Lockout angst: When did baseball become the good example?

It doesn't feel like all that long ago when baseball had an awful strike, missed a ton of time, and alienated many of its fans into jumping ship because they didn't want to deal with these rich guys' "problems" anymore.

For a modern example of what happened to the MLB in 1994-95, look no further than what Netflix has done the past five months, or what the NBA is trying to do as we speak. Both are excellent emulations of that less-than-excellent situation from 16 years ago in baseball.

So after all the messy news about the NFL lockout and among all the messy news about the NBA lockout (which is looking about as bad as Jared Leto's face in Fight Club), it was almost impossible to believe that I could be reading this.

According to the report, Major League Baseball has reached a verbal labor agreement between the players and owners for when their current deal runs out in...DECEMBER. Wait, What? They're allowed to negotiate and be productive before the current deal runs out? That's so weird, cause I would have thought if that was the case the NFL and NBA might have taken advantage of some negotiating sessions before they actually entered the lockout phase.

Since when did the MLB start setting the good example? This post comes on the heels of what I wrote about yesterday, when they made more good moves (adding more teams to the playoffs and moving the Astros to the AL). Sure, basketball and football were facing bigger issues that needed working out when they came out of their most recent labors deals than baseball is. But come on. This is the way this stuff is supposed to go down. Some smart people get together who understand what is going on, talk it out, and come up with a new deal. You don't get petty and take potshots at each other in between negotiations, offer deals that you know aren't going to be accepted because they are unreasonable, and wait forever to actually negotiate in earnest. If you'd have told me five years ago that in 2011 we would have three separate labor negotiations happen, that two of them would go poorly and one would go well, I would have never guessed the good would have come from baseball. If you'd have told me baseball would do a better job than the NBA or especially the NFL, I would have called you an idiot.

But here we are, in 2011, and the MLB appears to have done a good job making sure it can hang onto the momentum it gained from a phenomenal close to the regular season, phenomenal playoffs and PHENOMENAL World Series. NFL, NBA, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Your ne'er-do-well older brother just got called into the game and won the town over because you two were unavailable. Make sure you don't do this again, or Hockey just may slip on by you as well.

eNBArrassment

See what I did there? Pretty clever. Wait, you're not a fan? No? Okay, probably best if that kind of thing stops here and now.

At any rate, I wanted to throw myself into the unending and ever-growing group of people complaining about the NBA Lockout. And I'm angry for four big reasons.

1. Just like the NFL lockout, fans can't help but feel like this is a ridiculous argument between a bunch of rich guys and richer guys who want more money (In the NBA of course this is not completely the case: the owners say they are losing money, and the players just don't want to feel like they are getting ripped off in the new deal).
2. Two excellent articles by Malcolm Gladwell that he wrote for Grantland.com. These articles present two well-written ideas against the owners in this lockout mess.
3. The nonsense that we are continuously fed with the goal of keeping us from going insane. In the most recent story on ESPN.com, Commissioner David Stern said he doesn't think Christmas games would happen if a deal wasn't reached by Tuesday. This comes a week after Stern told us the first two weeks would be gone if a deal wasn't reach by the past Monday. So in a week, we went from losing two weeks to losing eight?!?! If the potential start date moved back one or two weeks, that might make a little bit of sense. But this is completely out of proportion. Quit lying to me, please! I just want to know how salty I should get about how much basketball I'm going to be missing.
4. I had really gotten into the NBA again. I grew up watching the NBA as religiously as any other type of basketball. I saw the end of Jordan's career (with the Bulls) and the rise of the Spurs. But at that point I was just a 9 to 12 year old kid. And when the last lockout season hit the NBA, it pissed a lot of people off. One of those was my dad, who stopped watching the NBA entirely. As a young guy, I didn't go out of my way to catch NBA games on TV, especially since there is no local team to champion when you're leaving in Dayton. But the NBA had started to get my attention the last few years, and I was really following it closely in 2010-11. From the people I speak to about these things, the NBA had regained a lot of fans it had lost. It's popularity was on the rise. If an entire season disappears again, what is going to happen to those fans? I'm guessing they'll depart, just like they did in 2003.

Sigh. Sometimes I wish these morons could just see the consequences of what they're doing beyond how it is affecting them for the next two weeks. Yeah, owners, it'll be great if you get a 50/50 deal. But if you piss off half your fan-base in the process, guess what? You'll still be losing money!

Quit wasting my time and yours.