The owners, who seem to believe
end times will arrive at 12:00 AM on November 1st, have come back
with another proposal. Now, they’re
willing to play 76 games while subjecting players to a pay scale reminiscent of
college tuition.
I say that as a parent who never
understood what his child’s tuition was going in as a freshman or coming out
with a degree. We have a system where
there’s tuition A for him, B for her and C for students from overseas. Don’t worry, you’ll go through the rest of
the alphabet soon enough, along with your savings.
You couldn’t make a system more confusing
if you tried. Yet this is what the
owners propose for players. The game’s
economic structure is so fragile owners can’t afford to prorate salaries
without further reductions. Oh, but they’ll
do something they have never agreed to before and drop the compensation
requirement for teams losing free agents.
Not only that, they’ll expand the number of playoff teams, all the way
to sixteen. But players have only 48
hours to decide.
The tuition-paying parent in me says
something’s fishy here. Would the owners
actually give up free-agent compensation out of a sense of fairness, or are
they doing it as a loss leader? And that
deadline. If that isn’t undue pressure,
what is?
Last month, the Rays’ Blake Snell
came off as a greedy SOB looking out for #1.
In comparison to how the owners are acting, Snell was a paragon of
virtue.
Adios, national pastime.
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