Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Saturday Evening Open Thread: Everybody Breathe

Saturday Evening Open Thread: Everybody Breathe

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One of the small pleasures that got overshadowed this past week, between disasters, was Doghouse Riley’s epic slapdown of some Bold Slate Contrarianism complaining that baseball tickets cost too much because, ugch, Uuuuuunions…

UH, first: there is a large, relatively well-remunerated employee type in this country known as “sales personnel” whose salaries are largely contingent on how much money they bring in for their bosses. There’s your comparison to what has happened to player salaries over the past thirty, forty, or sixty years. Media revenues exploded. The Reserve Clause was overturned. Cable television gained, with an assist from the Rehnquist Court, the same sort of anti-trust protection that Major League Baseball has had for over a century, so that a cable system has, say, a billion fucking dollars to throw at the Dodgers. In 1946 the average player’s salary ($5000, 1946 dollars) was 0.2% of the value of his franchise. In 2011 it is 0.5%. That’s not astonishing exponential growth. It’s the power of collective bargaining, aided by a changing legal status (and blocked by collusion for most of the 80s) to gain a more equitable distribution of revenues which depend entirely on the players. Nobody goes to the ballpark to see an owner. Except maybe Slate writers. Well, and Reason.

I’m singling out professional athletes for my class envy because they’re the highest-profile beneficiaries of changes that have enriched those at the top of the economic order while impoverishing those at the bottom.

If you say so. Sounds more to me like you’re singling them out because they earn “salaries”, same as average joes, if they’re lucky. Owners, on the other hand (increasingly conglomerates or major transglobal piracy concerns), have “earnings”. Just like Justin Bieber, Heidi Klum, and the Estate of Elvis Presley, none of whom can hit the curve. Or have to field these sorts of complaints…

***********
Apart from admiring professionalism in all its myriad forms, what’s on the agenda for the weekend?

Reader Interactions

89Comments

  2. 2.

    raven

    Bustin my ass getting ready for the addition. I’m going to recycle the existing deck materials so I’m taking it apart. Funny, I built it but I don’t remember the details.

  5. 5.

    dmsilev

    Apart from admiring professionalism in all its myriad forms, what’s on the agenda for the weekend?

    Drinking heavily tonight, for tomorrow I help wrangle an estimated 300 young children, all hopped up on sugar.

    Yes, I know public outreach is part of my job, but did we *have* to plan to give these kids lots of candy and ice cream?

  7. 7.

    mellowjohn

    i’ve always liked the answer pitcher jim bouton gave an interviewer when asked about who was right during one of the baseball strikes/lockouts: “you’re right. the players don’t deserve all that money. and the owners deserve it even less.”

  8. 8.

    tofubo

    not my quote, and changing it up a bit

    the difference between being rich and being wealthy ??

    justin verlander is rich, hal & hank steinbrenner, the guys who sign his paycheck, are wealthy

  13. 13.

    BGinCHI

    Mrs. BG out for dinner with a friend of hers.

    Toddler asleep.

    I have the whole evening to myself here.

    –Wearing bath robe
    –Acquired large hunk of cheese roughly size of a car battery
    –Beer
    –Wine
    –Salty snacks
    –Netflix
    –Pillows on couch fluffed
    –Doors locked

    What am I forgetting?

  15. 15.

    MikeJ

    @dmsilev:

    Yes, I know public outreach is part of my job, but did we *have* to plan to give these kids lots of candy and ice cream?

    Can you use the sugar induced hyperactivity to demonstrate Brownian motion or something?

  18. 18.

    Anne Laurie

    @raven: Raven, I admire all your photes, but that is particularly gorgeous!

    Would you mind if I used it for tomorrow’s Garden Chat thread?

  19. 19.

    Morzer

    @raven:

    That’s one hell of a good picture, raven. You’ve reminded me to buy my wife some blue irises sometime in the near future.

  21. 21.

    Dead Ernest

    @dmsilev:

    Drinking heavily tonight, for tomorrow I help wrangle an estimated 300 young children,

    Hmm, haven’t heard of that as a hangover cure.
    Are you in some kind of penance race?

  22. 22.

    Hungry Joe

    Until fairly recently — the ’60s, about — most Major League baseball players (except for a handful of big stars) made upper-middle-class wages. Marginal players made even less than that, and took second jobs in the off-season.

    If ticket prices were lower, 1) a new generation of fans could be introduced to the game first-hand; taking the kids to a ballgame should be a bargain, not a budget-buster. Ticket sales aren’t the teams’ main source of revenue, so lowering prices would hurt the owners just little in the short run and probably help them a lot down the road … so of course it’s out of the question. More important, lower ticket prices would mean 2) I could attend more games, even if they are Padre games.

  24. 24.

    quannlace

    –Acquired large hunk of cheese roughly size of a car battery

    Remember the late-great cartoonist B. Kliban’s advice ‘ Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head.’

  25. 25.

    RepubAnon

    Are the evil players unions responsible for the explosive rise in the cost of college football and basketball tickets?

