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Bruce Dowbiggin

MLB Economics: Ten Pounds of Sand In A Five-Pound Bag

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One might think that, in times fraught with Covid-19, civil unrest and schism politics, the people entrusted with diverting the population for a while might put aside their differences to supply a little entertainment.

If you think this you have not met the people in Major League Baseball. Instead of watching the debate in Parliament the past few days we might have been poring over the first reports from spring training in Florida and Arizona. We might have been speculating if this is the year the Blue Jays return to the World Series for the first time since 1993. But it’s not happening.

That’s because the owners and players in #MLB have chosen this time to resume their periodic border war over the economy of the sport. Since Curt Flood and Catfish Hunter led the way to free agency in baseball in the 1970s, the owners have been pining to restore the previous balance when they paid players as they pleased, and the stars of baseball were forced to accept.

More to the point, MLB once more wishes to crush the MLB Players Association, the most powerful of the pro sports unions. The unions in NHL, NBA and NFL have been smashed by owners in those sports, allowing for salary-cap regimes that range from draconian to merely intrusive. Getting MLBPA to submit has been a longterm goal for baseball owners as a result.

But repeated labour stoppages soured the public on baseball, culminating in the disastrous 1994 cancellation of the World Series (with the Montreal Expos set to win.) Since that blunder baseball kept its labour disputes from disrupting regular season games That idyll ended in the most recent prior dispute between MLB and the players’ union in 2020 as players and teams debated how to restructure a season affected by Covid-19.

But the temptation to squabble is too strong, and so owners want to again try the solidarity of players, locking them out last December. This time the the league and the union are at loggerheads over compensation for young players and limitations on tanking— losing on purpose to receive higher selections in the amateur draft. They are dealing with a situation where 10 players are making more than $33 million a year while the average salary stood at $4.17 million U.S. in 2021. And this offends many in the business.

Because, as we say in our book Cap In Hand (brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-capinhand.aspx) owners want to talk like capitalists but act like socialists. Their challenge in trying to expand their leagues to 30-plus teams— while assuring competitive balance— is that getting small markets Pittsburgh, Milwaukee or Kansas City to compete on an ongoing basis for free agents with New York, Chicago for Los Angeles is a fool’s errand.

To paraphrase an old expression, it’s like trying to put ten pounds of sand into a five-pound bag. Yes, there are smaller markets— notably the Tampa Bay Rays— who have found ways to circumvent their financial handicaps. But the dynamics of consistently winning a World Series or even making the playoffs are monumental. For that reason owners are seeking an expanded postseason which would allow 14 of the league’s 30 teams to reach the playoffs.

The current success of the LA Dodgers ( 3 NL pennants in five years) set against the systemic failure of Pittsburgh (with just one postseason win since 2010) highlights the frustration for owners and fans alike who wish to chase the unicorn of parity. The idea that any team can win on any given Sunday still has its adherents.

But this latest lockout speaks to the futility of the franchise model. The consumer has changed and the means of distributing the product has changed with it. The problem, as we point out in Cap In Hand, is that “no longer does a league need a team in every town to spread its product. Soccer has demonstrated that the sports world has morphed from the overstocked inventories of the franchise model to one based on matchups of elite teams populated by elite players.

“Without a salary cap, the beautiful game has allowed for the growth of super teams in smaller leagues. There is no parity in soccer, just the unending quest for the best product possible. As a result, the sport has finally made a breakthrough in North America.”

The breakdown of the conventional media delivery system, betting and the potential for profit has made all sports global. Fans/ bettors in Europe or Asia want to see the best teams, not Pittsburgh versus Milwaukee on a Tuesday night. What becomes of those teams? Don’t eliminate them the way the Expos were vaporized. Simply have teams play at the financial level they can afford. Concentrate the best players in the markets that can afford them. Have relegation and promotion.

Until the owners in MLB— and the other sports— grasp this simple proposition we are doomed to this cycle of defying market economics in the service of salary caps. Hope that keeps baseball fans warm till MLB cranks up again toward the end of April.

 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Hyperbole Is Dead. Big Brother Killed Him

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Antietam, Maryland: On Sept 17, 1862, the combined forces of the Union Army (under George McLellan) and the Confederate army (under Robert E. Lee) met on sleepy farmland west of Washington. When the ten hours of vicious fighting was done, there was an appalling 22,717 casualties. It still stands as the most lethal day in American military history.

History records it as a draw, although the Union army stopped an attack by Lee’s 30,000-man army on the U.S. capital. Walking the rolling lands alongside the Potomac River with Matthew Brady’s grisly photographic record in mind a modern visitor would ask how did it come to this slaughter? What issue was so divisive that it led to this?

