At 10:47 PM 7/9/2002 -0700, you wrote: >The battle of baseball owners vs. baseball players may >not be as interesting as Joe Stiglitz vs. IMF, but >Strike Talk makes me wonder: > >Why don't the (disconented) players of a sports league >buy out (some of?) the teams in the league?
Dan Lewis is the sports econ guru on this list (apologies to sports guru lurkers), but my guess is that owners, who must approve all team sales by some supermajority vote, would vote against such a proposal. Players are considered as contractors of sorts with the league; clubs, not players, comprise the league members. This raises the natural follow-up question: why don't the players split off and form their own, player-run league? I suspect there are a great many answers to that question, but the most obvious might be that players are good at playing baseball (throwing, hitting, catching), not running teams. It would also no doubt lead to serious coaching problems if team managers were answerable not to owners but to the players they coached. ASG
