May 20, 2002

I dunno. The owners of sports teams, as a group, do not impress me as the sorts of people that one would describe as "the finest men I've ever met". When the starting point of Kings' analysis is that football owners are fine gentlemen, and baseball owners are jerks, it's hard to take the rest of it very seriously. I'd say the real problem is the fact that baseball's antitrust exemption gives its owners free reign too engage in the sort of self destructive conduct that owners in other sports only wish they could indulge in. Bud Selig vs Dan Snyder. Only someone who spends his Sundays in stadiums instead of church would trust either as far as Ken Stabler could throw them. Labor disputes in sports are often described as being about the greedy players vs. the beleagered owners, but that analysis breaks down when we look at the other point King makes: in football, the numbers are an open book. In baseball, the numbers are cooked, to the extent that they are available to the players at all. NFL players can say, "Hey, we're getting 65%-- that seems fair." Baseball players can only go on the word of a bunch of guys with perjury convictions, who have been adjudicated as being collective bargining agreement violators.

posted by outside counsel at 03:48 PM on May 20, 2002