NEWS & VIEWS

 

News: Baseball is in the midst of a lockout, the first such development since 1995.

Views: Mind the gap.

So okay, the lockout is on, but so what? Spring training isn’t for another six weeks and the regular season wouldn’t start until six weeks after that.  The kind of money that’s at stake for both the owners and players ought to mediate against turning off the spigots, right? The golden goose should be squawking, if golden geese did such a thing. And who cares about a squabble between millionaires and billionaires? And there’s football and basketball to keep us entertained for the nonce.

But some figures that have emerged since the so-far-painless stoppage began raised my eyebrows, something that doesn’t often happen in the wonderful world of sports. It revealed an income disparity between baseball’s have- and have-not players that parallels that of our country as a whole in size if not in seriousness.

According to the Associated Press 1,397 of the 1,955 players who had signed Major League contracts going into the last month (September) of the 2021 regular season—or 71%-- earned less than $1 million annually, and 1,271 of those—65%-- were at $600,000 or less, just a tad over the MLB full-season minimum of $570,500. Players shuttled between the majors and minors earned less than that. On the upside, the 112 who were paid $10 million a year or more amounted to just 5.7% of the total.

 The game’s 50 highest-paid players, led by New York Yankees’ pitcher Gerrit Cole at $36 million per, accounted for fully one-third of the game’s total 2021 payroll, and the top 100 gobbled up 52%. The average player salary (of about $3.8 million last season) gets most of the ink, but the median of $1.15 million is more representative. That last figure was down from $1.65 million in 2015, the AP noted.

Further, if nothing much changes those top-sided totals will be even more lopsided in 2022 because the new top so far—the three-year, $130 million deal ($43 m-plus a year) bestowed upon pitcher Max Scherzer by the New York Mets-- puts Cole’s haul in the dust, and some other top-tag free agents (Carlos Correa, Freddie Freeman, Kris Bryant) remain unsigned.

Now, I’m well aware that $1m per or thereabouts is a fine income, more than ample for the feeding of a village, much less any one player’s family, but baseball’s chasm-sized wage gap still is enough to give one pause and put the current contract negotiations in perspective. Both sides say they want to narrow it, but in quite-different ways. The owners say they’d okay a salary floor but the players say nay because they fear it might lead to a salary cap. The players want free agency and salary arbitration to come faster than they do now, but the owners say that would negate what they spend on player development.  At the least, a lot of tough talk remains between now and “Play Ball!”

News: Hockey is failing in Phoenix.

Views: Again?

The Wall Street adage that no tree grows to the sky is regularly breached in big-time professional sports, where money figures move in only one direction (up), but the Phoenix Coyotes, the National Hockey League team in my adopted hometown, provide a counterbalance. Perennially failing, they’ve been kicked out of their home arena and no ready new home exists locally.  A move to another city seems called for, but who wants the worst team in the league? It’s a puzzlement.

The team has been a mess both competitively and financially since it moved to the desert metropolis from Winnipeg, Canada, in 1996. On the ice, it’s the longest-running NHL franchise (42 years including its Winnipeg stay) never to have made a Stanley Cup final, and it’s string of feckless owners that kept it on a financial tightrope. Just when it seems things can’t get worse, they do.

The team’s move to Phoenix was botched from the start because the only venue that could hold it—the then-called America West Arena that also housed the basketball Phoenix Suns-- was too small for hockey, putting about 2,500 of the place’s 18,000 seats out of play. Real-estate skate Steve Ellman touted a plan to build an arena for the team in wealthy, suburban Scottsdale, but after a string of missed deadlines he left behind a wrecked-shopping-center site for a better deal (for him) in less-well-heeled Glendale on the other (west) side of town. The starry-eyed burg picked up almost all of the $220 million price tag for the place.

The move to Glendale came in 2003 and worked all right for a while, even though Ellman’s promise of commercial development that would repay the city for its generosity never measured up.   Lackluster teams and ill-equipped owners led the team into bankruptcy and NHL receivership from 2009 to 2013. The owner since 2019 has been Alex Meruelo, a casino and radio-station owner, but he quickly established himself as slow-pay or no-pay when it came to bills. Last month Glendale threatened to lock out the team over $1.3 million in unpaid taxes and operating costs. The Coyotes finally paid up but the city still decided they were more trouble than they were worth and canceled their arena lease at the end of the current season.  A dozen or so concerts annually would compensate for lost hockey revenues, city officials aver.

Meruelo & Co. has been noising about plans for a new, billion-dollar stadium and entertainment complex in the suburb of Tempe but that city, the home of Arizona State University, probably is too smart to bite. Even if it did, the place couldn’t be completed until about 2025, and the team has no obvious place to play until then. Options are so few that plunking down an ice rink in the Chase Field baseball stadium has been mentioned. Wouldn’t you like to see that?

The NHL swears up and down that the Coyotes aren’t going anywhere else, but Houston wants a team, even one that’s about a furlong deep in last place in the won-lost column and 30^th of the 32 NHL clubs in attendance, and it will be tough to say no to that.   A change of scene can only help this gang.