Posted on 08/24/2002 12:00:21 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
A week ago, the Baseball Union set a strike date for the end of the month. The baseball players have shown that they're not playing around when they vow to strike, because there have been eight strikes in baseball in the past 30 years.
This has to do with, of course, money. A new economic system is being proposed for Major League Baseball, but the players are worried about their salaries being cut if this system is put in place. Presto, the automatic solution is to quit working.
The planning of a strike on the 30th -- and another World Series canceled -- is upsetting to me and many other baseball fans.
You have to understand: I grew up on the baseball field, with my brother playing baseball and my sister playing softball. I started playing – T-Ball at least – when I was four, but even before then, I was playing in the dirt somewhere at a game.
In recent years, I have played competitive baseball. My siblings and I have all been on competitive teams and traveled across the country to play in tournaments where a 100+ teams participated.
Not only have I been around baseball my entire life, I've supported Major League Baseball by watching the games on television, traveling far distances to MLB games, as well as buying a lot of baseball paraphernalia. My favorite team has always been the losing Chicago Cubs and I've never once wanted the Yankees to win a game.
My dad is a baseball fanatic, as is my sister, my brother and myself – even my mother likes to watch baseball and follows the games.
The game of baseball is one of the smartest, difficult and most complex games ever created. Abner Doubleday invented the game in the 1830s and the complexities still boggle the mind of players and fans.
A small ball is thrown up to and sometimes over 100 miles per hour to a batting plate 60 feet away, where a batter with a thin bat has to move his hips, bring the bat around, find the ball, and generate enough bat speed to meet the bat with the ball – this is all done in less than a second.
However, that description is just a tiny fraction of what comes into play with the game of baseball. Yet, even just that complex, nine players must work together to win at this game. No wonder baseball is America's pastime.
Sadly, the game has come from a time where players were loyal to their managers, teams and teammates, to a day and age of greed – and it has nearly come to a point where money is the only tangible factor that comes into play when players makes decisions on which team to play.
After all the players have been blessed with over the years, more is still demanded. They're worried about a cut in pay raises, but I was under the impression that a million dollars in one year was more than enough money for anyone.
The blessings that they have received are all from the baseball fans. Therefore, they owe it to the fans to do whatever it takes to prevent a strike. But money is everything to these guys.
The baseball strike is set for the end of the month. I hope the strike is called off – not only for the benefit of the fans, but also for the benefit of the players, because many fans won't come back.
I have supported baseball for as long as I have been able to, but what do I get back in return? A slap in the face by greedy people who play a children's game as a source of income.
If indeed, the baseball players do strike, I vow that as of the strike date, I will never watch, read, or have anything to do with Major League Baseball until this generation of players are gone. Will you join me?
Greed has taken over the game and it's a sad sight.
Why does nobody mention this?
Pretty much sums up why I refuse to subsidize baseball and why football is rapidly losing it's appeal to me.
I think once the teams became a group of hired contractors the concept of them being a "team" didn't really click with me. I'd like to think of a team like the Chicago "Bears" being a group of guys who love Chicago, play out of pride and provide a real and tanigible return to the community that supports them. How? By being decent citizens for starters.
But now that I've returned from fantasy-land, I know it just doesn't work that way anymore. Still, it just feels dirty watching a group of hired contractors rather than a team. I don't feel like subsidizing a known felon who'd sell his mother for another 200G and doesn't give a damn about the city and people his team allegedly represents.
Maybe a lot of people feel that way.
I used to be so into the tactics (my love was football, but the same thing is happening there so it's a valid point for discussion), but the other aspects of what was happening with football began to taint how I felt about it. Man, there used to be only a few things that felt better than whopping a guy at full speed in full pads on the field. Who the hell cared where the ball was? Nowadays it takes an effort to get involved, which is sad. I really loved the sport.
The current financial structure of both football and baseball have not helped to make them any more appealing to fans.
Ted Williams won't have a problem boycotting games from now on. He has frozen his position on this issue.
Oh really, then why do the players insist on a minimum salary of almost $400K. If players want a free market, then why not allow players to sign for $100K if they wish. If baseball players were worth what they are being paid, clubs would be making money, which very few are. Baseball is a mess and it is utterly stupid for baseball players to strike since they already make more than the revenues they produce. The game will be ruined and everybody will lose. Oh well, I like pro Football and college basketball much better.
