Phil Watch: More Misplaced Indignation

The Big Lead reported a few days ago that Sam Smith, the Tribune's NBA writer, stated on the Tony Kornheiser radio show that he might be taking a buy-out.

Though I've only read Smith on occasion, what I have has been reasoned, rational and entirely entertaining (I'm in the process of trying to find the absolute best article about the NBA I read two years where he was part of a roundtable about the state of the NBA - it's unbelievably good).

I give you this little tidbit because it's a good example of juxtaposition: Phil Rogers against Sam Smith in pure ability to write with a smart and entertaining flair.

Phil's most recent piece of 'work' is a bad example of juxtaposition.

Why?

Let's get started.

Shame on Curt Schilling and the other players who did an ugly little Norma Rae imitation last week. They could have solved their problems internally, without letting their inner spoiled brat come out, but that would have meant sacrifice.

Remember when you were in college and had to write fifteen papers a semester? Inevitably, five or six of them patently sucked. For me, many of the sucky ones were written the night before, filled with information vaguely heard in class while I read the newspaper. You know...just a regurgitation of the moments where the professor seemed really into it, create a hook, pound out something in record time and presto! A-.

Phil heard Red Sox and Norma Rae and thought he had a column.

Upset over whether coaches, trainers and a handful of other club employees would be cut in on the bonanza the big-leaguers from Boston and Oakland receive for traveling first class to Japan for the season opener, the Red Sox delayed their final Grapefruit League game in Ft. Myers for an hour.

Do baseball players ever fly coach?

Anyway. I followed this little scuffle as it happened. Here a recap:

Last October, as MLB continued it's little plan to make the game more 'international', they got all the players' union reps together in a conference call to pound out the details. Baseball players being...well...baseball players, got nothing in writing and it was a little vague as to how it was all going to work.

On past trips of this ilk, the whole staff was compensated on par with the players. Boston's player rep., Kevin Youkilis, was of the assumption that it would continue and misunderstood the details of the conference call (who got what, who chipped in, the percentage breakdown, etc.). When it came to light that that wouldn't be the case, the Red Sox front office and MLB tried to hold their feet to the fire. The Red Sox as a team balked at that. Go here for a full explanation.

Phil conveniently leaves out the fact that the Oakland A's were ready to do the same if it wasn't worked out as quickly as it did.

And on that 'quickly'. Where's the justification for this type of outrage on the part of Phil? A Grapefruit League spring training game was delayed for a freakin' hour! It's not like Chicago garbage collectors went on strike for a month in the middle of summer (remember that?).

If it delayed the start of the actual season, I would be a little pissed.

But...Grapefruit League game. One...Hour.

They were rewarded for their behavior by Boston's front office, in conjunction with Major League Baseball and the players' union. The pool of men pocketing $40,000 bonuses was expanded, leaving Schilling's chest puffed up about how the regrettable incident had brought the team together.

Seems fair to expand the pool to me, especially to guys making significantly less than the actual players. And a little smarmy of MLB to try to do such things.

Here in the article, after using Schilling as some form of whipping boy, you would expect a direct quote of Schilling saying something uppity and stupid, something that demonstrates his complete disconnect with the world at large.

"It shows how much this team cares about one another and the people who are involved from the traveling secretary to the video guy to the trainer to the clubhouse people," third baseman Mike Lowell said. "We believed what we were standing up for was the right thing."

Nope.

Perhaps it was, but the details weren't worked out at the appropriate time. By chipping in one-third of their bonuses, the big-leaguers quietly could have come up with enough so that players and 15 staff members each would have netted about $27,000 apiece—now that would have been a show of unity.

Why?! Why?! Why?!

Why in all that is holy should the Red Sox players cut their own bonuses when it has been common practice in the past for these typey-things to include the staff in the cut?

Baseball made over $6 billion last year and their trying this crap?

Something Phil even mentions in this column...

Player salaries have increased to an average of $2.8 million while MLB's annual revenues have passed $6 billion, both at least partly the result of international growth. Aren't trips like this one to Japan and the one to China that the Padres and Dodgers just completed a natural result of the business model?

...here.

Yes. Baseball players make just a crapload of money and have no earthly reason to complain about anything w/r/t money issues as it pertains to them individually.

But MLB has aggressively been pushing these dippy little side trips and baseball festivals like these for the last few years (see World Baseball Classic) and it seems more are on deck. It seems to me this would be a 'natural result of the UNION model' to get a cut of the oodles of cash MLB is raking in with stuff like this.

'Natural result of the business model'. I think Phil just liked how that sounded.

I'm no fan of the baseball union, but where's the issue here?

Again. One Hour. Spring Training Game.

And here's where it gets so much worse.

The Red Sox's Wednesday protest was staged about 24 hours after Cubs players made a stronger statement in Mesa.

Feeling that strength and conditioning coach Tim Buss is underappreciated, the pitching staff did something about it. They passed the hat to buy him a 2008 Nissan Xterra, valued at about $25,000. They got to take their bats to his 1995 Nissan Sentra as part of the deal.

Ugh. Did you feel Phil about to get all juxtapositiony in order to prove a badly thought-out and pretentious point?

I did, but I've become a bit of an expert on Phil-logic, not something to be particularly proud of.

He's not going to take it a step further, is he?

It also came one day after the Yankees traveled from Tampa to Blacksburg, Va., for an exhibition game in honor of those killed in the Virginia Tech campus shooting last April, and at about the same time that the Padres and Dodgers were returning from Beijing.

This makes Christo sad.

Evoking the image of the Virgina Tech shootings to somehow try to prove the silliness of the Boston Red Sox players? And using it because it happened to take place around the same time as this?

Really? That's good writing?

I'm going to use Phil's own language from this column as a juxtaposition to illustrate how terrible it is to do such things:

Shame on you, Phil Rogers. Shame, shame, shame on you.

Give the San Diego and Los Angeles organizations, especially their players, credit for approaching the China trip exactly the right way. Closer Trevor Hoffman and setup man Heath Bell were among the Padres players who embraced the chance to eat scorpions, silkworms and jellyfish, drink snake wine and visit the Great Wall.

Right way?

It's right for the staff not to be cut in on the bonuses?

Can I say that Phil is no fan of the lesser-paid peoples of the world while the obscenely-paid players got theirs?

But hey, they got scorpions, silkworms and jellyfish. Take your cake and be happy about it.

Again. MLB made over $6 billion last year and the Red Sox financial report shows they're also not exactly hurting for dollars.

And they're trying to pull this shit?

And Phil defends them?

National. Baseball. Correspondent. Chicago.