Okay, no baseball strike. I guess that's good, but what I always find interesting about these battles is how many fans instinctively leap to side with Management and adopt the notion that those damn players are too greedy. Of course they are…but if they don't get more, the money does not go to house widows and orphans. It goes to the owners of major league baseball teams, who already have a helluva monopoly and racket. Think George Steinbrenner and ask yourself if that kind of person is a victim in such squabbles.
But this seems to be the way a lot of the public thinks. Back in the seventies, when Johnny Carson was having one of his many battles with NBC over cash, the Los Angeles Times ran an incredible letter about how, at a time when however-many people die each year from starvation, it showed a lack of values that Johnny wanted a few million more per annum. I fired off a rejoinder which was published and which basically said, "If Johnny getting less translated to fewer commercials, I'd be all for it. But that's never how it works and I don't see why he should take less so NBC can make more. If any values are askew here, it's in the notion that the guy who made the business successful is the bad guy for wanting a fair share of the pie."
Same thing with baseball. If players taking less would somehow translate to lower admission prices or fewer commercials, great. All for it. But that never happens. Baseball is going to make a certain amount of money and all the fighting was not over how much it's worth an hour to play Shortstop but over what percentage of that certain amount would go where. Perhaps the public attitude about all this will change the next few years as we go through The Great C.E.O. Compensation Scandals. We're going to hear an awful lot about men who ran huge corporations into the ground, did everything wrong, but still got out with huge salaries and performance bonuses while the grunts who did their jobs well lost both their positions and their pensions. It'll be interesting to see how all that impacts America's attitude about labor.
Ultimately though, it doesn't affect me. I have all that money coming in any day now from Nigeria…