No one has ever confused baseball players with Harvard Ph.D.’s. In retrospect, their lack of intelligence has cost them dearly.
In 2003 Major League Baseball tested players for performance-enhancing drugs for the first time. Players, however, were not subject to disciplinary action if they tested positive. They wouldn’t even be identified if they tested positive. This initial testing was for survey purposes only.
Major League Baseball officials bristle at the suggestion that the owners are playing games again with free agents. No one actually is accusing the owners of the kind of games that cost them $280 million for conspiring against free agents in the 1980s, but the slow pace of the free agent market and the number of free agents who remain unsigned as pitchers and catcher prepare to begin spring training next weekend raise questions in some people’s minds. My mind is one of them.
Last week in this space I offered a theory to explain the platoon of unsigned players. Although club officials cite the economy as the primary reason, I wrote, they may be using the economy as a cover for leaving veteran players jobless. Their real aim, I suggested, could be to have an impact on future free agents, making them think they better sign quickly for less money than they might want or face the danger of going jobless, too.
There they go again, those agents of government who believe they are above everyone and everything else. Negotiated, legal agreements mean nothing to them. Major League Baseball and its players union learned that several years ago. Baseball teams and corporations with which they have agreements are learning it now.
Dennis Kucinich, a Democratic Congressman from Ohio, wants Citigroup to break its naming-rights agreement with the Mets and take back its $20 million a year because it is receiving bailout money from Washington. And if the parties won’t dissolve their agreement voluntarily Kucinich wants the U.S. Treasury Department to terminate it.
