The world of sports is changing around us. ESPN reports (I use the term loosely) constantly. The major media outlets are accused of pandering. If you want the real story on anything you have to go to the internet and the blogs. But then of course they are accused of being based on conjecture and inherently critical and negative. I for one don’t find anything terribly surprising about this.
Case in point, the recent Yankee spending spree this off season. Sports outlets are cranking out their lists of winners in losers in all this. I’m left a bit out of sorts in this whole situation because everyone is playing in the mud, there are no real winners. It’s only a matter of time before they start posting their “What’s Wrong with Baseball” stories.
I talked about how contracts began to grow in baseball back here, and I do believe that you have to put things in perspective. If the players didn’t make that money, and if the ownership sees any holes they can exploit, they do it and pocket the difference, so no one is providing public service. For years ownerships undersold their players and controlled every aspect of their jobs.
But come on. Agents inflate althlete contracts to the point where only the richest teams can compete in free agency and it bumps up the expectations for what all other slightly worse players can expect to make, to the point where even prospects are owed crazy amounts of guarenteed money for possibly good baseball. How long before losing teams that get high draft picks can’t ever get better because they can’t afford to sign those prospects? Oh wait…
Expectations are just impossibly high. If a guy makes hundreds of millions, he should never strike out, never make a mistake, and hit a homer in every at bat. But baseball is a game of mistakes. As the saying goes, it’s the only sport where you can fail nearly 70% of the time and still be considered massively successful.
And then what are we to think? We fans? You know, the people keeping the whole thing turning, the people buying those overpriced jersey’s and bits of swag?
No one deserves that kind of money, especially not people who play games for a living. So is it any surprise? Is it shocking that the majority of sports fans hate guys that are successful, is it any surprise that one of the biggest functions of the internet has been a place to pervade rumors and comment on and bring down athletes for every infraction at every opportunity.
Of course not I say. In fact, to a great extent I believe it is necessary. Without that outlet, how could we bear to watch at all. But it gets tiresome sometimes, you know? There’s no real end in sight.
I like having an outlet, but I’d trade it for a player to say, “you know, I’d like to play in such-a-such place. I’m already pretty well set up, I’ll take a couple of million on top of the millions I have, leave 140 million on the table, because frankly, neither I nor seven generations of my family could spend that kind of money, and play a game. I’m pretty blessed here, best not to push it.”
While we’re fantasizing, I’d like to hear the ownership say “Well, now that our free agents aren’t commanding so much money any more, it really doesn’t make much sense to charge so much money for tickets and merchandise. Come to think of it, our cable deal is lucrative enough. Like our talent, we’re already fabulously wealthy, so we’ll take a salary that’s still well above what most people make and dedicate more money toward fascility matienence, and maybe pay our workers better too so they’ll actually be nice to you when you spend your money here.”
Honestly, who can we trust? I wish that was a rhetorical question and I could provide some comforting answer, but I really don’t know. Money breeds resentment, that’s not something that’s even exclusive to sports. But as fans, sports mean so much to us, it would be nice if that good will wasn’t plundered, and the industry will just have to forgives us if we’re all a bit more cynical these days than we used to be.
So I’ve said a lot. What do all of you out there think? Where are we going?
