The NFL has become a powerhouse and the most popular sporting league in America for a variety of reasons. It appeals to America's inherent love of spectacle and violence. The rise of fantasy football has given casual fans a reason to care about every team, not just their own. The season culminates in a single, winner-take-all contest of wills. Perhaps most importantly: A strict salary cap and non-guaranteed contracts have combined to keep competitive balance in check and players giving 100 percent on the field at all times.
The NFL has a distinct advantage over the MLB and the NBA insofar as the NFLPA is too weak to secure guaranteed contracts or a softer salary cap for its players. NBA players are often able to mope their way out of town, forcing trades that hurt their teams. And the league's salary cap is a joke. MLB players, meanwhile, have run into trouble by loading up on steroids and getting caught by the league. They are using performance-enhacing drugs to fraudulently enhance their stats, leading to huge contracts, and quickly followed by steep decline and massive lineup holes if and when players get suspended.
This all comes to mind because the MLB is threatening to ban Alex Rodriguez from the game for life due to a huge quantity of steroid-related issues. The move is essentially an attempt to get A-Rod to agree to a deal that would involve a lengthy, but not career-ending, suspension. What's interesting to me is that this is all being done by the league: due to the absurd hoops that have to be jumped through because of the asinine language in the MLBPA's various deals with the league over the drug issue, this is essentially the only play anyone in baseball has. The Yankees, his team, can do nothing: If Bud Selig doesn't suspend him, they're on the hook for almost $100 million more.
Allow me to repeat: Absent action by the league, the Yankees would have to pay a known cheater who has missed much of the last three seasons with injury, likely broke the law, and has done a ton of damage to the league and his own team almost $100 million in salary.
That's insane.
The MLB really needs to break the MLBPA. This foolishness has to stop, for the good of the game. Teams should, at the very least, be able to break contracts made with players found to have cheated their way to excellence.
Update: I'm shocked by the level of outrage this has caused. The Free Beacon's own Truth Monkey called me a communist and suggested I hate freedom. Allow me to just clarify my main point by positing a hypothetical.
Let's say the New Yorker was in the habit of handing out $1 million contracts for film critics. I am not a good enough film critic to be paid $1 million a year by the New Yorker. But I really want that gig! So I plagiarize a bunch of people who are better than me in an effort to pass myself of as a really good film critic. And it works! I get the job based on my fraudulently obtained credentials.
So there I am, in the midst of my sweet New Yorker gig when, suddenly, someone reveals that my pre-New Yorker work was plagiarized. The New Yorker wants to fire me—frankly, I deserve to be fired—but they can't because of a deal worked out between the magazine and its writers that contracts can never be terminated.
Does that make a lick of sense to anyone else?
I don't think the MLB will ever get NFL-style contracts that can be terminated at will for any reason, and maybe that's for the best. But to argue that it's objectionable to terminate the contract of someone who is violating the rules, destroying the integrity of the game, and who obtained his position at your place of business by using fraudulent credentials (that is to say, steroid-inflated statistics)? I don't get that.
I guess that makes me a dirty, dirty commie.