by David Beck
EEEEEE!Contributing Editor
Installment 1 -- October 25, 1997
I'd barely finished what was supposed to be the final chapter of my polemic against the evils of free agency when I couldn't help but get the itch to again challenge more of the moronic things I see happening in the world of sports, particularly in Major League Baseball.
Recently Gregg brought up something that I had briefly mulled over: turning "Free Agency Is #!*%@#*!%#*&#!" into an ongoing discourse of continuous installments, frequently providing updates on relevant current sports events and opinions and addressing them appropriately.
This is my attempt at giving that a go.
I don't know how often I'll add something new, but looking at the climate of professional sports today, it will be often enough. This project is, without question, something that requires its own website, but until I become more computer literate (and can afford it!), I hope to piggyback on EEEEEE! for a while. The relevance it has to the San Francisco Giants is something I have exhaustively detailed in "Free Agency is #!*%@#*!%#*&#!," so I feel no need to have to justify taking up Gregg's valuable web space for my rantings and ravings.
When I do get online, I will definitely then be able to address directly any questions, comments and concerns readers would have. In the meantime, I hope you will be a regular visitor and feel free to share your thoughts with Gregg at his e-mail address, gregg@EEEEEEgp.com.
If you have looked at "Free Agency is #!*%@#*!%#*&#!," then you should have a general idea of where I stand. Before I restate that stand, let me give you an brief idea of who I am, so that you may discover a little of why I feel the way I do.
I am currently a high school teacher living in Southern California. Yes, my home is about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, and I actually love it here. It is indeed very difficult to endure constant Dodger blithering from the media and elsewhere, but I consider that I am doing my duty behind enemy lines. It is heartening, though, to see -- more frequently than you'd think -- people with Giants caps or bumper stickers, and I have two close friends at church who are rabid Giants fans.
I teach U.S. History to eleventh-graders during the school year, and during the summer I teach economics and U.S. government to twelfth-graders. I received my bachelor's degree in Social Sciences with an American Studies emphasis at San Francisco State University, and I am currently working on my master's in Leadership Studies at Azusa Pacific University. I am married to a wonderful, beautiful woman and I have two bright, terrific sons: one is a ninth-grader and another is 15 months old.
My primary sports interests are in professional football, basketball, and baseball. I could not care less about most everything else. I do enjoy college basketball because I like the Kansas Jayhawks, and the year-end tournament is always surprisingly exciting. But stuff like college football, ice hockey, and soccer (the most stunningly boring sport on earth) can take a hike. I spend most of my physical activity playing basketball in city and church leagues.
I can't complete any description of my person without mentioning that I am a Christian and regularly attend Vineyard Christian Fellowship; yes, I am one of those lamebrains who is in church Sunday mornings even if there is a big game on. I do certainly get riled in my animosity toward free agency, but I understand that it too comes under God's sovereignty and whatever lunacy I see out there, I am always encouraged to know that His justice will prevail in the end.
I was born near Kansas City, and much of my family lives out there, so as passionate as I am about the Giants, I am as much so for the NFL Chiefs. The second greatest sports experience I ever had was seeing a Chiefs game at Arrowhead Stadium.
Most of my childhood, however, was spent living in Salinas, a town about 100 miles south of San Francisco. Gregg and I became friends while attending the same high school there.
I saw my first baseball game in person in 1971. My family had just returned from a vacation in Colorado and our plane arrived at SFO shortly before the Giants were to play the Cardinals that Saturday afternoon. I was overwhelmed by the great vastness of the stadium and the brilliant colors of the uniforms, the grass -- everything. This was nothing like what I saw on TV.
The Giants won the game and a couple of their stars hit homers -- I don't remember who; I think Mays or McCovey and Henderson or Dietz. From that point on, the Giants would be my team forever.
My dad took us to a few more Giants games over the next few years, and I tried to remember all the Giants who hit home runs in games we attended. I remember before one game with Dodgers my dad asked my brother and me to guess the score; I thought we'd win 3-2, and sure enough, we did. I went to some games with my Little League team, and I remember all the great stuff we would get sometimes: caps, helmets, even real baseball bats. Real ones.
