LOYALTY IN SPORTS

With the NFL Draft this weekend, I was given to revisit a few issues that for lack of a better expression, really stick in my craw. Among those are team loyalty, escalating salaries, franchise relocation, and administrative tampering. What this amounts to is a system that hurts everyone but the biggest superstars, and leaves the fans wondering why they're watching in the first place. The average player is never going to reap the benefits of a free agency system where the laws of supply and demand dictate salaries and the risks teams are willing to take. Meanwhile fans find themselves conflicted when one of their favorite players jumps ship and lands on a rival team, or a player who has tormented them for years suddenly joins the team. And for those fans who revel in free agent acquisitions, you obviously weren't watching on draft day, when your team had three picks in seven rounds.

It's difficult to say whether I've become cynical about sports because of my getting older, or the fact that the game has changed considerably in the time I've been watching. It's probably both, but predominantly the latter. Maybe the games have always been mercenary, and I just missed the nuance in my youth, but I can remember when my innocence was shattered. In 1977, my favorite sport was baseball, my favorite team was the Mets, and my favorite player was Tom Seaver. I still don't grasp all the factors that were in play in what ensued, primarily because a lot of it went on behind the scenes and only came out as rumor and innuendo of dubious veracity, but the crux of the matter was that Tom Seaver and M. Donald Grant, the then chairman of the board of the Mets, had reached a loggerhead. Seaver, at the time regarded as one of the best pitchers in the game, had just gone through a tough negotiation for his current contract, for some reason or other had a change of heart and wanted the contract torn up and re-negotiated. In my youth, I was inclined to take the side of the athlete who I saw doing his job every fifth day, not the chairmen of the board who I never saw, except in cheesy photo ops with the players who did the real work of the organization. In retrospect, I missed the point. However much of a skinflint M. Donald Grant may or may not have been, he had negotiated in good faith and had every intention of living up to his contractual agreements with his star pitcher. However undervalued Seaver may or may not have been, he was reneging on a valid contract that he had signed a year earlier. Did his performance merit more money? Quite probably. Did he have a right to ask for more money? Well, it never hurts to ask. Did he have a right to go public, demanding a trade if his contract was not renegotiated? Absolutely not. Despite the fact that I missed who was to blame, I still recognized this as an ugly scene. A local hero was saying he didn't want to play here any more. There were no notions of loyalty from either side, not for what they had done for each other over the years, and certainly not for the fans who had supported both of them. I'm certain there was a compromise that could have been reached if they simply applied themselves to constructive talks, but true to the form that has carried us to the modern era, egos got in the way. Seaver wanted to earn as much as every other pitcher, and Grant wanted to hold the line on salary increases. In the end, I and other fans like me paid the real price. Seaver, went on to win twenty-one games that year, fourteen of them for the Cincinnati Reds, and the Mets fell from third place to the cellar. On top of everything else, was a real conflicted feeling whenever Tom Seaver took the mound against the Mets.

Years later, after the Mets had been sold, Tom Seaver returned for the 1983 season, the first among many I hoped. Unfortunately, I was about to get a taste of the real downside to free agency. After the '83 season ended, the teams that had lost free agents had a chance to pick from a "free agent compensation pool." Each team had a limited number of players it could protect, and the rest went into the pool. Given Seaver's limited number of productive years left, and his hefty salary, the Mets left him unprotected, guessing no one would pick him. Guess again! The Chicago White Sox snapped him up. You can say what you will about how free agency has improved the lives of countless players who were either unhappy with a team, or could never get their full value under the reserve clause, but what it has also done is take teams like Pittsburgh and Montreal and turned them into farm teams for other clubs. In an effort to restrict mass exodus and replenish lost talent, the compensation pick in both football and baseball has a lot of people going places they had no desire to even visit. In baseball, I can almost excuse it, even though it cost my team one of its most enduring and endearing stars, because without a salary cap, they are not playing on a level field. A Steinbrenner or a Huizenga can spend freely and buy a championship, whereas other owners can not afford to hold onto their marquee players. Therefore, I can see the need for some kind of compensation. In football, however, since everyone is theoretically playing with the same amount of money, the compensatory pick in the draft is merely a way to deter other teams from signing your players. I'm reasonably certain this makes no one happy. Players on the perimeter of greatness may not get a fair shake on the open market because no one wants to compensate any one else. Owners end up using their compensatory pick to replace a known quantity, with an unknown, albeit younger quantity. The players who do successfully explore the free-agent market find themselves on a team with depleted resources from fewer draft picks and a strain against the salary cap.

Lest we forget, there is the backbone of the whole thing, the fans. Remember back in the 1970's and earlier, when you could follow a group of players for basically their whole careers on the same team? Remember when you could name the whole roster from year to year because only a trade or two would happen during the course of a year? Remember Tinker to Evers to Chance? Now it's waiver wire pick-up to free-agent to compensatory pick, and next year they'll be picking up their World Series rings on three different teams. In the past, I've given some fans a pretty hard time for changing their favorite team based on their recent performance. I ask them, where's their loyalty? Now I have to ask myself, are they any worse than a ball-player who changes his team based on their most recent paycheck, or an owner who changes cities based on luxury boxes. To the owners who want some loyalty when the teams aren't doing so good, show some loyalty when the mayor of another town dangles an attractive package to relocate your team. You do reap what you sow.

As you might be aware, I'm quite a fan of irony (it never changes teams or cities). I look back at Superbowl XXIX and recall that speech that Steve Young gave after the game (if you can call it that), talking about commitment to the team, realizing how much cap room his salary was taking, and that two of the people amongst whom he was praising were Deion Sanders, and Ricky Watters, perhaps two of the biggest mercenaries to ever play the game, both of whom skipped town for better offers. With commitment like that you might as well be a married Hollywood couple. So far as that goes, the level of commitment anyone shows is directly related to how much their career depends on it at any given moment. As long as you're in the play-off picture, everything's hunky dorey, but once you're eliminated, or close to it, it all becomes about playing time, back biting, and second guessing. The player who in September says of his coach, "It was a gutsy call, you gotta respect the coach's decision," in December offers this little nugget, "You bust your a** all season long, trying to put your team in a position to win, and next thing you know, the coach takes it out of the players' hands." And that's the ones who are considered loyal. Some of them are complaining they aren't getting the ball enough, at half-time on opening day (Ricky? Keyshawn?).

So, where is it all headed? One can only hope that the same recognition that brings about rules changes, such as losing the game winning RBI stat or moving the kickoff back five yards, will eventually be applied to these deeper issues. If they can be brought to understand that keeping a meaningless stat, or turning the NFL into the National Field goal League is bad for the sport, then maybe they can design a system that keeps salaries fair, players with teams for extended periods, teams in their cities and maintains parity. Oh and just so you know I know how unrealistic that is, throw in a cure for cancer, unemployment, social security and welfare.