I will say both sides are entirely withing their rights to do whatever they do. However as fans we are entirely within our rights to reject the whole &^%$&*( bunch of them.
I suppose I could agree with you if we were talking about cops or firemen or hospital employees or some other basic group of hard working Americans.
But professional sports are GAMES. The cost of paying these jocks multi-million-dollar salaries has jacked up ticket prices to the point where a lot of people can't afford to attend a pro game but once a year if at all.
There is greed on both sides but the owners,like investors everywhere, are the ones taking the original risk.
Some 17yr old kid in Vermont just finished high school and the Red Sox gave him $300,000 just for signing on for a two year comittment.
If he does well, the rest of his classmates can look forward (under the present scenario) to shelling out a hundred bucks to see him pitch.
Most of the baseball, basketball and football players are level headed guys but there are too many jerks who think a mega salary entitles them to behaving like fools.
I've been a fan since the mid-40s when a guy like Dave "Boo" Ferris (just elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame) went 9-0 for the Red Sox at the start of a season for something like $10,000.
Guys like Pesky, Doerr, Malzone, Ted, Dom D were heroes for a kid to look up to. Today, we've got too many Clemens, Everetts and jerks advertising Viagra.
I recently heard one intellectually-challenged jock saying somehting to the effect: "it's not for us..it's for the kids coming up, just like the last strikes were for us at that time."
Yeh, right! You really needed that second Mercedes.
Ok, I'm a P.O.'d old fart and you can shoot all the economic holes you want in my argument..but..if they can't play ball I can't be bothered wasting any time on the prima donnas any more.
I'll pull a Rosey Grier and take up knitting.
I'd like to see the marketplace determine salaries. Just like the most prestigous corporations can pay the big bucks to get the most talented CEOs or researches, the most financially successful baseball teams can pay more. Heck, I'd even like to see the draft go. If it just keeps going on its own, even the richest teams will bankrupt themselves by giving ridiculous salaries to nearly over the hill superstars. And we'll keep preferring the David and Goliath scenerios where the less known and well paid players go out and get it done.
I would think that this time round the players are smarter than their union and realize that a strike will abort a lot of their careers.
To get skilled help, the owners can't help being involved in a bidding war to sign up a potential player.
The owners invested in baseball because they love the game too! They would like at least to recover their investments.
True this is a very special skill, but I wonder if anyone has pointed out that the job market for it is (to say the least) limited. Last time I checked the want-ads I didn't see many ads saying "Wanted shortstop must be able to go deep in the hole and still turn a double play. Experence preferred, but will train the right candidate."
This must be from Selig's text called Outright Lies and More Subtle Forms of Baseball (Owners') Accounting.
If baseball ownership is such a bad deal why does the Minnesota Twins' billionaire investment banker owner, 86-year-old Carl Pohlad want to extort $250 million from his fellow owners (including the "poor" small market owners) for the folding of his franchise? He paid $30 million in 1986 to buy it and has spent scarcely a cent since by way of capital improvements and very little on player acquisition. He claims that his team just cannot compete and yet the Twins embarass him by leading their division by a wide margin.
If baseball ownership is such a bad deal, how did Steinbrenner acquire the Yankees with limited partners galore for $8 million total in 1973 and now have a team worth $1 billion (with a b) and far fewer limited partners? He bought the Yankees from the same clueless CBS clowns who infested our liveing rooms for as long as any of us can remember with the likes of Walter Cronkite and Dan Blather. CBS had paid $13 million in 1965.
Ah, but New York is the Emerald City of baseball markets, right? Tell it to the Mets' ownership whose team plays in Queens near fashionable Forest Hills and not in the South Bronx. Their team is not worth half as much as the Yankees. Nor as much as the $600 million that the small market Red Sox just sold for last winter.
If the union is the problem, if Steinbrenner is the problem, if small markets not being competitive is the problem:
1. How many pennants have the Cubs and White Sox won since 1910 in that tiny Chicago market? Why?
2. How many pennants have the Angels (Los Angeles, nearby Anaheim or California) won in their forty years of existence owned only by the very wealthy and well-meaning Gene Autry and then by the far wealthier and malevolent Disney Company? Why?
