Um how did A-Rod (the best available player) get signed to a contract? CC? etc. In a free market players will get paid approximately their marginal value to the team. They in no way will ever get “an unlimited amount of money”. Does that make any sense to you?

Seriously this was 2nd grade logic. It was simply fundamentally flawed and made no sense. You don’t even need to have taken an economics class to see the complete lack of any sense in this argument.

The Beatles have a monopoly on their music and do their CDs sell for “an unlimited amount of money”. Of course not, they pretty much sell for the exact same as other music CDs, $10~15. Players are no different.

If this is the case, then prove why it is flawed. I’m not a PhD in economics in fact I’ve never had an economics class, so maybe i missed something obvious, but shouldn’t criticism at the very least, come with an explanation.

Clearly the owners will not simply give up the status quo of six years simply because the CBA works wildly in their favor. There would have to be an equitable concession made by the union, and I’m not sure they have anything quite as powerful as that to barter with.

Draft picks, on average, are a steal. That’s just true.

1. The Reserve Clause-This tied a player to his team for life, for all intents and purposes. A team could trade that player and pay them basically whatever they wanted and were under no obligation to pay them what they were worth.
2. Collusion-After Free Agency became a reality, owners started collectively pissing their pants about how much they were paying FA talent. So, they all got together and agreed to stop paying high salaries for FAs. Whether MLB players deserve to make as much as they do is irrelevant…Fact of the matter is that what the owners did is, in every possible way, illegal. Andre Dawson ended up playing with a blank contract b/c he so badly wanted to escape Montreal, and yet no one would pay him.
3. Blocking the formation of players unions for decades-This prevented players from having any sort of mechanism for resisting unfair business practices. Basically the players were told to shut up and take whatever poop-flavored lollipop the owners gave them.

For more of the Bullshit Ownership Activities Greatest Hits Tour, go to wikipedia and read about figures such as Marge Schott, Charlie Finley, or Charles Comiskey. These were people who would literally do anything possible to put more money into their own pockets, whether they had to shit on their players to do it or not.

If any of us working in our normal jobs was told that we couldn’t work there b/c we were black, or that we were tied to that company/organization forever at the total whim of that institution, or that we couldn’t leave and find a better job because all of the bosses of that field got together and said they wouldn’t pay what a person was worth b/c they weren’t making as much money as they liked, we’d all be fighting mad. Why? Because these are greedy, evil, reprehensible actions. If we were told to “shut up and take it” because being a lawyer/doctor/construction worker/dentist/teacher/professor/truck driver is a neat job and our salary was decent, we’d be fighting mad at that too.

I understand that FA’s and draft picks are different. It is true that there are plenty of good business reasons not to sign untested, semi-fungible draft talent to top-dollar contracts. But don’t for a second call these largely middle-to-lower kids greedy for wanting a slightly bigger piece of the pie, especially when that pie is being given by a group who makes 100x what the player does and has a history of screwing that player and all of his peers in disgusting ways.