Then came free agency.
It didn't affect me much then, for a number of reasons: I really didn't know any better, I didn't follow sports that closely, and free agency really didn't wreck sports to the extent that it does today.
The position I hold today is one about which I am obviously fiercely zealous:
Free agency is what is wrong with professional sports. So much so, I believe, that it will lead to its destruction. If anything, it will certainly turn sports into something very different -- and much worse -- than what we know now.
(Those of you lamenting the major leagues' proposed realignment and how it would irrevocably screw up baseball know what I'm talking about. As much as they are softening the blow by implementing mild realignment, free agency will make radical realignment inevitable. It will come.)
As much as I loathe free agency, one thing must be made clear, if it wasn't in my previous essays: I am not against players making as much money as they can.
I am against the virulently greedy aspect of that prevailing mentality and what it has done to sports. Few would disagree with me on that point, but this writing endeavor is about demonstrating that all the gymnastics by the Powers-That-Be to ameliorate the ruinous effects of free agency (salary cap, more advertising, etc.) does little to stop the spiraling trend toward disaster that awaits high-level professional sports, especially major league baseball.
The only way to prevent that is to end the charade of claiming that free agency and the character, integrity, and veracity of sports can work together; to expose it for the joke that it is; and to eliminate free agency altogether.
Furthermore, it is the objective of this forum to find a way that is totally and completely not free agency that will benefit everyone. I certainly spend a great deal of time ripping and shredding all the free agency stupidity there is out there, but as cynical as I am, I am not pessimistic. I do want to fully address anything and everything that will lead to solutions bringing the game back to where it should be.
A starting point in this undertaking is to state that free agency is not something that is untouchable and indispensable. If the Powers-That-Be had The Game Of Baseball in their best interests and meant it (yeah, I know, there will be some very hilarious parts here), then there is no reason they could not come up with something better than free agency. Something that is not free agency, in any way. And something with which, yes, the players and the owners get their truckloads upon truckloads of money without jerking the fans around.
I open this project today because recently the Los Angeles Times ran several pieces addressing free agency head-on. One of the benefits of living in Dodger country is that I read the Times and I can get a feel for the sentiment down here; too often it makes me want to hurl, but again, I'm faithfully carrying out my duty as a Giants fan in Dodger Country. The Times sports department's take on things is very provincial, and very opinionated. Most Times writers have that nauseating arrogance that is just too thick, and sure, every paper's sportswriters have it -- I'll just say that the Times is no different.
To begin with, on the front page of the entire paper was an article that described what a joke it is these days to sign top draft picks by major league teams. High picks are getting anywhere from $2 million to $10 million just for signing, with no guarantee that they'll even make it to the big league club. The question was, "Are they worth it?" Mega-agent Scott Boras was featured prominently, and he basically answered "No."
"No?" you cry? You thought he'd say "You betcha!"?
Well he didn't say "No" as in "No, they are not worth that much," but rather as in, "No, they are worth even more." Too bad there wasn't a picture of him with the piece because it certainly would have been accidentally hocked on. [I don't know how possible this is. I already theorize that Boras' reflection cannot be seen in mirrors, so can he even be photographed? -- GP]
There was indeed a flavor of, "What is the true market value of these guys?" and naturally everyone who contributed something to say hadn't the foggiest idea. The union guys and some players said, "Yeah, they should be getting it." Others said they shouldn't, including Angels top exec Tony Tavares, who referred to the whole free agency thing as "the moronic trap," as in "the salary demands start going through the roof and we all act like morons and just follow on up." That's paraphrased, but it's close enough. And accurate enough in describing what it is like.
What is not mentioned here is that one factor that is never really addressed in talking about this "market value" stuff, and that is simply that the nebulous "market value," whatever it may be, is still determined by one thing and one thing alone: the fans who purchase the game in some form or another.