3. Why aren't the New York Mets world-beaters after last winter's shopping spree?
Translating your real point: Baseball players are stupid because they offend Always Right by making more money than he does or will. Always Right can relate easily to the idea that the players who want $400,000 as a baseball "minimum wage" at the major league level are getting a bigger salary than Always Right gets. Always Right does not own a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars as most of us do not. He or she will not as most of us will not. It is tooooooo complicated to wade through the thicket of Selig's lies to accurately guage the net income of the owners (including fabulous capital gains) so it would take real work to criticize the owners without facing a firestorm of critics more knowledgeable. Better to go with the flow: Hate the Yankees! Hate the greedy players! Hate those SOBs who inherited nothing but make more than we do! All hail Big Brother!
Further, the law of supply and demand is not suspended just because the SCOTUS exempted baseball as "a gentleman's sport" and not a business from the Anti-trust laws applicable to every other business. If the owners had not insisted on grubbing pennies from expansion again and again and again, the talent pool would be much less diluted and the pitching staffs would not be loaded with scrubeenies who make Barry Bonds and Mark Maguire look like Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron and, given the relative scarcity of jobs compared with expanded baseball, the salaries would be lower for many players, for those who obsess about lowering other people's paychecks.
The owners have never won a negotiation yet and they are not about to start now. For one thing, they will collectively owe one of their richer colleagues Rupert Murdoch (Dodgers and Fox Sports) $500 million if there is an actual strike as liquidated damages whether the strike is long or short. Secondly, many owners have strapped themselves with credit practices not available to the likes of you and me and cannot afford to make massive interest payments during a strike or lockout. Thirdly, the owners are liars and they are wrong. Fourth: like little tykes, they are wistfully dreaming that this time their prince will come, the union will fold, and they will be emperors once again. Not a chance!
Get rid of ten franchises minimum in towns which have no more business being in the major leagues than Kosovo has.
2. The owners' position is to irrationally demand that the players who receive the salaries join in a conspiracy in restraint of trade to prevent the players from receiving the salaries that the owners will pay without player cooperation. What the owners are saying is : PLEASE, PLEASE, STOP US BEFORE WE SPEND AGAIN!!!!
3. Do you actually believe that the owners are losing money????? Have you seen the actual books? Has anyone seen the actual books?
4. The Milwaukee Brewers were allegedly the most profitable team in MLB last year? Laugh, I thought I'd die! How much do the Cubs (a Chicago Tribune toy) pay to WGN, the cable superstation, also owned by the Tribune to broadcast Cubs games?
5. How many owners of small market teams like billionaire Pohlad of Minneapolis pocket the revenue sharing money and refuse to improve the roster by free agent acquisitions or even by retaining their own players with that revenue sharing money?
6. Is Tampa Bay a major league city? Miami? Kansas City? Montreal (which cannot manage to get a radio contract much less a TV contract?) Add your own next six selections.
7. A few short years ago, the Cleveland Indians were operated by magnificently wise ownership and executives like John Hart. The Indians innovated by paying sure-fire prospects and rookies much better than other clubs in exchange for modest long-term contracts. The seats at Jacobs Field were sold out for a year in advance. The core of players remained recognizeable. Occasionally, a star like Matt Williams was traded at his personal request for personal reasons of a divorce and his desire to be nearer his kids. The Indians treated their players very well and at a reasonable price in today's market. Jacobs sold to the Dolans (cable TV vampires) who are no doubt grabbing broadcast rights at a discount for their TV operation and are certainly conducting a fire sale of every valuable player that they can move to save salary. When they ruin the franchise and the fans don't buy tickets, the Dolans will cry poor mouth and blame Steinbrenner. They also tried to buy the Red Sox last winter and would be stripping that franchise as well if they had been successful.
8. Wake up and smell the coffee!
Nonsense. These guys aren't manufacturing widgets; they're playing GAMES against each other.
You can't have a system of games where certain teams always have a financial advantage over others. Fans will lose interest. The system has to be fixed.
The players' union does not threaten massive fines against players who talk about the strike in the press. Selig i9s about to fine three owners for speaking to the press. The fines will reportedly be in millions each.
