The well-dressed man at the podium is smiling. He appears relaxed and happy, as if he received word his stock portfolio just doubled in value. His posture, his expression conveys an utter lack of concern. Me? Worry? About what?
If you didn't recognize Rob Manfred, you'd never guess he was the commissioner of major league baseball. Or that he was in the midst of a news conference confirming that the three-month long work stoppage is now going to eat into the baseball season.
The photograph is one that crystalizes the divide prolonging a complex and multi-faceted negotiation that pits baseball players against the upper crust of the one-percent.
As a working stiff, I frequently derided both sides. I just didn't care about a tiff between what I saw as billionaires vs. millionaires. But in 2022, I feel very differently.
We are well aware of the monstrous contracts offered the game's elite players. We are less-aware of the ones offered to the game's dwindling middle class. In fact, the median salary in major league baseball is just one-million dollars a year. That means there are as many players making more as there are making less.
I never would have guessed.
What we see happening in society at large (ever-increasing amounts of wealth concentrated into fewer and fewer hands while ever-increasing numbers of people fight for an ever-shrinking pool of money) is also happening in baseball. And that's not by accident. It's a deliberate, on purpose outcome driven by policies put in place by ownership.
This but for a single reason: to make more money.
I ask you: shouldn't baseball owners have the same right to pillage and plunder as your garden variety hedge fund manager? I mean, is this America or what?
So while baseball owners decry their financials (think Cubs' owner Tom Ricketts, who termed his 2020 losses as 'biblical'), the valuations of their profit-sucking ventures continues to soar. Please—tell me the last time you saw the value of a money-losing business escalate like a professional sports franchise.
Answer: you haven't.
And now our billionaire owners have a new revenue stream to frolic in—legalized gambling. It's probably just me, but I can't position my head sufficiently to glimpse the top of their tower o' cash.
And yet these whores are still playing hardball with their talent—the folks you and me and millions of others actually go to see. Or watch. Or stream. Professional sports are—for better or worse—a TV show. And a TV show ain't worth the stink under your arms without a great cast.
Tom? Do you honestly believe three-million people pour into Wrigley Field each year to watch you own?
Really?
You just sign the checks. And to be perfectly honest, I can do that, too. Lots of people can. What I'm not so good at is turning a double play. Or getting around on a wicked curve. Which is why I pay to see the guys who can.
Even apart from your craven, short-sighted efforts, baseball is suffering. It's not connecting with our youth, which is critical to sustaining any kind of endeavor. Then there is the descent into the all-or-nothing gambit of the home run. The endless pitching changes. Shifts. And the torpor with which so many games proceed.
And why is it we never hear of small market NFL, NBA and NHL teams struggling, anyway?
Going on, how is it that in a celebrity-obsessed culture like ours the game's premier players so consistently fly beneath the radar? How to make them sizzle? How to make them snap, crackle and pop like their counterparts in the NBA and NFL?
Wring the neck of the golden goose if you wish. It's “your” game, isn't it? Install a servile lap cat as commissioner; one so far-removed from the game he is able to laugh even as the game creates yet-another degree of separation from its fans.
Seize the day, bro. Have at it.
But I'm fed up with you and your kind. You're ignorant pigs so suffused with gluttony you can't see the approaching train. But not to worry—our body bags feature 24k zippers and are strictly limited edition.
We call them bags, but they'll fit you like a glove.
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