Let's pretend for just this moment that you are Major League Baseball. Oh, the horror.
On one hand, you've got the filthy mess of a steroids controversy. On the other hand, you've got nobody in the seats - attendance is down 7 percent from last year and more than 40 percent of your games are being played in front of half-full (or worse) stadiums.
Then there's your all-star game in July that could become a major fiasco if more players announce that they'll boycott it, as one (Boston pitcher John Burkett) already has. And that's not even mentioning the ongoing stress and speculation surrounding the contraction of small-market teams and the escalation of salaries on big-market ones.
That's too much to juggle unless you're David Blaine. So what should you do?
Do exactly what you would do if you were stressed out on the job: Take a vacation.
Conventional wisdom - at least the kind doled out on the sports pages and talk radio - is that baseball can't survive a work stoppage. But that's exactly what it needs: time to break out the defibrillator and start pumping. The only way that baseball can solve its problems and ensure its long-term health is to undergo a complete overhaul that can't start until there are serious, long-term negotiations between players and owners.
How a strike can save the game
As Major League Baseball is sinking back into the whole it fell through in 1994, when a strike canceled the World Series, it should take a close look at the NBA, which rebuilt itself after its work stoppage three years ago and now is at its strongest point since Jordan retirement No. 2.
Back before its 1998 lockout, the NBA was dealing with some of the same problems that baseball is grappling with now: the meteoric rise of star salaries, a strong mistrust between players and owners, and a growing gap between rich teams and poor teams. Now, the NBA has none of those problems, thanks to an improved, more equitable salary structure that rewards players for high performance in their early years in the league and gives them more freedom to choose where they play.
Baseball could use a work stoppage to revamp its salary structure and introduce a player-by-player salary cap, making sure that overpaid, under performing guys like Kevin Brown get paid less.
Baseball could also use a work stoppage to think a bit harder about where it puts its teams, again using the NBA as an example.
When the Vancouver Grizzlies announced two years ago that they weren't economically viable anymore, the NBA concluded immediately that it's experiment in western Canada had failed and allowed the Grizzlies to move to Memphis. But, in baseball, the Montreal Expos haven't been close to being competitive - on the field or in the books - since the early '90s. It could be another decade until baseball admits the Expos can't make it and a team in Washington or Northern Virginia can. Unless there's a strike that would force baseball to cut or move its unprofitable teams.
The bottom line for baseball, however, is that a work stoppage can only be beneficial if it results in some real, tangible changes that fans will be able to see starting next season, at the latest. In addition to altering the salary structure and rearranging teams, there needs to be an agreement made about drug testing. There needs to come out of the league's ranks somebody who can communicate with the players and fill in the cavernous rift that has come between the two sides, somebody like Commissioner David Stern of the NBA.
Baseball also has to reconnect with its fans before the stadiums empty out for good, especially since a work stoppage would keep some disgruntled fans from coming back at all. It could do this, as the NBA did, with a non-stop blitz of marketing and an infusion of young talent from the United States and abroad. It would be best off, though, by ensuring everybody - fans, players and owners - that they won't have to worry about the business of baseball anymore and just concentrate on the games.
(Sam Le can be reached at sle@cavalierdaily.com)
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