Political Hardball Pays Off

Say what you will about athletes being pampered, overpaid and overexposed. When you mess with people they care about, they don't take it lightly.


That was never more clear than this morning, when a particularly peculiar item scrolled across ESPN's Breaking News ticker: Red Sox players refuse to play this afternoon's exhibition game against Toronto and board planes for trip to Japan unless their coaches will be paid a $40,000 stipend for the trip. All Red Sox and A's players will be paid $40,000 appearance fee for the trip.

On top of that being a particularly lengthy comment for BREAKING NEWS, it also opens up a serious proverbial can of worms. Why are incredibly highly paid men standing up for more money for OTHER incredibly highly paid men? Think about it, the players were striking - or essentially doing the next best thing - for a stipend that, in itself, is more than a number of Leicester and Worcester resident make in a year.

Yet amazingly, WMYM found itself siding firmly with the players. In a unified front, ALL the Red Sox refused to do anything until the coaches got just as much cash as they did. Not only is it a testament to promoting ethical treatment of coaches, it's also a flashpoint in unity that not a single player abstained or voted against holding out for coaches' shares. It's the kind of holistic - or as close to holistic as you can get in the cash cow that is known as MLB - move that brings an organization together and helps re-create that "us against the world" dynamic that all professional teams thrive on (if they tell you they don't, well, they're lying).

Not only that, it worked! That's right, MLB caved, or at least caved enough that the game went on, players trotted on to the field, and though Daisuke Matsuzaka (who was scheduled to start against the Jays) had already moved on to throw in a minor league game, players wearing Red Sox and Toronto jerseys actually competed. Well, maybe not so much competed as engaged in a spring training game. If you hadn't noticed already this spring, there's a difference.

Of course, before this morning, the norm was always that coaches were treated differently than players when it came to additional, fringe-based compensation in MLB. Evidently that's changed, so maybe these spring training games will start getting wicked serious next.

... Nah. Good luck with that one.

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