    Oh, wait, that’s right, college athletes aren’t paid…

    Maybe unions are also responsible for the massive increase in bankers’ salaries as well?

  27. 27.

    Amir Khalid

    The latest Firefox upgrade has apparently removed both NoSquint and the Malaysian flag theme I put on it. Grump.

  28. 28.

    gbear

    1. Watching snow melt.

    2. Getting over my disappointment that everything I wanted was gone before I got to the record store for Record Store Day. It’s turning into the vinyl equivalent of Black Friday at Target.

    3. Spending the money I would have spent on records on a trip to the Cat Food Store. The two cats got upgraded to Blue Buffalo.

    4. Watching snow melt and being happy that I’m not in northern Minnesota, where they got bombed with over a foot of snow and are experiencing temps below zero this weekend. Enough is enough.

  29. 29.

    Mnemosyne

    Tummy is still cranky after my bout of (probable) food poisoning, so I should’t have looked at that chili dog photo. Dinner will probably be oatmeal with bananas.

  32. 32.

    BGinCHI

    @quannlace: When I lived in Buffalo I had a really good friend who played for the Bills. Often when we were going to dinner he would have to stop and get chicken mcnuggets to tide him over. Man, that guy could eat.

  35. 35.

    Schlemizel

    I don’t have a problem with what the players earn, its no more that the owner think the player is worth. The power is still with the owners to set that price. What pisses me off is the amount of money stolen from local governments to build palaces for these assholes. The garbage pile known as the Minnesota Twins was worth $125 million dollars until the state of Minnesota and Hennepin County spent $500 million to build them a dump to play in, they are now listed at $250 million dollars. It would have been a better deal for everyone if the state had just handed the crappy bastard Pohlad family $300 million dollars and told them to stay in their old place.

    Thats not the players fault its the crooks that own the teams that drive this madness and the douchebag politicians they own

  36. 36.

    Mnemosyne

    @Amir Khalid:

    I’m pretty sure it was food poisoning (I felt like one of the characters in Bridesmaids for a while there last night), but gogol’s wife made a good case for it potentially being norovirus. The actual symptoms were thankfully reasonably short-lived, but I’m trying not to make my digestion angry again by challenging it too soon.

  37. 37.

    Jennifer

    @Hungry Joe: I usually don’t weigh in on any issue re: sports, because for the most part I don’t give a flying one about any of it, but your points are both good and give rise to yet another: major league sports these days get the bulk of their revenue from broadcast rights, merchandising tie-ins, etc etc, not from ticket sales. Seems it would be better for them to lower ticket prices and fill the stands, which makes for better optics on TV which is mostly where their profits are. Of course I’m sure there are some teams that can fill the stands even with ridiculous ticket prices and in those cases they’re just taking advantage of being able to set their price and make even MOAR money. But I’m pretty sure it’s not true everywhere for every team.

  42. 42.

    Uncle Cosmo

    The growth of the average MLB player salary from 0.2% of franchise value in 1946 to 0.5% in 2011 represents a growth rate of 1.5% per annum in salary over & above franchise value growth. How many years in that period have seen an inflation rate less than 1.5%? (And FTR, my guess is that if you expressed a typical salary in terms of median rather than average–as is customary when dealing with skewed distributions–it would likely run even less.)

  43. 43.

    jnfr

    Big 4/20 party down in Denver today. Lots of music and fun. I hate crowds so I didn’t go, but I am happy knowing they’re down there doing it.

    Then apparently a couple of folks shot a couple of other folks. Not life-threatening, but still gives me a sad. It was the first 4/20 since Amendment 64 passed, and I hate this shit.

  44. 44.

    BGinCHI

    @raven: Where is that?? It looks kind of like that old BBQ place on the road into town (shit I can’t remember the name…).

    Who’s the dude on the left with the kid. Looks familiar.

    That pic is soooo Athens. And the weather and general springtime atmosphere is killing me.

  45. 45.

    Schlemizel

    @Amir Khalid:

    I am going to ask a question and I hope you don’t mind.

    I have lived my whole life in the USA where we expect everyone to kiss our ass & cater to us. What is it like to live in a country where your stuff can be deleted like that? I am not trying to be insulting I really do wonder how that stuff can happen & you not be sort of pissed off about it. It seems dismissive.

  46. 46.

    Mnemosyne

    @Schlemizel:

    We in Los Angeles (city and county) are very lucky that we’ve managed to prevent our sports teams from climbing onto the public dole. When the Lakers wanted a new stadium, a private consortium came together to build the Staples Center, and it’s been wildly successful without getting a dime of taxpayer money.

    We’ll probably never get another NFL team because the NFL refuses to bring a team to any city that doesn’t give the NFL a kickback from taxpayer funds, but we can live with that.

  49. 49.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Mnemosyne: Well, we already do have a pro team that plays near to downtown LA anyway.

    P.S. Do hope your tummy feels better.

  50. 50.

    gbear

    @Mnemosyne:

    We’ll probably never get another NFL team because the NFL refuses to bring a team to any city that doesn’t give the NFL a kickback from taxpayer funds, but we can live with that.