You have not seen the owners' books. Nor has anyone else because, as liars, they understandably value secrecy. Yet you are willing to take them on blind faith as to their alleged losses. Their "losses" are largely for tax purposes if they exist at all. When Steinbrenner was wrangling with David Winfield, it came out that the owners actually depreciate the players' value each year for tax purposes and the depreciation is based on salary owed. The owners deduct the salary and get an additional deduction for the supposed deterioration of the player. Jason Giambi has begun to depreciate. So has Derek Jeter. And Alfonso Soriano. Surely you have noticed.
Would you deny that much of the resentment of the players is along the line of: Who are they to be making that much money when I don't? Or government school teachers don't? Or cardiovascular surgeons don't?
BTW, that's class warfare not class welfare.
Assuming for the sake of argument that class warfare is disreputable, why is it more reputable when aimed at the players than at the owners? Assuming that it was aimed at the owners. Actually, the owners think that there should be class welfare for owners and, in a remarkable twist of normal reality, think that the welfare ought to be distributed by the players to the owners. Selig thinks there ought to be a minimum dividend for owners no matter how ignorant they may be of the game (their business) and that it is perfectly fine to strip well-run teams like the Yankees of the money paid by their patrons and fans to help a pack of whiny losers with surplus teams to pocket the revenue sharing money and further cheat their fans. Selig sees nothing wrong in the Dolans purchasing the Cleveland Indians and then strip-mining the team. If Selig really cares about "the best interests of baseball", he will throw the Dolans out of opwnership for actions far more deleterious to baseball than any of Marge Schott's personal idiosyncracies.
The players' performance on the field IS the product sold to the public. Would you pay money to see Selig play? To see Pohlad play? To see Glass play? To see Wilpon and Doubleday play? To see the Chicago Tribune play? To see the Disney Company play? MLB is not a factory where the owner pays large sums of money for raw materials and substantial sums in labor to produce finished goods and more large expenses for sales and marketing and delivery and has a few percent left over as profit for himself and any stockholders. Nor is it a business where brilliant and innovative entrepeneurial insight is critical to competitive advantage. Basic human relations and paying a decent level of income to the 750 best baseball players on the planet (each according to his skills in a free market) is all that is necessary.
Most teams play in taxpayer-subsidized or provided stadiums, with unimaginable special tax breaks, with little or no requirement of disclosing their books since their stock is not publicly traded, etc., etc., etc. The owners absolutely resent the success of the players in making them pay the salaries they pay. The owners think that the revenue should be theirs, all theirs and yearn for the permanently dead days of the reserve clause and lifetime chains upon the player talent. The owners have oodles of ego, oodles of id and no self-control or common sense.
It is not a chastisement to point out that your post suggests a much easier understanding of simple player salaries than of complicated and dishonest bookkeeping by owners (if it is not dishonest, why is it so very secret?). And since, they are so very secretive about their books but enjoy your naive faith:
Your specific objective evidence that most owners are losing money?
Your specific objective evidence that player salaries and not gross mismanagement is the root of the problem?
Your specific objective evidence that the players do not generate the necessary revenue to pay their salaries.
Your specific objective solution to the baseball "crisis".
America wants to know!
Disagreeing with you is not a personal attack. Using language colorful not language bland is not a personal attack.
I do personally attack the likes of Selig, Pohlad, the Dolans, the Chicago Tribune, the Disney Company and other practitioners of the art of deception who fleece their clubs' fans and want a guaranteed level of "earnings" as a reward.
You have posted that the players are "stupid" apparently for disagreeing with you as to what their paychecks should be though you have very little personally at stake in the size of their paychecks and I am "chastising" you because I disagree with you and do so enthusiastically. By George, I think I've got it!
Don't hit and run now. Answer the substantive questions.
Baseball's operating loss was $232 million this year, including a major league-leading $52.9 million by the Toronto Blue Jays.
Commissioner Bud Selig, summoned to testify Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee, released an unprecedented amount of financial information on the 30 major league teams.
While the Arizona Diamondbacks were a success on the field, winning the World Series in just their fourth season, they were a bottom-line bust, with an operating loss of $32.2 million, according to the report.
That was the third-highest operating loss in baseball, trailing only Toronto and the Los Angeles Dodgers ($45.3 million).
Eleven of the 30 teams had operating profits before revenue sharing, led by the New York Yankees at $40.9 million. Seattle was second at $34.3 million, followed by San Francisco at $19 million and Milwaukee at $14.4 million.
