by Gerry Nicholls
Editor’s Note: If you haven’t heard the news, Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen landed in hot water recently when he praised former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Of course, his has caused a stir in south Florida. At any rate, this story reminded me of an column I wrote years and years go, that dealt with the issue of baseball and Castro. I’ve reproduced it here.
This may sound like crazy, old-fashioned cold war paranoia but I think Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has hatched a fiendish communist plot to destroy professional baseball in the United States.
O.K. so it definitely sounds like crazy, old-fashioned cold war paranoia. But hear me out.
First, you need to know that Castro is a big baseball fan who once even toyed with the idea of becoming a professional player. Then he discovered that throwing dissidents in jail was more fun than throwing out base runners.
But the point is Castro knows the game. He also knows that if he could somehow destabilize America’s national pastime, it would demoralize his great imperialist enemy. And as an added bonus, he would help keep Cuba’s own star ball players at home, some of whom, such as Yankee pitcher Orlando Hernandez, have risked their lives in leaky boats to escape Castro’s socialist paradise.
But what really got me thinking about a diabolical communist plot is the way baseball’s ordinarily capitalistic team owners are frantically pushing what can only be described as socialist economic model for their sport.
We constantly hear, for instance, the owners arguing about the need to enforce a “luxury tax” on richer teams and salary caps on players and how the leagues need to impose some sort of complicated revenue sharing scheme.
The owners say the “poorer” teams such as the Kansas City Royals and Montreal Expos can’t survive or even compete unless they get money extracted from the wealthier teams such as the New York Yankees.
It’s classic “Make the Rich Pay” socialist ideology. The kind of stuff only Castro, the North Koreans and the NDP still believe in.
I can only conclude that Castro has brainwashed the owners, maybe with some sort of spiked cigar. Who knows?
But what we do know is that this is one socialist revolution that the workers, — i.e. the players – are determined to fight off like a sinking slider.
The players’ union argues that players have a right to sell their skills to the highest bidder in an open and free market. (Imagine that a pro-free market union! Are you listening Buzz Hargrove?)
Anyway, the players say they are willing to go out on strike later in this season to defend their rights. The last time they struck back in 1994, it resulted in a cancelled World Series. This time it could result in the end of professional baseball as we know it.
Now that might not bother some people, but for baseball fans like me, who feel life is only worth living between the months of April and October, the prospect of no baseball is as bloodcurdling as facing another round of constitutional debates.
But it doesn’t have to happen.
In the first place, the baseball owners aren’t as poor as they make out to be.
A recent study by Forbes magazine, in fact, showed that the 30 major league baseball teams had an operating profit of $75 million. And according to Forbes, 20 of the 30 teams showed a profit last season.
Yet that’s not to say the owners don’t have a legitimate gripe about the economics of baseball. After all, something is wrong with the system when you pay a guy like Carlos Delgado of the Toronto Blue Jays a gazillion dollar a year for hitting a paltry .250.
But the answer to baseball’s financial woes won’t be found in “Das Kaptial.” Socialism simply doesn’t work. Just ask the Russians.
What will help, however, is more free enterprise.
After all, what baseball really faces is a supply and demand problem. Players command exorbitant salaries because quality free agents are in great demand but in short supply. Every year the 30 teams have to chase after the relatively small handful of players who have played out their contracts.
It’s this intense competition for stars which drives up salaries.
So what’s the answer?
Simple. Why not institute a policy requiring teams to sign players to just one-year contracts? This would mean that every year all 750 or so major leaguers would become free agents, able to sign up with any team. Unless everything my economics professor told me was a lie, as the supply of players goes up, the cost of players should go down.
And as an added benefit, the one year contract idea would end the all too common phenomenon of players taking it easy after signing a big, fat multi-year deal and then only turning it on again in the final year of their contract. Under my plan, every year would be the final year of their contract.
Of course, my plan might not be perfect, but in my view it’s the best way we have to save baseball and stop the Reds.
And I don’t mean the kind who play in Cincinnati.
(Gerry Nicholls is editor of Freedom Forum.)