Greed Wins! Greed Wins! Greed Wins!
And everyone else loses. If NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman is true to his word, the sound you just didn’t hear was the sound of the NHL resuming it’s season. No, the NHL is apparently out of business for the 2004-05 season, this weekend being Bettman’s deadline for getting a deal done and for the season to be salvaged in some limited form. How stupid can a bunch of people be? Hockey is the fourth professional sport, a fairly distant fourth even prior to this season. Personally, I like it better than NBA basketball (which isn’t saying much at all); I get interested in the NHL around Stanley Cup playoff time, and that’s about it. Hockey cannot afford to lose the fans it has, but it stands that chance, and all for what reason? Greed. The players will not accept a salary cap. Is there any good news? Yes…unlike the weenie baseball owners, who caved, the hockey owners appear to be willing to ride it out long enough to force the union to accept a salary cap, or break the union altogether, either or both of which would be wonderful developments.
On this same day, the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in its lead article referring to the Pittsburgh Pirates (whose pitchers and catchers report this week), asks, “Another Spring Without Any Hope?” I’ve lived north of Pittsburgh for 12 baseball seasons now, corresponding to the exact number of losing seasons in a row weathered by these Pirates. They have no chance of making the playoffs this year; a .500 season looks like the absolute, if-everything-works-out-perfectly best that they can possibly hope to achieve, but I wouldn’t bet anything I cared about on that outcome. Why? Greed, in this case the greed of most of the players and some of the owners, such as George Steinbrenner, who’d rather ruin baseball than not have an extra $100 million in his bloated pocket.
Hopefully, the fans will eventually stop putting up with this nonsense. We’re already seeing some signs of it in Pittsburgh, the number of empty seats signalling the fact that baseball’s utterly unfair system–which produces such pitiful teams as the Pirates–is turning people off. Sure, occasionally smaller market teams can catch lightning in a bottle and do well, and the Pirates could have probably done the same if they’d been run better/had better luck. But the small market teams cannot consistently pay to keep the players they develop; eventually, the Yankees or the Mets or the Dodgers scarf them up, because they can pay the big bucks. I hope that fans of the forlorn small market teams begin to vote with their feet, and force baseball into a corner, so that baseball’s owners will have to grow spines, like the NHL owners, and when the current collective bargaining agreement expires in 2006, demand change, substantive change, and refuse to pay spoiled brats a gazillion dollars for running around in short pants and playing a kids game.
In the NFL, every team wins or loses because of how it drafts, is coached, and plays on the field; that playing field is level. In baseball, it is anything but, and until it is, don’t expect this once-serious baseball fan to rekindle interest in the sham that the “National Pastime” has become.
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
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