royals' top man David Glass is the fucking CEO of Walmart.
The Royals made a $20 million profit last year. That's after all expenses, including payroll. So Glass signed Juan Cruz. The man's not in the baseball business. He's in the profit business.
Do the Yankees have a financial advantage over other teams? Yes. Do they have a COMPETITIVE advantage? Actually they don't. The Reds, Pirates, and Royals don't have to share a division with the Red Sox, for example. The Yankees are really the only team anybody's talking about when they start talking advantages, and they haven't won a World Series since Bill Clinton was president.
The Reds, Pirates, Royals, and Orioles all want us to sob over them, but all three of us remember when it used to be the Brewers, Rays, and Tigers that wanted to be the recipient of our tears. They were all three absolutely at the bottom of the barrel, and you both remember this-- it was earlier this current decade.
It's time we recognize that these bottom-tier clubs today are just playing the same P.R. angle as an excuse to their fans for front office incompetence. It's the same as always. But in reality, the Reds, Pirates, Royals and Orioles haven't been competitive forever, not because of George Steinbrenner or Donald Fehr, but because they s-u-c-k suck, same as the Lions, Bills, Texans, and Browns.
No, it's not sour grapes, though I was probably guilty of trying to expand my list of annual contenders and player stealers too far beyond the Yankees and Red Sox. Baseball, to its credit, is random, so teams like Tampa can sneak into the playoffs once in their history, and that gives an illusion of parity that doesn't exist in other sports.
True, one cannot name a great Cinderella team in the entire history of the NBA, because the best team always wins. Regardless of the reason, though, it is certainly good to have a new champion every year.
I know, Chris, the Yankees run such a flawless organization and it's not because of their gigantic payroll that they missed the playoffs once in 15 years.
The Brewers have had a nice comeback, but they're already fading this year because their best pitcher is gone to the Yankees. And though I somehow doubt Albert Pujols jumps ship from the Cardinals in the same fashion, I've seen you lament in these pages already that they signed no significant free agents in two years. Any guesses why?
The randomness of baseball's postseason certainly covers up a lot of baseball's economic flaws, but, when every August comes around and all the small market teams start dumping the players their fans have grown attached to, or when team's don't sign free agent relievers in the spring, this adds to the extreme ill will that builds up against baseball and explodes when things like steroid scandals come around, in direct inproportion to other sports. And it leads to irate Chris Moeller blog entries.
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