.......
Of course you will just dismiss this as lies by the evil cartel of baseball owners, but this is the best info available.
I've BEEN boycotting since 1994 already...this just deepens my commitment all the more - besides, it's football season already, and the REAL sport of hockey will be starting soon as well - I've never even missed baseball....
Me too, besides the Tigers have absolutely sucked for way too many years to be even remotely interesting.
The Washington Senators were perennial losers. So were the St. Louis Browns. So were the Chicago Cubs (last pennant 1945/last World Championship 1908). So were the Chicago White Sox (pennants only in 1919: "the Black Sox" and in 1959 since their last World Championship in 1917) The Red Sox: last Championship: 1918. The Philadelphia Phillies: One championship since 1915. One could go on and on.
Solution: Terminate a minimum of ten franchises and distribute their players by reverse order draft with worst survivors drafting first. That eliminates 250 major league player jobs in one fell swoop for those obsessed with players' salaries. Supply and demand will take care of lowering the salaries. If the terminated teams are such money losers, surely the owners would be glad to fold without compensation or for very little compensation? Right? Pitching will tighten up considerably. Baseball will go back to being baseball rather than homerun derby when modestly competent major leaguers will have no scrubeenie pitchers to feed on.
You are right that baseball is unlike manufacturing widgets. Baseball is an art. Ther players are the artists. The owners are mere middlemen, often ignorant of the game they are ruining, who survive in their localities only by virtue of the anti-trust exemption. Without the players, baseball is finished. That is why the players always win at the negotiating table and why the football players and basketball players were very foolish to facilitate gambling interests by accepting salary caps and artificially contrived "competitive balance."
There was no free agency and little salary (Mickey Mantle: $125K per year) when, during 1949-1964, rooting for the New York Yankees was like rooting for US Steel (which was also very strong in those days). Fourteen pennants in sixteen years and nine World Championships. Most who have a problem with player salaries nonetheless seem to regard those years as a golden age. If you scrap ten franchises in cities having no business calling themselves major league
Did someone twist their arms to force them to trade a boatload of prospects for Juan Gonzalez who then walked away?
The Toronto Blue Jays were another team that sold out a year in advance before the present strip-mining ownership took over. If they are losing money, maybe it is because fans don't want to spend ever-escalating prices for ever more diluted talent.
And, yes, the owners are liars and, as I previously posted, you are taking their lies at face value. That is not OBJECTIVE evidence nor even very good evidence. It just happens to comport with your personal preferences.
If socialism (unearned revenue sharing) is the answer, it cannot have been a very good question!
Supply and demand. In the abstract, increasing the demand for players will increase the price. Consider starting pitchers. Suppose there were 12 teams per league, and each team had four starters. How much money would the 96th-best starter be able to demand? Not a whole lot, since an almost-as-good pitcher (the 97th) could probably be hired to replace him pretty cheaply (given a choice between pitching in the majors or the minors, people are apt to opt for the former even if the salary isn't much different). Likewise, the 95th-best pitcher would have to compete against the 94th-best, etc. limitting the salaries any particular player could demand.
Expand the leagues to 15 teams each, though, and the 96th-best starting pitcher suddenly becomes much more valuable and can demand a much higher salary. As his salary goes up, so do those of people above him.
And on the point of reducing talent? The talent pool is increasing, as teams look further than ever before for future stars. We're seeing an influx of players from Japan and even Australia.
Does that mean that the talent pool is inceasing, or that the talent pool is scarce enough that teams are desperate to find talent wherever they can get it?
I know that there are a lot of talented players out there, but I don't think there are enough really talented players to fill the rosters of all the teams in the league. If there were, I don't think the owners would settle for the expensive mediocre players they're getting.
You ignore the evidence presented but provide nothing to back up your point except the mantra, "the owners are liars".
BUT, the defendant says he did not do it. Release him, right? After all the defendant knows what he did or did not do better than we do and his statement must be the best evidence. Right? What reason would he have to lie? Right?
Whether or not the owners make money or lose money and how much is relevant only because they have brought up the issue. If they raise the issue, they have the burden of proof. Their self-serving statements are NOT the best evidence. Their books, audited independently, are the best proof. We will not see those books in this lifetime, much less independent audits of same for reasons obvious to anyone with common sense.
