I feel the resentment towards players has to start with people that are jealous they don’t have the talent/skill to play the game to get paid a good wage
I also always find it odd that they hate the players but have no issue with the no talent owners making money off their backs for a game making way much more money
I'm always shocked when people are surprised that fans identify with ownership.
Most fans are routing for the team over the players. The players come and go. The team is the team. The fans want to see the games. The players are literally replaceable b/c they are every year. Most people only watch their team and maybe some highlights.
Most fans do not understand how much money is the game. It is only made worse by the constant think pieces about how baseball is dying.
There is some "truth" in both of these statements - the problem is that society as a whole (including baseball fans) has become so polarized that they only read or see what they choose to, and this leads to discussions about whether you "side" with the players or owners turning into useless arguments. Picking a side makes it impossible to see the forest for the trees.
Goldfly's earlier statement that owners haven't made counterproposals is just factually wrong - they just haven't offered what the players are willing to accept. The owners have offered to...
1.) Raise the minimum salary.
2.) Create a pool to pay arbitration-eligible and pre-arb players substantially more money based on performance.
3.) Create a draft lottery in the hopes it will somehow limit tanking.
4.) Adopt the universal DH.
5.) Only expand the playoffs to 12 teams if that's as far as the players are willing to go.
As I mentioned some time back, that grouping of concessions is WORLDS better than what the players have received in the last two CBAs combined, yet apparently that's not enough. Even Enscheff admitted that that was a pretty good start and that while they probably needed to hash out just how much the minimum salary gets raised and just how big that performance pool becomes and how it's paid out, there should have been optimism because it looked like the owners weren't being completely unreasonable.
I could see a reply from the players saying that the pool for paying younger players that aren't eligible for free-agency shouldn't be finite - that's too much like a hard cap. I think that would be a legitimate point. Make it a sliding scale where those arb-eligible and pre-arb guys get rewarded a percentage more than their previous season's salary based on awards or a certain WAR production floor and you'd be onto something. Instead, the players simply said they weren't interested.
Am I "jealous" of someone who gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to play a game? *amn right I am, and anyone that says they're not is simply lying through their teeth - that's human nature. The statement I made about the owners being full of *hit was ignored because he wanted to paint me as "pro-ownership" - which I'm not. Reasonable people who haven't picked a side - mainly because it doesn't really affect them either way - are like me. Unfortunately today's political climate has made it almost impossible to attempt to be reasonable without being attacked by someone who has chosen a particular side.
The simple fact is that the only side that has been willing to negotiate thus far has been ownership - the players haven't budged one bit and looked for compromise at all. If they'd say - "You know what? If you're willing to raise the minimum salary to $700K, we'd be willing to reduce our demand for this or that." they'd be negotiating (giving up something to get something they want more for those who are confused about what negotiating means). They've just said "Nope - that won't work." and walked away from the table.
