Quote:
Originally posted by chopper816
baseball has become a joke. if babe ruth and players from back in the day were alive, theyd raise hell over the players of today. when they played, teachers made more than them. now, theyre getting 250 million dollar contracts, to play a game they wanted to play since childhood! i know a 162 game season is long, but football and hockey are higher risk sports and are more demanding than baseball, and you dont hear them crying and bitching over dumb things. the highest contract in football cant be over 70 million, and hockey has to be way less. they dont threaten to strike over stupid stuff thats a waste of time. i say they should be happy that theyre one of the lucky ones who play pro ball, theres many that want to and would play for free just for the opportunity.
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-Football's situation is the way it is because the owners essentially broke the union during a strike a few years back. So yeah, the NFL has had strikes and lockouts.
-Hockey's CBA runs out this season, and there has been no progress in labor negotiations, mostly b/c players want a larger slice of the pie - many feel a strike/lockout is 'inevitable'.
Baseball is not a perfect system, but negotiations actually went well this year and made steps toward making the playing field level.
BTW - it was more the owners screwing the players than the other way around . . . A-Rod might make $250MM over the next 10 years, but his boss is making even more off of him. This was about the owners limiting salaries to put more in their pockets than anything else.
To me, the bottom line is that sports are like any other occupation - striking or locking out is allowed by law, and so it happens. It's not exactly the same as the Teamsters going on strike over labor conditions, but there can be some parallels if one side is trying to screw over the other - it is simply made bizarre due to the ridiculously high pay scale it uses.