I guess I am not going to convince you and you surely are not going to convince me by repeating the unaudited lies of the owners. Do you think the owners shoul;d submit their books to an independent audit or should we just take their word for it under the circumstances?
The only thing that is gonna screw up the game is a strike.
You're certainly not alone. I'd imagine most sports fans fell that way, but try their best not to think about it.
I used to be so into the tactics (my love was football, but the same thing is happening there so it's a valid point for discussion), but the other aspects of what was happening with football began to taint how I felt about it
As far as football is concerned, it's the wild celebration after every single play that really irks me. A linebacker stops an opposing running back after gaining 7 yards on first down, and the celebration of the tackle would lead one to think (if one didn't know any better) that the team playing defense just won the Super Bowl. It wasn't too many years ago where players went about their business on the field like professionals, and after making a decent play they acted like they had done it before and will do it again. Most of today's pro athletes are children by comparison. There aren't too many Cal Ripken Jr.'s left.
The free agency changes of the sixties began the change in baseball for the worse. And I say this without regard to legal arguments on either side, but rather a personal comment on how it made me not care about the game I loved as a kid.
As is pointed out in Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions, different decision-making systems work under different organizational frameworks. Socialism (the redistribution of public and private incomes by the government) is an inefficient decision-making system for a society. It warps the profit motive and destroys the information-carrying potential of prices. But also, because it is a governmental system that is mandatory, it cannot be escaped.
Profit sharing in businesses are, on the other hand, often very rational and competative agreements. They are very frequently necessary to maximize the competativeness of a business or corporation.
For example, you may have six or seven Radio Shacks in your town owned by the same person. Are they socialist because the yearly profits are pooled into one acount? Is it socialism when, as a new store is built, the new store is subsidized by the profits of the old stores until the new store can develop a client base? Or, is it socialism to pay the employees based on seniority and not the amount of work each actually does (so a more productive person who has been there four years gets paid the same as someone less productive who has also been there four years)?
All of the above are cases where collective agreements make good business sense, due to the need to take temporary losses for long-term profitability (or, in the case of the workers, the difficulty of defining "productive" in a manner that will be cost-effective for the business to regulate and reward).
ONLY A GOVERNEMENT CAN BE SOCIALIST! I'll say that again, so the ecomonic illiterates out there might have it sink in: Only a government can be socialist!
What you decry as "socialism" as simply different internal organizations for a business. Perhaps that is the problem: people mistake the teams for the businesses, whereas it is really the league that is the business (that's why it needs the anti-trust exemption from Congress). Besides, how can anyone decrying "socialism" in business then support a "collective" bargaining agreement in the first place? Because neither are "socialism," so long as the government stays out of it...
"Why the difference between our figures and the MLB's? For starters, MLB includes "non-cash" charges in its cash flow numbers. Specifically, the league subtracts ballpark depreciation expenses. For teams that finance their own stadiums, like the San Francisco Giants and Detroit Tigers, ballpark depreciation runs over $5 million per team annually.
I subtract building depreciation in my business too. Are they somehow implying that baseball statiums appreciate in value instead of depreciate. Seems like the Forbes numbers are not up to standard business practices, IMHO. And even if the Forbes numbers are correct, a $75 million profit for Baseball is an absolute joke. These teams are valued at roughly $10 billion, so a $75 million profit represents a whopping 0.75% return! Shoot, the top couple of players earn more than the 30 owners combined and they don't have one penny invested. So yes, the players are WAY overpaid in a real business sense. They simply are not worth what they are paid. Not even close.
Because for several owners, winning is what is most important. They take gambles on playes and some don't pan out or they get injuried. Players need to get reasonable though and understand what has happened. Nobody is gonna win this round. The strike is lose-lose proposition, and the players need to understand the fiscal reality of the situation.
I just don't think baseball can survive as a major sport if it does not address the competitive balance issue. Fans today, for a number of reasons, are more fickle, and will not support perennial losers.
That would be sad, because baseball is an important part of our culture.
I think a good revenue sharing program, and moving a couple of franchises (Montreal -> Portland, Tampa Bay -> Washington) could help to address some of the problems.
Another thing baseball needs to do is to make sure kids can see baseball on TV or hear it on radio. MLB needs to stop nickel-and-diming out-of-market fans, and put more games on TV.
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