Playing Hard Ball

THE PLAYERS, quite correctly, point out that it is they who are the source of value, who provide the product, who are what the customers pay to watch perform, not the owners. To the players one might retort: forigve me for yawning and seeming bored, but, ...well...we already knew that, because, after all, we all live in a capitalistic society, and thus we understand the value of labor...or do we? Major League baseball players have such great value that the minimum mwage for an entry level laborer is nearly half a million dollars per year, which is somehwat more than folks working in factories or first grade clasrooms rake in. The average salary for an MLB player is north of a cool mil per, the average being several mil per. Every team has at least one player, and usually several, whose annual salary is more than twenty million dollars a year ( one god pitcher several days ago signed a contract addording to which he will be paid forty three million dollars in 2022, if there is a baseball season next year, which seems currently doubtful as best). The twenty and thirty million per year contracts extend over a period of five to ten years, usually, and are guaranteed, which means that no matter whether the player plays well or atrociously, the money is paid, no matter if the player is healthy and plyaing or injured the entire year and plays not a single ball or strike, the money is paid in full. Altogther, not bad for blue collar workers, we might agree. The players struck in 1972, 1981, and 1995, and now....now. The reasons were philosophically similar each time; the specific circumstances considerably different each time. If they don't already, today's players should worship at the first church of Marvin Miller, a savvy attorney who spearheaded the formation of the MLB players union in the mid seventies, leading to the arguably exorbitant salaries players get today. Of all the labor unions in all the countries in all the gin joints in the world, the Major League Players Association might be the only labor union that I, a staunch left wing union man, detest. It is the one union which arguably measures up to the otherwise nonsensical conservative lament that "unions have outlived their usefulness". Since the players are so finely tuned in to the value of labor in a capitalist system, and to the need for labor to organize to get what its got coming, perhaps the infielders, outfielders, pitchers, catchers, and even designated hitters might do well to remember the other side of the free market equation for universal prosperity: that labor is the source of profit, that labor MUST necessarily be exploited for their to be any profit for the owner/investor, and that if labor is paid the full value of what it produces, what you have is no profit for the business owner, no incentive for business investment and ownership, and the business is in essence owned by the workers, in which case what we have is, alas, not "capitalism", but rather, that scourge of economic prosperity for all, "socialism". As Marx well knew, when we workers unite and lose our chains, our chains must of necessity be replaced by something else, and that something else is freedon, and the responsibility, and the heacaches which come with it, of business ownership. Chains come in many shapes and sizes.