The issue as seen today was slavery, although the Confederates would say it was states’ rights. From the day the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence the issue of slavery pointed to that day in 1862. Attempts to reconcile the issue of the South’s dependence on slavery produced failed compromises (The Great Compromise of 1787) and the creation of the Republican Party.

It all failed. The reason? For 75 years, the two sides divorced themselves from one another, demonizing and distancing in escalating rhetoric and political corruption. With the election of Abraham Lincoln, an abolition-sympathetic Republican, war was on. Before it ended in 1865 there were 828,000 Union casualties while the South experienced 864,000 casualties. There were almost a million civilians and free slaves left dead as well.

This ominous historical note is relevant today as the two sides in the American and Canadian debate slide inexorably toward a schism. With a presidential election this November and a Canadian federal election likely next year, the sides have given up on policy. Oh, they still make a show of plans for the economy. Or housing. Or the military.

But the real battlefield is the war on information. Who will be censored? Who will write history? As a picture of intolerance it has reached DefCon 4. No better example exists than the hissy-fit from employees of the NBC News department at the attempt to hire Rona McDaniel, former RNC chairwoman as an employee. The sanctimonious stars of NBC and MSNBC news— several of them Obama-era employees or Democratic fundraisers— launched a collective insurrection against the hire, saying McDaniel was a purveyor of lies and disinformation in the service of Beelzebub aka Donald Trump.

Never mind that Racial Maddow and Joyless Reid and Chuckles Todd spent the past eight years carrying water for Hillary Clinton’s demented RussiaGate and Hunter Biden’s laptop hoax. Former Republican Joe Scarborough spoke of the “sacred trust” with viewers as grounds for forcing NBC to fire McDaniel after about 48 hours.

No one is now allowed to pollute the minds of Morning Joe viewers. A narrative is a narrative, and no niece of Mitt Romney is getting in the way of that carefully crafted line as we head to November. Trump World is a cesspool of Nazis and enemies of democracy, and they’re going to play that card.

Viewers of last Sunday’s 60 Minutes saw a more subtle version of demonizing the other. In the fusty Tiffany Network style they introduced  Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington and a leader of a “misinformation research group” created ahead of the 2020 election. Who gave her that title is left to the listeners’ imagination.

Naturally Ms. Starbird did a hit job on Jim Jordan and the GOP. Naturally, 60 Minutes neglected to mention Starboard is a longtime Democrat donor and foot soldier in the 2024 Biden Army. Naturally, the divide was widened further. The effect was achieved. Anyone voting Trump is a dedicated Nazi.

It will only ramp up from here because, with no successes to brag about and Biden’s polls plunging, fear is king. (Adding Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to siphon left-wing votes is another threat.) They know Biden is a millstone in efforts to eradicate Trump. And 40 percent of the U.S. population thinks this is reality, much the way the opposing sides at Antietam saw the devil across the Bloody Ditch and Antietam Bridge.

The federal Liberals in Canada have been paying attention. With polls that even Biden would faint over, Justin Trudeau is ramping up the disinformation dodge with the same fervour as the MSNBC fainting goats. Skippy has added a little Russian sauce to his equation, claiming that Putin has Conservative leader Pierre Polievre in his control, manipulating the public to abandon Ukraine.

How Ukraine figures in Canada’s national interest isn’t explained, but if Canadians elect the Tories next year Western society will collapse, pace Trudeau. The PM’s lightweight posse is jumping in, too. Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, who applauds Nazis in Parliament, is predicting a bleak future for the country unless the evil-thinkers to the Right are brought under control.

Hence Bill-63, the Liberal/ NDP diktat to criminalize WrongThink on the internet and what’s left on the traditional media. Not only in the run-up to what may be the Waterloo for Trudeau and NDP fashion model Jagmeet Singh. Freeland’s bill gives faceless bureaucrats the right to criminalize future behaviour as well. Holy Karnak!

There will be many attempts to pretend that permanently silencing the opponent is not the key issue of 2024-2025. Don’t believe them. People who just a few years ago laughed at the images of Mao’s purges in the Cultural Revolution now have succumbed to a new Little Red Book. They praise their heroes Obama and Clinton and demand jail for Trump. Hyperbole is dead. Big Brother killed him.

circa 1970: Chinese Red Guards reading from the little red book of Thoughts of Chairman Mao before starting their day. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

From Hall of Fame To Hall of Shame? Shohei Faces Banishment

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Holy Backtrack, Batman. With MLB Opening Day— the North American, not Korean version— days away, the sport’s biggest star is up to the bill of his new L.A. Dodgers cap in gambling controversy. Turns out that interpreter Ippei Mizuhara, Shohei Ohtani’s closest companion since coming to North America in 2018, has committed “massive theft” and stolen a reported sum of at least $4.5 million to pay off debts to an alleged illegal bookmaker.

