Cleveland Sports Forum

they actually met on the holiday. and moved a bit on their positions. and scheduled to meet again today. If they are so inclined, they can reach a deal; if not then we will have minor league spring training and eventually a shortened big league season. and more fans will desert the former national game.

Is anyone under ago 50 a baseball fan?

No news is No news.

In case anyone cares about the boring financial issues I'll copy an article from ESPN on "How can the MLB Lockout End"

Big News!!

MLB labor talks to extend to Friday as Monday deadline to cancel regular-season games looms

ESPN reports Saturday negotiations go nowhere. Sometimes I'm sorry that I like baseball; if this were the NFL I would not be disturbed if they never played again.

I agree Civ.

The time I was gone, I didn't have any interest in sports, period!

I never watched an inning of baseball. I never watched a down of football. I never saw a shot in basketball. My sports related tensions were relieved. It was good time.

Too bad sports is big business now.

What's the problem

In a word......GREED

The owners are saying that we make plenty of money. Let's make more.”

The athletes make a ton of money and are always looking for more.

The fans support some of this greed.

The owners are constantly raising the price of tickets. They know there are always fans ready and willing to purchase the high-priced ticket to watch their favorite ballplayer perform.

The fans will continue to purchase overpriced apparel and souvenirs.

When is enough, enough

Whatever happened to playing for the love of sport and not because of the tremendous amounts of money that can be made

We're all responsible in one way or another.

Do we expect a last minute meeting of the minds as rational negotiators would achieve
Or a breakdown in talks and a cancellation of regular season games from hard-headed short-term thinkers?

Should we hold a poll?

joez wrote:I agree Civ.

The time I was gone, I didn't have any interest in sports, period!

I never watched an inning of baseball. I never watched a down of football. I never saw a shot in basketball. My sports related tensions were relieved. It was good time.

Too bad sports is big business now.

What's the problem

In a word......GREED

The owners are saying that we make plenty of money. Let's make more.”

The athletes make a ton of money and are always looking for more.

The fans support some of this greed.

The owners are constantly raising the price of tickets. They know there are always fans ready and willing to purchase the high-priced ticket to watch their favorite ballplayer perform.

The fans will continue to purchase overpriced apparel and souvenirs.

When is enough, enough

Whatever happened to playing for the love of sport and not because of the tremendous amounts of money that can be made

We're all responsible in one way or another.

joez - nice post and I agree with almost all of it except....

I still watch. Because I only care about what goes on "between the lines". That is where the beauty lies - in all sports.

And if games aren't being played I'll watch something else. I love....basketball. Tennis. Golf.

When they start up baseball again great. But "outside the lines" won't affect my happiness one way or another.

JUPITER, Fla. -- Despite a long day of conversations between MLB and the MLBPA on Sunday, the sides still remain far apart on a new collective bargaining agreement, a union source told ESPN.

The six-plus hours of meetings came a day before a league-imposed deadline that will trigger the cancellation of regular-season games. If the sport doesn't have a new collective bargaining agreement by the end of negotiations on Monday, Opening Day on March 31 will be canceled along with potentially a week's worth of games.

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL is in a crisis of its own making, a self-inflicted wound borne of equal parts hubris, short-sightedness and stubbornness from a class of owners who run the teams and seemingly have designs on running the game into the ground. Barring a miracle eleventh-hour agreement Monday on a new labor deal that ends its lockout of the MLB Players Association, the league has said it will cancel Opening Day games. That baseball finds itself on the precipice of such an ugly denouement is no accident. It is a study in the consequences of bad behavior -- of indignities big and small, of abiding by the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit and, worst of all, of alienating those who make the sport great.

The players are angry at the trajectory of the negotiations, which have inched along for almost a year with little demonstrable progress. More than that, they're tired of the game they love saying, in ways both active and passive, it does not love them back.

Player pay has decreased for four consecutive years, even as industry revenues grew and franchise values soared and the would-be stewards of the game pleaded to anyone who would listen that owning a baseball team isn't a particularly profitable venture. Players' service time has been manipulated to keep them from free agency and salary arbitration. The luxury tax, instituted to discourage runaway spending, has morphed into a de facto salary cap, and too many teams are nowhere near it anyway, instead gutting their rosters and slashing their payrolls because the game's rules incentivize losing. The commissioner has called the World Series trophy a "piece of metal," and the league has awarded the team that did the best job curtailing arbitration salaries a replica championship belt.

Any of these is a problem. In aggregate, they served as a call to action for the players, who even now struggle to pull off the delicate balance of being aggrieved while trying to negotiate a larger piece of a $10 billion-plus pie. The MLBPA grew into the strongest union in the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s by marrying morality and money -- by fighting for itself and for the betterment of the game simultaneously. Now, following a quarter-century of labor peace and the relative complacency that accompanied it, the players are energized and engaged beyond what even they expected.

"We're just trying not to get screwed," one player told ESPN.

Easy as it is to point to the average major league salary ($4.17 million last Opening Day) as a sign players aren't on the wrong end of anything, it's also facile. Finance in sports is a zero-sum game. What doesn't go to the players goes to the league and teams, and owners control how their teams spend money. Since the 1994 player strike that canceled the World Series -- and especially over the last two collective bargaining agreements -- the league has through canny negotiating positioned itself to be the aggressor, a role with which it has grown comfortable and familiar.

On Dec. 2, when the league instituted what commissioner Rob Manfred, in a letter to fans, called a "defensive lockout," MLB acted first -- ostensibly in the name of proactivity. "We hope that the lockout will jump-start the negotiations," Manfred wrote. The league then waited 43 days to present the union its next offer.

Now, the sides find themselves at another inflection point, one with the ability to do grave harm to the game -- a "disastrous outcome," Manfred said recently. Without a deal, the league says, games will be missed and player salaries lost. If players don't get paid for 162 games, they say, they'll refuse to agree to postseason expansion, one of MLB's key targets in any new deal. Neither knows for certain if the other is bluffing.

We're in extra innings today.

First the players at bat with an automatic runner on 2nd base; then the owners get their shot. That new rule could lead to a speedier conclusion.

1st week canceled

jerks !!!

Yep

anyone see anything about further negotiations?

I hear they're on Spring Break.

THAT'S WISE!