Free Agent Contracts

I believe the players should be kept in chains until game time, and that there should be snipers posted to shoot any that attempt to escape to Cuba...Oh, wait...that might be against the law, let me check on that before I commit to it, okay???

Okay. Then I'll lose the chain stuff...

Here's the issue. The players union is not much different from any other labor union. Unions have done a tremendous amount of good for the working man in the USA, so I don't have a beef with there being such organizations. The common man formed unions because employers were subjecting workers to near slave-like conditions under the "take or leave it" rules of the times. Wages were low, and there wasn't anything anyone do about it because there was also collusion among business owners. They all knew that if they were the ones that paid more...well...it wouldn't be good. There was also corruption...both with criminal characters and with the law.

So, once the employees unionized and gained power they got more and more demanding until they took too much and the corporations they were working for crumbled under the strain of wages.

That's simply how it works. Now, the unions have lost power and wages for most of the big corporations are somewhat frozen, and jobs are being out-sourced to non-union contract laborers.

Baseball is somewhat different, but in that this is about millionaires fighting billionaires for a piece of a large and tasty pie. The corrections we've seen this year were inevitable as more and more teams have been saddled with bad contracts due to the increasing demands for longer and higher dollar deals by the players. The same solution would apply to baseball that would also apply to all of our corporations and their unions. That solution is so simple that it's nigh to impossible. It's called fairness and cooperation. The employers have to volunteer to offer a fair wage, and the employees must accept those fair wages. The biggest obstacle at this point is probably player agents, who stand to a lot of money if they aren't involved in salary negotiations.

There would have to be a mathematical formula drawn up that would reward players for performance numbers with a certain salary (call it piece work, if you wish). There would still be some issues, like how to value speed and defense, but in an ideal world the two sides would amicably agree to some sort of system for that as well...There would also have to be some provision made for "franchise players", or some such silliness to allow a player to stay beyond his peak years based on some "entertainment" clauses. Perhaps they would involve career targets such as base hits or HR...

Cooperation and volunteerism is almost un-American. It's boring. No one can really take credit for saving the system or the company or the world or whatever is at stake. We like fights and war. We like to hire lawyers and agents and somebody to go out and break knees. That's the reason that unions and corporations are both struggling right now. Watch for the next corporate collapse near you. It will happen. Eventually someone will figure out that bullying employees and forcing them to work for a wage that they can't live on is not in the best interests of the company or the employee. How long will that take? Another 50 years? A hundred? I don't know, but I think in a smaller population like that of baseball players and team owners there is a much better chance of instituting such a system than there would be with massive and greedy corporations that have executives living high off the hog while whining that profits are down. Ever notice that the first move is usually lay-offs in the work force? Ever notice that it can take several hundred to several thousand employee lay-offs to equal what could be saved in executive salaries and bonuses if the lay-offs and cuts happened at the top first?

As Forrest Gump would say "That's all I have to say about that"...

Thank you, my friend. There is only one secret to the knowledge. You must live about 64 years to attain it. Many people get educated far beyond my level of education, but the reality is that I wasted my education because I was working 40 hours a week while I was still in high school, and never applied myself to earn scholarships that were easily within my grasp. That was because of bad advice and a bad example or two. Since then, I have soaked up as much knowledge about far more important things than those the birthdays of US Presidents and the capitals of states I'll likely never visit...

The best way to learn is to keep your eyes and ears open...And history...well, yes...it is in the past, but somehow it keeps repeating in many, many ways...It seems ESPECIALLY the mistakes...