    Yes, you could have had our Vikings, but they managed to get the state to spend buckets of money on a new stadium. I can’t imagine how sad this makes you feel…

  59. 59.

    Amir Khalid

    @Schlemizel:
    I’m somewhat mystified by your question. It’s not likely that the Bloody Garmen (as we call it here) had anything to do with this. It’s election time here and they’ve got bigger fish to fry, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors.

    It was just some glitch in the new Firefox, methinks. NoSquint do say they’re working on a fix. I might try to re-install the flag theme later on.

  60. 60.

    Cacti

    Of the four major professional leagues in the US of A, baseball tends to be the most affordable for a family experience.

    In the Phoenix area, much cheaper to get D’backs tickets than the Cardinals, Suns, or Coyotes.

  62. 62.

    Schlemizel

    @Amir Khalid:

    I suppose but it seems to me that this sort of stuff happens to other people, not to Americans. I just sort of wonder how it feels to get short shrift to a bunch of loud mouth, swaggering assholes like us

  64. 64.

    Highway Rob

    Wifey’s on the road for work. Therefore, steak, margaritas, and the Maltese Falcon on blu-ray.

    Re. the margaritas, I’m sampling Republic of Texas’s tequila & mixes, and glorying in the fact that I live in Austin, Texas.

    +1/2 of a double.

  65. 65.

    Schlemizel

    @Cacti:

    Gopher womans hockey – most expensive ticket is $12 and it is the best hockey you will see in North America outside of a US/Canada game. Seriously, just watched the world tourney & MN would have finished no worse than third.

    They play fast & make beautiful plays. When the top teams play they allow a lot of physical play too so you will not miss the bumping and slamming.

    Hockey, when well played (not goonball like the NHL) is a thing of beauty, chess at 100 MPH with bodies flying. Unlike basketball (the next best play/strategy game) it takes many good player, not just 2 or 3 to make a great team. If you do not see Minnesota, BC or BU you are missing the very best players of the very best sport

  66. 66.

    mellowjohn

    @tofubo: except…
    justin verlander = detroit tigers
    steinbrenners = the evil empire

    but your point is well taken, and applies to any player-owner relationship in any sport.

  75. 75.

    Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)

    I’m trying to watch this Hemlock Grove stuff on Netflix. Anyone seen it? Good? Bad? Meh?

  76. 76.

    raven

    @BGinCHI: It’s White Tiger right in the Boulevard district. Might have been Thrasher Grocery when you were here. Pat Carey is the dude.

  77. 77.

    Fort Geek

    Didn’t even think of it till I saw it at Wonkette…but Romneycare is taking care of bomber #2’s medical needs as we speak.

    Let us savor.

  78. 78.

    MikeJ

    @Fort Geek: I’m not sure that’s true. When you’re in police custody, you’re the problem of the police. The state has to pay for healthcare for prisoners even in states without decent healthcare laws.

  80. 80.

    Mnemosyne

    @MikeJ:

    It’s an interesting question. IIRC, the state will usually try to seek reimbursement for non-prison care from the person’s insurance company if they have one, but I’m not really sure.

  81. 81.

    Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)

    @Higgs Boson’s Mate: Interesting. I didn’t even think of the Twin Peaks angle, and I’ve never watched/read any Twilight. It seems pretty emo so far.

  84. 84.

    magurakurin

    @MikeJ:

    When you’re in police custody, you’re the problem of the police. The state has to pay for healthcare for prisoners even in states without decent healthcare laws.

    So true, in fact, people have actually done crimes and sent themselves to jail to get health care

    so, all in all, the “bad guy is getting RomneyCare” joke, while probably well intended, isn’t really very funny. But, hey, they can’t all be winners.

  85. 85.

    Another Halocene Human

    @Amir Khalid: That’s lame. Shouldn’t Firefox be publishing api’s for developers so their plugins don’t break?

    I hope that the stuff you’re using is still actively maintained. Hopefully they will notice and update, too. :)

  86. 86.

    Another Halocene Human

    @Schlemizel: The worst part is that the old time fields were often used for other purposes during the off-season. Now they’re all one-sport only, paid for with public funds yet off-limits to the public. I mean, fuck that shit. Pay for your own damn crap. Let’s have some municipal fields and if pay-to-play leagues wanna use it they can get in line.

    TV fucked baseball. That’s the truth. Cities with multiple teams saw the blue collar teams get shipped to major markets without a team. Regular people can’t go to the actual game, it’s like fucking opera tickets or something. The little people can’t go to anything live, it’s tv for you. Even the Romans weren’t that crass.

  87. 87.

    Eric

    The sad fact as many so called “journalists” really know nothing except how to write well but they think they can be an expert on anything. It is amazing how many of them have no concept how market pricing works and business fundamentals. Put simply they have the causation exactly backwards, ticket prices don’t go up because of player salaries. Player salaries go up because tickets (and concessions and especially TV revenue) go up. What determines ticket prices is what the market will bear, they charge as much as people are willing to pay in competition with other firms of entertainment. With the explosion in TV revenue and ticket prices that increased profit will either go all to the owners or to higher salaries.

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