The Major League Baseball Players Association is killing the game of baseball. Instead of trying to better the game, they are greedily trying to defeat the owners on every issue at the bargaining table, regardless of whether it makes baseball as a whole better or worse.
Unionism is normally a good thing. Historically, it has allowed vulnerable workers to band together and express their demands in a collective voice to powerful bosses. However, the Baseball Players Union is too powerful for its own good. In a factory the relation between owner, worker and factory production was much more apparent to the individual worker. The worker could see that if he demanded too much of his bosses, his competition would increase, his factory would close and they would be out of a job. The worker and employer were unified in their fight against rival industries, and in order for both to benefit, each knew a middle ground had to be reached. The owner would be hurt by an unhappy and thus unproductive workforce, and the worker would suffer if the factory closed due to high wages and not enough profits.
Baseball is different from traditional unionism in that instead of the worker and owner being unified in a fight against a common enemy, the workers and owners view each other as the enemy. Professional sports are a peculiar business because they are largely free from competition. Each of the major sports are seasonal: football in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball in the summer. The consumer is faced not with a choice between sports but rather with a choice of whether or not to watch. As the stunning failure of the XFL shows, the average American has no time for new sports competition. Baseball is not in danger of losing all its fans to rival broadcasts of Wimbledon, the Masters or Major League Soccer, but it is in danger of dying as a result of fan indifference, a disease currently attacking the NHL.
The current threat to the health of the game of baseball is steroids. Even though chicks dig the long-ball, the current prevalence of dingers at even lowly Brewers games has caused many fans to question whether the moon-shots are the result of illegal pill popping instead of old-fashioned grit, determination and skill. As the permanent bans of even greats Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose show, baseball is a game that cannot tolerate declines in consumer confidence. Suspicion of steroid use is just as dangerous as the suspicion of gambling that clouded the legacies of Jackson and Rose, and yet the Players Association wants to ignore the danger such suspicions pose to the game.
Instead of advancing the good of the game as a whole by supporting steroid \testing,"" the players union sees protection from testing as a prize won from the owners at the arbitration table, and thus is unwilling to give back a concession won from the ""enemy"". It is not that all players see testing a bad thing, as evidenced by the Chicago White Sox's attempt last spring to refuse to take the test, which would show as positive because of failure to comply, in order to create enough positive results to force league-wide testing (an act of protest quashed by the mighty union).
The Union thinks it is benefiting all players by standing strong against ownership. However, just because the owners desire testing does not make it automatically evil. Testing should be viewed as something that will better the game as a whole, regardless of whether it hurts those players who have been illegally 'juicing' themselves. Instead of viewing the steroid issue as protecting players from owners, the Union should view steroid testing as protecting players against the unfair competition of those amongst them who choose to cheat by taking banned substances.
Regardless of the point of view, all of baseball suffers every time a player hits a home run and some fan somewhere thinks ""did he hit that shot because of his skill or because he cheated?"" and whatever hurts the game as a whole will eventually hurt the players as well, regardless of what their union leaders may tell them.