This leads to the second newspaper piece of note, a striking contrast to this stuff about million-dollar high-school kids. It was Bill Plaschke's feature, splashed across the front of the sports section and titled, "For a Variety of Reasons, the 93rd World Series has been the Worst" with the word "Worst" in huge 60-point type.
The worst, Plaschke opines.
He goes on to write "with America yawning the national pastime needs a wake-up call" and proceeds to itemize all that is wrong with the Fall Classic and baseball in general.
No, it is not the free agency-infested major leagues that is ever at fault -- it is always "baseball" or, in this case, the World Series that gets the blame.
After citing how poor the ratings have been for this World Series, the first offense he notes is "bad matchup" and blames the wildcard and the long baseball season. Really, what he means is something he won't say and that no one will say, but that everyone knows:
Joe Fan wants to see a Dodgers-Yankees World Series. (Or some currently fashionable variation thereof, such as Braves-Orioles.) Come on, why did Jim Leyland in his famous postgame interview have to tell Joe Fan to take a hike, him and his whining about not getting to see the Braves, the Orioles, or the Yankees?
Plaschke's second problem is with "bad umpiring," and while he brings up all the standard complaints we've already heard dozens of times, he further gripes about umpires not getting the pitchers throwing the ball and batters getting into the box within a reasonable amount of time. Ironically, a letter-to-the-editor writer in the very same paper noted that the time that passes between innings averages nearly three minutes, when baseball's rules mandate a one-minute break. (The networks have a cow whenever an umpire begins an inning before coming out of a commercial.) [I believe the rules say that for broadcast purposes, breaks between innings must not exceed two minutes and 20 seconds. -- GP] That makes over 50 minutes total of advertising time in a nine-inning affair that a viewer must endure to help the players scream about how high their market value must be.
Plaschke's third complaint is "bad timing." The Series is played so late in the year, and nobody wants to see snow at the World Series, he supposes. Why? Who cares? In fact, I would think snow or some similar situation would make everything out there more of a challenge (both teams are at the same "disadvantage") and more fun to watch.
The fourth and last thing Plaschke mentions is that one thing that makes free agency so -- well, you know (it's late -- I can't think of the appropriately derogatory word, you think of one here for me) -- is television.
Television. The guy who runs NBC, Don Ohlmeyer, even said that he hoped the Series would be a four-game sweep so it wouldn't conflict with his "Must See" Thursday-night lineup. He apologized, but he almost had to, certainly in part to keep from continuing to look like an idiot. [Of course, the bell cannot be unrung. -- GP] Thing is, shortly thereafter, two different LA Times writers besides Plaschke expressed the thought along the lines of, "Yeah, but Ohlmeyer was right." I can hear Joe Fan a mile away: "Boo-hoo, this Series doesn't have the Dodgers or Yankees. What a dog it is, then."
Anyway, Plaschke complained about the job NBC was doing covering the Series. "Bad TV," he notes. Okay, so NBC is bringing it a little over the top. So what? It's the World Series for cryin' out loud.
Sorry, but none of these things make it "the worst." Again, the only reason Joe Fan is not watching it is because it is not Dodgers-Yankees, no matter how correctamundo Jim Leyland is regarding how much his team deserves to be there (it being a Team That Money Can Buy aside).
And the reason that Dave Fan is not watching it may very well be the same reason that many fans in the country are not watching it. And that is because they don't want to be treated as market value fodder for the greedy, moronic (Tony Tavares said it, not me) Powers-That-Be who by miles do not have the fans' best interest in mind, no matter how much they say they do.
So today, in the LA Times -- let's get this straight: In one part of the newspaper we got a story about how much 18-year-old kids should get paid to whack a small white ball with a wooden stick, and then in a different part of the same paper we got a story about how little the fans want to see these guys whack the small white ball with a wooden stick, even if they are a part of what is probably the greatest American sports showcase of them all.
Now, please, run that by me again....
EEEEEE! Contributing Editor David Beck is a history teacher at a Southern California high school. He has also taught social studies, math, government, and economics, as well as "Hydroelectricity and Silly Putty: Combining Them To Make Cool Explosions."