Source: www.sportsnet.ca --- Wednesday, November 23, 2016
Relax. This isn’t 1994; there’s no way the powers that be will kill spring training, let alone Opening Day of the 2017 Major League Baseball season. The issues aren’t serious enough and the tone not draconian enough. It’s a $10 billion industry – $10 billion, 10 times what it was in 1994! – with an average salary of $4 million and thanks to the NFL caving in to its moral vacuum and a monolithic presence on the internet, Baseball is positioned to claw back some of the three decades of ground lost in North America’s sports consciousness. MLB has flourished as a regional sports product and it even has blind luck going for it, in the form of strength in major markets. Plus, the World Baseball Classic is scheduled for this spring – an event that operates as a formal partnership between owners and players. Of course, Donald Trump was never going to be president, either. What struck me as remarkable about the reaction to Tuesday’s report by Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports that owners were thinking of voting to lock out players if a new collective bargaining agreement isn’t reached by Dec. 1 is how used we’ve all become to labour peace in Baseball; how we’ve become accustomed to no news being good news just as the two previous CBAs materialized out of thin air. As one long-time, former player agent told me on Tuesday after Rosenthal’s report came out: “You’ve all gone soft. This used to be par for the course – one side leaks one thing, the o ...
from Baseball http://ift.tt/2ghbhsb
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