Originally published June 15, 1981, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe
Why should we get upset because a bunch of guys averaging around $150,000 in salary for seven months work now claim their bosses are unfair? How can you feel sympathy for bosses who, as a group, should be given “The Dummer of the Decade” award for the way they have helped destroy baseball?
This baseball strike is like a war between Hitler’s Germany and Joe Stalin’s Russia: you don’t know whom to root for. It’s like a debate between Idi Amin and Castro; a fistfight involving Howard Cosell and Tom Snyder.
Both sides look like sleazes.
The players are like 16yearold rich kids who get everything they want and a lot they never asked for. If the kid wants to go swimming, the parents buy a mansion next to the beach. When the kid says his feet hurt, a Mercedes shows up in the driveway.
And the owners are like all those whacko rich parents you read about: they open up checking accounts for their children when they reach the age of seven, give them cars and $15,000 for gas money, and apologize when little Dexter throws a tantrum after he is asked to sweep up all the cocaine on the floor of his bedroom.
But the root of the strike is truly American. It all began in a courtroom. Everything in this country now either begins or ends in front of a judge.
The whole nation is one big legal mess: from busing to baseball, from marriage to municipal employment, human beings no longer talk to each other without the aid and encouragement of those modern robber barons called lawyers.
Without the consent of a hocuspocus industry called the law, kids cannot pray in school, parents cannot do what they feel is best for the health of a daughter, and the list goes on and on. Why should sports be different?
A few years ago, a couple of ballplayers who had grown tired of being treated like property did not sign new contracts with their teams. The courts agreed with them when the ballplayers claimed they were free to sign with anyone willing to pay for their services. The owners fought this for a bit, and then they fell in love with the concept.
Soon, mediocre banjo hitters and pitchers unable to break a pane of glass with their fastball were on the open market. Not owned by any club, they went with the highest bidder.
The bidding is ridiculous. It helped make the sport a joke while putting huge sums into players’ pockets. Human nature and common sense dictate that when one man offers you a million dollars to cross the street while another man says he’ll give you a dime to stay where you are, you cross the street.
The players took the money. If they did not, they would have become candidates for a lengthy stay at the Menninger Clinic.
The owners have been turning profits for years off the backs of players and those naive fans who thought baseball was still a sport instead of the tax gimmick it is today. Owners could get through the year better without nine healthy ballplayers than they could without an accountant.
Now, having witnessed the almost ludicrous spiraling of costs, the owners are asking the players to help them stop the madness. “Please make us stop handing out money,” the owners are saying to the players.
Tell me it is not a great country when a Skip Lockwood is handed half a million bucks to prove that he can not play baseball. Without stupid owners, he would have been a greenskeeper five years ago.
Tell me we are not living in a screwedup society when Dave Winfield gets $20 plus million from the Yankees to play a game. And tell me you wouldn’t take the money and run if it were offered to you.
All of it is more than enough to make you sick.
The players have wealth, opportunities, and marvelous and hard won benefits, and yet they cannot sit in a room with management to work things out. And the other side, truly a collection of snakes, makes money hand over fist through sophisticated writeoff schemes and tax shelters and still has the gall to act like the injured party when, in fact, it started the madnesss.
Both sides stink. Both are bums.
Both have forgotten where their livelihood comes from: the poor stiff who, until recently, thought the bible of baseball was The Sporting News and not the minutes of the National Labor Relations Board.
The bottom line is that a bunch of bungling lawyers, a bunch of spoiled ballplayers, and a bunch of arrogant chiselers who think of baseball as a business first, last and forever have stolen our summer. They made a game into a legal brief. They took a nice, soft, pleasant part of America and turned it into a big, fat headache.
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