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Ecw Press - Bruce Dowbiggin

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108 pages

English

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Iconic baseball writer Bill James, in 1987, frustrated with MLB's labour stoppages and the decline of the minor leagues, wrote that the minors 'were an abomination... if you're selling a sport and the players don't care about winning, that's not a sport. That's a fraud... an exhibition masquerading as a contest.' Bill imagined a better model and proposed that, as opposed to limiting the number of teams in MLB to protect parity, a free market was capable of sustaining many more franchises - hundreds, even - if we would just allow it to sort out the level at which those cities might best compete. Cap in Hand goes a step further, arguing that a free market in sports teams and athletes once existed and could work again if the monopolists of MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL would simply relent from salary-restraint schemes and reserve-clause models that result in elite talent being spread as thinly as possible and mediocrity being rewarded via amateur drafts and equalisation payments. Cap In Hand a

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	18 octobre 2018
Nombre de lectures	2
EAN13	9781773052380
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0700€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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CAP IN HAND
How Salary Caps are Killing Pro Sports and Why the Free Market Could Save Them
BRUCE DOWBIGGIN with RYAN GAUTHIER

Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part 1: The Contracts that Shaped Professional Sport
1.1 Babe Ruth
1.2 Curt Flood
1.3 Catfish Hunter
1.4 Bobby Hull
1.5 Magic and Bird
1.6 Reggie White
1.7 Wayne Gretzky
1.8 Shaquille O’Neal
1.9 Alex Rodriguez
1.10 David Beckham
1.11 LeBron James
Part 2: Sports and the Law: The Fine Print
2.1 How Antitrust/Competition Law Works in Sports
2.2 If the Shoe Fits: Labor Law Applied to Sports
2.3 The Entry Draft
2.4 Free Agency Ain’t Free
2.5 So What the Heck Is a Salary Cap, Then?
2.6 Exceptions to the Cap
2.7 Cap Circumvention
2.8 Collusion
2.9 The Role of the Commissioner in All of This
2.10 If the Cap Don’t Fit . . .
Part 3: Bringing Back Real Competition
3.1 Rewarding Success, Not Failure
3.2 It’s My Parity and I’ll Cry If I Want To
3.3 A System You Can Bet On
3.4 Leveling the Playing Field by Restricting Free Agency
3.5 There’s a Draft in Here: The Amateur Draft Doesn’t Level Competition
3.6 Attempts to Rebalance the Draft
3.7 Moving Beyond the Draft
3.8 Too Beat to Compete: How Salary Caps Dumb Down Play
3.9 Innovate or Die: Unless You Have a Cap
3.10 Then There’s Soccer: The Benefits to a Non-Salary-Capped League
3.11 Does Parity Pay?
3.12 What About Soccer’s Corruption?
3.13 Okay, Smart Guys, What Would Work Better?
About the Author
Copyright

