Baseball just can't save itself from its own stupidity...

Baseball is a passion in Missouri, evidenced by not only the tremendous history of, and fan support for, the defending World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinals but also by the continuing interest in the struggling Kansas City Royal franchise-- years past their 1985 World Series glory.

In recent years the Royals have had (relatively speaking) low payrolls and non-competitive teams.

Yet fans still go to the beautiful ballpark (formerly Kauffman Stadium, after the respected former owner of the club) that is the home of the Royals, because they love baseball and love the Royals.

Now, the Royals are trying to build with youth, and lots of it.

They recently faced a dilemma. Their first draft choice in the 2007 summertime baseball draft (second overall) is a high school player represented by Scott Boras, an agent well-known for pushing the ‘demand envelope’ for unproven players.

That’s his “job”, of course: to get as much as he can for his clients.

But it does make a person wonder what the thinking process is for the young player and his family. In this instance, we are told, according to various media reports, that the player was seeking more than 3 million dollars as a signing bonus.

Keep in mind this young man, while projected to be an outstanding pro, has played only at the high school level.

Under the terms of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, if the player is not signed by the deadline, he goes back into the draft pool for 2008, provided he attends a Junior College and not a school in the NCAA.

Presumably he would then go to college for a year, and be drafted by a team that can afford to pay him what he wants the next time around.

Sadly, we have again hit a time when the salary expectations of athletes have become simply outrageous. We see salaries in the NBA, for example, that are long-term --and absurd. In so many cases we hear, within a year of the signing, that that NBA player can’t be traded because no one wants --or can afford-- his outlandish contract.

The NHL is clearly walking down the very same path that led to a lockout only three years ago. Salaries are climbing again, and for a league that can’t get a decent TV contract south of the border—much less find any real fan support even in markets where they actually have teams—this will surely prove a recipe for future disaster, however much revenues allegedly are growing.

And then there is baseball, where the players union and Bud Selig nearly killed the game in 1994, and instead of juiced balls produced juiced players to ‘save’ the game through the later1990’s and into the current era.

This is a sport that refuses to establish a legitimate salary cap, where one team can spend 200 million to buy players and other teams such as the Royals can barely field a Triple A- caliber team.

This sport has no effective rookie salary cap to prevent the absurd request of 18 year-olds who think they are “worth” millions of dollars before they even step on a pro field.

Who will step up—a player, an agent, a family, a commissioner—and say this is insane, utterly insane?

This is not to say this young player won’t become a fine professional player. In all likelihood, he will.

But if he does become a tremendous player, he will earn his millions in due course.

If he doesn’t, why over-pay before the young man establishes legitimate market value?

Here’s hoping that young ballplayers such as the one in question, if they choose to turn down huge money after being drafted because their agent feels it isn’t “enough”, head off to Junior College and play for free for a season, and then stay healthy. (To close the loop on this story, this particular young player signed for $4 million dollars at the signing deadline, almost a million dollars more than Major league Baseball’s “slotting” system suggested for the second overall selection.)

We’ve all heard the stories of players (and in some cases known players) who waited and waited and sat out for that big payday, only to suffer a serious injury and see their market value plummet overnight.

Hopefully this and other such stories will have a happier ending than at.

"Irate soccer mom brings game to screeching halt"

Irate soccer mom brings game to screeching halt

It’s not as though we have never seen this type of headline before.

But the particular details—a youth soccer game in July of this year involving kids under the age of 8, with a 14-year old referee—reflect a kind of “over-invested” attitude that many of us, as parents, need to address.

In this particular instance, a mother and father of a young player were charged with assault against the young referee.

By all accounts the local soccer Association dealt with the matter promptly and effectively. But after all the public discourse on the subject of parents fighting with coaches, referees, and other parents, we wonder: why does this kind of thing still happen?

While these “events” are not exactly common, they aren’t quite rare, either. Those of us who have stood on the sidelines at a soccer or baseball game, or in a rink at a youth hockey game, can readily attest that the emotional heat gets turned up pretty quickly, and way too often.

Any number of things can flip the switch—a young player who is perceived to be playing “dirty”; a coach who does not play a particular child as much as another player; a referee’s decision; a comment by a parent on the “opposing” team, and many other things.

All these are triggers, and because this generation of parents is so invested in our kids, it sometimes takes very little to get certain individuals going.

Those of us involved in the sports world, including the youth sports field, have made numerous suggestions over the years as to how this type of behaviour can be at least somewhat mitigated. For example, I wrote very widely published articles within the last two years on the subjects of “Soccer Sideline Etiquette” and “Hockey Rink Etiquette” for parents. The articles were overwhelmingly well received by sports organizations across Canada and the United States, but any of us who have written on this or similar subjects recognize that it’s not an easy problem to “solve”.

Many years ago minor hockey officials in Canada developed ad campaigns encouraging parents to take their kids to the rink to watch them play. The message was simple: spend time with your kids. A few years and many incidents later, officials encouraged parents to drop their kids off at the local rink—a clear indication that things had changed and that hockey officials now believed that parents served best as taxi drivers than as a loud, argumentative presence setting horrible examples from the stands.

It must be human nature: we all (or at least most of us) seem to think our kids are “better” than the other kids; deserve more playing time; always receive the bad end of referees’ decisions; are the ones that spend more time listening to other parents complaining than we complain ourselves.

Most of us would really benefit from actually looking in the proverbial mirror, and assessing if we contribute to the problems that often surface in youth sports. We may not be the person who harasses a 14-year old referee, but if we help create a toxic atmosphere on our son or daughter’s youth team, we are contributing to the problems that create the unhappiness that leads to these totally unacceptable outbursts.