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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Thursday, August 29, 2002 :::
I'm having trouble figuring out exactly how blogger decides how to format these things, but I'm not going to worry about it too much.
Some baseball thoughts:
- It seems odd to me that revenue sharing is an issue for labor negotiations. This is something I'd think the owners would simply work out themselves without any suggestion that they would talk to the players about it.
- I don't get why the owners are allowed to work it out themselves, though. The anti-trust exemption is emotion-based muddle headedness. There is no reason baseball should be treated differently from any other industry.
- But I don't like anti-trust laws, really. The owners should be allowed to work together to figure out what they think is best for the major leagues. Fans and players who don't like it can go to the Northern League, or elsewhere. It would be interesting to see how quickly the Northern League could grow if the top players would consider this option, though first
- The local municipalities should quit subsidizing owners who don't own the stadium, and holding those back who do (say, the Cubs, who aren't allowed to expand their own ballpark).
- Revenue sharing -- heck, "competitive balance" -- would be a disastrous idea for Major League Soccer. The best teams are in California; the best in the east may be Chicago. This is where Mexicans live. The revenues will come in for teams with support; you want the good teams to be where teams would be able to get support. A bad team will keep away more potential fans than a good team will draw nonpotential fans. Whether New York is that much better a baseball town than somewhere else is debatable, but the possibility is being ignored.
- I don't think teams should be able to prevent other teams from moving in next door. That has to cost people concerned more than it benefits them, even if "people concerned" is just team owners; I don't understand why they put up with this rule. On the other side,
- Drug testing should be promoted strongly by the players' union. If companies in an industry were all threatening their long-term well-being for short-term economic advantage relative to each other -- let's face it, if everyone got worse at the same time it wouldn't hurt them that much -- they would jump all over any chance to collude to change that. U.S. labor law allows workers to collude, even where it doesn't get rid of special wavers of anti-trust laws for particular industries.
::: posted by dWj at 6:12 PM
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