Baseball is following the path of Broadway. Instead of catering to a smaller hardcore crowd willing to spend $40 a ticket to go to practically every show, plays are dumbed down for the masses and marketed as “events” you charge three times as much to attend.

It’s not as if anything is going to change. I haven’t paid attention to hockey since Messier left the Rangers the first time, but I was hoping that the strike would blow up the entire cost structure, and it would come back smaller – players making low hundreds of thousands, tickets costing $20. Instead, it seems as if nothing has changed. If a niche sport can’t start over, baseball certainly won’t.

You’re 100% correct when it comes to multi-year contracts. No incentive and even no fear which we all really need to bring out our best. Long before free agency and the wild card system, September was known for two types of drives: one for the team (the pennant drive) and one for themselves (the salary drive). For other than the fringe player, that doesn’t exist any more. Players sign long-term contracts with guaranteed amounts and incentive clauses but never ones with season-by season financial escape clauses for owners should they perform below par.

One would hope with their financial future no longer in question players would focus on team play and actually take losses much harder. But that is not the case until their skills go down and they mature enough to appreciate the game itself. A prime example is first-year free agent Ken Holtzman who said he didn’t care if he didn’t pitch at all as long as he got paid – later on, when that began to happen he became very unhappy and admitted he was wrong.

The Mets and Yankees and pretty much every other team out there with a stadium built since 1992 have been drooling over the revenue possibilities of a new stadium with luxury boxes and luxury prices ever since Camden Yards sprang up. Are there any owners now who DON’T put revenue first? If pressed, they’d probably all admit they’d rather turn a profit with a losing team than be in the red with a winner.

Anyway, I could give a crap about how much the players are paid; why should the owners make all the money? It’s how long they’re paid that’s often the problem. Long-term contracts frequently turn into albatrosses that teams can’t get rid of if the player turns out to be a bust. That is why I think they were right not to get into a bidding war over John Lackey, and wind up with a 6- or 7-year deal with a pitcher on the north side of 30 with a history of injury problems. If they wanted to pay him $25 million for one year, fine. But his agent would never have even accepted that as a bid.

Problem was, there wasn’t a whole lot else available, but when things are this desperate, the fans feel like they should have gotten someone, anyone, no matter who or what they had to give up to get them. And then, of course, those same people would have whined incessantly that we gave up Ike Davis, or whoever, for some schlub who blew out his arm.