By Richard McIlroy
January 20 2018

This time next year instead of counting down to Opening Day as we are now, we could be facing a Baseball free summer. Will the fans wear another labour disagreement though so soon after the last one in 1994. And if there is a stand off who should carry the can?

[Originally published March 7, 2001]

The spectre of a season long lock-out is haunting Baseball once more. Padlocked ball-parks and fractious negotiations could once more be the main images of the season, as players and owners lock horns in another tedious labour dispute. There is no doubt that Baseball needs to find an even keel, players wages are too high and the game cannot support them, but who is to blame?

Well is it the players for demanding silly money? The owners for paying them and not standing up for themselves? What about the players again though for holding the owners over a barrel?…. oh who knows!!

Lets just look at some figures: Alex Rodriguez $252m over 10 years, Manny Ramirez $160m over 8 year, Frank Thomas grumbling over his $85m contract.

Commissioner Bud Selig has seen it all before and admits that things have to change. “The problems we are facing are so pervasive and complex that its going to take myriad solutions at every level.” He continued. “We have to change the way we do business from top to bottom.”

Can the game stand another strike, it only just recovered from the last one which wiped out the 1994 World Series, fans are only so loyal and their sympathy may not automatically fall with the players, who they see getting greedier and greedier with their sport.

Dodgers outfielder Shawn Green ($14m a year) summed up the feeling and the fears when he said, “Somewhere along the line the players have to sit back and say, ‘we’ve got a pretty good deal here, why would we want to screw it up.”

But screw it up is what they look as if they are just about to do.