Preface
In 1987, baseball’s Boswell, Bill James, was frustrated with Major League Baseball’s labor stoppages and the decline of the minor leagues. Bill is frustrated a lot of the time. The inability to accept “given wisdom” produces much of his best work on sports (and crime, too). So he wrote an essay entitled “Revolution.” In this case, he thought the minor leagues as they existed (and still exist) “were an abomination in the sight of the Lord . . . if you’re selling a sport and the players don’t care about winning that’s not a sport. That’s a fraud. Minor league baseball today is exactly what the 1919 World Series was: a charade, a rip-off, an exhibition masquerading as a contest.”
He described how Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver used to distort the box scores he sent to the Baltimore Orioles because he was playing a prospect at first base. The Orioles wanted the prospect to play third base. So Weaver fibbed in the paperwork. As Bill writes, “Earl wanted to win” but, to do so, had to resort to subterfuge. “That’s a disgraceful situation.” Bill was no less disgusted with how leagues were shutting down their business every couple of years to argue about why the free market was not the best way to determine the value of a player’s compensation.
In his ire, Bill went looking for a better model that would allow folks in non-major-league cities to have a team that tried to win. Enter “Revolution.”
Bill proposed that, as opposed to limiting the number of teams in MLB to protect parity, the market was perfectly capable of sustaining many more teams than it does now. He thought it could run into the hundreds. Maybe as many as 240. (There was a lot of math involved the argument, but suffice to say, it involved the U.S. population being 240 million at the time.) All it might take was letting the free market sort out the level at which those cities might best compete.
In “Revolution,” he pointed out that a free market in sports teams and athletes existed at one time and could work as well again if the monopolists of MLB and the NFL, NBA and NHL would simply relent from their salary-restraint schemes and reserve-clause models. The piece is classic Bill: “At first there was no reserve clause. This was a sort of primordial soup for baseball, and the players would just drift from team to team as suited themselves.” He then described how today’s model of limited movement and mediocrity evolved as big cities subordinated smaller cities using a farm system that prioritized development over winning. Until the point where today — with the cooperation of player unions — elite talent is spread as thinly as possible at the major-league level, movement of players is grossly distorted and mediocrity is rewarded via amateur drafts and equalization payments.
None of this has to be, he pointed out, if teams could operate in their own interests, not the interests of the league. If a free market worked, you would have teams play at the level they could afford, players sold up the developmental food chain for profit and a dynamic incentive to improve. No salary caps, amateur drafts, Rule 5 drafts, recallable waivers or back-diving contracts. Just the noise of the free market.
Bill knew that Nellies like me would complain that this might not be very stable.
Competition isn’t always pretty. Teams would fold, go bankrupt sometimes, use near-naked usherettes in a cheap attempt to boost attendance, pull out in the middle of the night without paying their debts — all the things businesses do . . . Baseball would be less stable. It would change more rapidly than it ever has, in part because each league would be learning from the experiences of the other leagues. But it would be changing because it was growing, and it would be growing toward a baseball world that is larger, stronger, richer, more diverse and more fair to the fans. It can happen.
All it would take is for the U.S. Justice Department to revoke baseball’s antitrust exemption (more on this in the next sections). Order MLB to divest itself of its farm systems. And tell the player unions that they shouldn’t be subverting competition and labor law in collective bargaining. Let the baseball people go.
When I read “Revolution,” it was a transformative moment in how I looked at sports leagues. I had bought all the propaganda they put out about winning, stability, parity and how the restrictive systems they used were the only path to create a better sport. (Which was significant because I was working as a sports journalist at CBC at the time.) Even when they shut down their sports to create an even more pernicious system to crush market value, I saw it as the cost of doing business. Until Bill deconstructed my accepted notion of the sports industry, I had simply assumed this was the way it must be. To be competitive, the system had to be regulated to death. As I say, bullshit. From that day on, I’ve never looked at organized pro sports in the same fashion. That was also probably the day I started the move from being a liberal to a conservative.
(Ironically, when I asked Bill about the article in 2017, he couldn’t remember having written it. His online followers found it in a book called This Time Let’s Not Eat the Bones . Here, I’d been massively influenced by his insights into the dynamics of sports leagues, yet Bill couldn’t remember it. But when you have as much original thought flowing through your brain as Bill does, I suspect this happens occasionally.)
So yes, “Revolution” underpins this book. Like Bill, I look at the product sold to fans and see a pale copy of what it might be if the market could guide the best players to the best teams, whose ingenuity and innovation (hello, Bill Belichick) would then inspire everyone to do better and present a better show. As we’ll see, soccer (outside North America) comes closer to this model than anyone, and it’s taking over the world. That is, in part, because soccer has accepted that professional sports have moved beyond the restrictive covenants of the franchise model to a pursuit of an excellent TV/digital product for global consumption.
So here we go. In this book, I’m joined by Ryan Gauthier, a sports law expert who has written extensively on the issues in this book. Please welcome him to the fraternity of those looking to improve pro sports. Remember, anyone who thinks parity is a thing should be made to watch the NHL All-Star Game on a tape loop.
Bruce Dowbiggin, 2017

Introduction
Russell Wilson might be the most recognizable and successful player in the NFL. The quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks has led them to a Super Bowl win and regular playoff appearances in his first five seasons in the Seahawks uniform. Because of his commercials, Wilson is instantly recognizable to tens of millions of football fans. His dating life is the stuff of non-sports curiosity, too. His divorce and subsequent relationship with singer Ciara have engaged people who might not know a thing about sports.
Wilson is the ideal package for the media-savvy NFL. And the league is doing everything it can to turn him and his Seahawks into losers.
Jonathan Toews is the star captain of the Chicago Blackhawks. A three-time Stanley Cup champion, he embodies all the virtues that the NHL loves in a player. Hard work, success and charitable ventures off the ice — Toews couldn’t be more perfect for a league always short on star power. He’s bilingual, too, speaking English and French flawlessly.
The NHL should want one hundred Toewses in the league. But it does everything it can to make sure that he doesn’t win another Stanley Cup.
Steph Curry, the star of the Golden State Warriors, is the face of the modern NBA. He’s revolutionized the game with his outside shooting, defying the traditional notion of the NBA as a big man’s league where titles are supposedly won under the hoop. Boyish, but with a killer’s eye in big games, he’s taken the Warriors to the NBA Finals multiple times, winning in 2015. He holds the record for most three-point shots made, breaking Ray Allen’s record of 269 with 272 in 2012–13, 286 in 2014–15 and a mind-boggling 402 in t