At least that is one story. There are others. After the Dodgers’ first of two games in Seoul last week, Mizuhara admitted that his buddy Ohtani had “loaned” him $4.5 million to pay off a gambling debt which has a paper trail to California and possibly Japan. Sooner than you can say Cy Young, Ohtani’s lawyers said, nay, nay… he didn’t lend anything to Ippei, and Ohtani is severing his relationship with him.

(Which is just as well, because the Dodgers were firing Mizuhara already.) Then Mizuhara did a complete reversal, telling ESPN that Ohtani had no knowledge of his gambling debts, and that Ohtani had not transferred money to a bookmaking operation in California, where there is no legal gambling. About this time someone got to Mizuhara and told him it might be a good idea if he 黙って (Japanese for damare or STFU).

Friday, reports emerged showing large amounts being bet in Japan on games played by Ohtani and his lousy performance in those games. While no one has been able to say the bets were placed by the pitcher or those around him, there are a few games that look highly suspicious. Monday, Ohtani sought to distance himself from his former buddy.

What is undeniable is that payoff money came from Ohtani’s account. And that for almost five years, a gambling addict had complete access to the inner workings of the California Angels dressing room. What injury insights and insider knowledge might Ippei Mizuhara have traded for gambling debts or favours? MLB and the police say they are investigating, but if it can be shown the Ohtani had any betting interest in his own team or other MLB games he will— based on the Joe Jackson and Pete Rose examples— be banned for life from MLB.

Also, are these stories exposing Ohtani about something else? Some believe the allegations may be revenge for Ohtani signing a friendly contract that backloads most of his compensation till after he retires— thereby depriving tax-hungry California of hundreds of millions in taxes.  Finally, why was MLB, which purports to have a security department, caught flat-footed here, and why are they only “gathering information”? Not a good look on any of these fronts for a business already struggling to re-capture lost audience share.

For those who like comedy we can only hope this mess has the entertainment value of the NHL when its greatest star ever was caught gambling with a shady character outside Philly. Okay, Wayne Gretzky never bet on sports , which was then illegal everywhere in North America outside Las Vegas. Never. Perish the thought.

When the Gretzky story broke in 2006 we were informed by people throughout hockey—including many sniffers in the sports media who still have jobs— that it was Wayne’s wife Janet and his pal Rich Tocchet who had the gambling problem. The walls around No. 99 went up quickly to protect him. There was concern about Gretzky’s eligibility to manage the 2006 Olympic mens hockey team.

VANCOUVER, BC – OCTOBER 20: Head coach Wayne Gretzky and assistant coach Rick Tocchet (R) of the Phoenix Coyotes discuss a play during their game against the Vancouver Canucks at General Motors Place on October 20, 2005 in Vancouver, Canada. The Canucks defeated the Coyotes 3-2. (Photo by Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images)

For weeks the police and the NHL did a dance around the Gretzkys, placing most of the blame on Tocchet as the point man who financed and placed bets. Much was made of No. 99’s simon-pure record, even though wiretaps later showed his knowledge of the scheme and of Janet’s “involvement”.

Janet, who was taking the heat for hubby, later whined to Chatelaine Magazine. “It’s unfair that Wayne and I have had a great marriage for 20 years and a nice family, and the people in the media could care less if they are trying to cause friction in your marriage, trouble in your family, and make your kids feel a certain way. That was a little hurtful, because it was like, ‘Why? What have we ever done to you?’”

Um, as the wife of a hockey legend, you were, at the very least, dealing with illegal gambling when any such activity at the time was strictly verboten in the NHL and with the cops. That’s what you did. Your marriage had nothing to do with it.

Just to prove that Gretzky is not the type to get involved with the sleaze of gambling he immediately signed up to advertise sports betting as soon as it became legal in 2022. He’s done commercials with Connor McDavid yukking it up over parlays and teasers. He’s the hockey face of legal gambling. But he’s not a gambler.

This story was never going to be told straight in 2006 with Gretzky’s name involved. He’s just too big in Canada to be taken down for a silly betting scheme with a few goombahs in Tony Soprano’s old Jersey neighbourhood. You could tell by the indignation of Team Gretzky in the day that they were calling in their markers… er, discussing the issue with friendly media on burying the story.

MLB can just hope that it has enough lackeys of its own in the press and friends in the DOJ to keep the Japanese Babe Ruth out of trouble. But the bases are full and the runners will be in motion with the next pitch

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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