Baseball's Revenue Gap


Book Description




Stealing Lives


Book Description

While some Latin American superstars have overcome discrimination to strike gold in baseball's big leagues, thousands more Latin American players never make it to "The Show." Stealing Lives focuses on the plight of one Venezuelan teenager and documents abuses that take place against Latin children and young men as baseball becomes a global business. The authors reveal that in their efforts to secure cheap labor, Major League teams often violate the basic human rights of children. As a young boy growing up in Venezuela, Alexis Quiroz dreamed of playing in the Major Leagues. Alexis's dreams were like those of thousands of other boys in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, and Major League teams encouraged such dreams by recruiting Latin children as young as 10 and 11 years old. Determined to become a big league player, Alexis finished high school early and dedicated himself to landing a contract with a Major League team. Alexis signed with the Chicago Cubs in 1995 at age 17 and then began a harrowing ordeal of exploitation, mistreatment, and disrespect at the hands of the Chicago Cubs, including playing for the Cubs' Dominican Summer League team in appalling living conditions. Alexis's baseball career came to an abrupt end by an injury for which the Cubs provided no adequate medical treatment. The story continues, however, with Alexis's pursuit of justice in the United States to ensure that other Venezuelan and Dominican boys do not encounter similar experiences. What happened to Alexis is not an isolated case-Major League teams routinely deny Latin children and young men the basic protections that their U.S. counterparts take for granted. This exploitation violates international legal standards on labor standards and the human rights of children. Stealing Lives concludes by analyzing various reforms to redress the inequities big league baseball creates in its globalization.




The Business of Sports


Book Description

The Business of Sports, Second Edition is a comprehensive collection of readings that focus on the multibillion-dollar sports industry and the dilemmas faced by todays sports business leaders. It contains a dynamic set of readings to provide a complete overview of major sports business issues. The Second Edition covers professional, Olympic, and collegiate sports, and highlights the major issues that impact each of these broad categories. The Second Edition continue to provide insight from a variety of stakeholders in the industry and cover the major business disciplines of management, marketing, finance, information technology, accounting, ethics and law. In addition, it features concise introductions, targeted discussion questions, and graphs and tables to convey relevant financial data and other statistics discussed. This book is designed for current and future sports business leaders as well as those interested in the inner-workings of the industry.




Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1860-1901


Book Description

Here is the first in-depth account of the birth of black baseball and its dramatic passage from grass-roots venture to commercial enterprise. In the late nineteenth century resourceful black businessmen founded ball teams that became the Negro Leagues. Racial bias aside, they faced vast odds, from the need to court white sponsors to negotiating ball parks. With no blacks in cities, they barnstormed small towns to attract fans, employing all manner of gimmickry to rouse attention. Drawing on major newspapers and obscure African-American journals, the author explores the diverse forces that shaped minority baseball. He looks unflinchingly at prejudice in amateur and pro circles and constant inadequate press coverage. He assesses the impact of urbanization, migration, and the rise of northern ghettoes, and he applauds those bold innovators who forged black baseball into a parallel club that appealed to whites yet nurtured a uniquely African American playing style. This was black baseball's finest hour: at once a source of great ethnic pride and a hard won pathway for integration into the mainstream.




Bargaining with Baseball


Book Description

In 1995, William B. Gould IV, then chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, cast the deciding vote to obtain the injunction that ended the longest strike in baseball history. Sixteen years of peaceful relations between baseball labor and management have followed, as well as unprecedented prosperity in a relationship that had just endured 30 years of strikes and lockouts. This study, which clearly illustrates the practical impact of law on America's pastime, considers the 140-year sweep of labor-management relationships and conflict, exploring player-owner disputes, the development of free agency, the collective bargaining process, and the racial integration of baseball, among other topics. It concludes with a discussion of the "steroids era," the problem with maintaining Jackie Robinson's legacy in the 21st century, and globalization.




The Great Baseball Revolt


Book Description

The Players League, formed in 1890, was a short-lived professional baseball league controlled and owned in part by the players themselves, a response to the National League’s salary cap and “reserve rule,” which bound players for life to one particular team. Led by John Montgomery Ward, the Players League was a star-studded group that included most of the best players of the National League, who bolted not only to gain control of their wages but also to share ownership of the teams. Lasting only a year, the league impacted both the professional sports and the labor politics of athletes and nonathletes alike. The Great Baseball Revolt is a historic overview of the rise and fall of the Players League, which fielded teams in Boston, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Though it marketed itself as a working-class league, the players were underfunded and had to turn to wealthy capitalists for much of their startup costs, including the new ballparks. It was in this context that the league intersected with the organized labor movement, and in many ways challenged by organized labor to be by and for the people. In its only season, the Players League outdrew the National League in fan attendance. But when the National League overinflated its numbers and profits, the Players League backers pulled out. The Great Baseball Revolt brings to life a compelling cast of characters and a mostly forgotten but important time in professional sports when labor politics affected both athletes and nonathletes. Purchase the audio edition.




Free Agency and Competitive Balance in Baseball


Book Description

As early as the 1880s, baseball owners and sportswriters were decrying the greediness of players as the leading threat to the national pastime. Nearly a century later in 1976, the Player's Association was able to finally tear down baseball's permanent reserve clause--the contract language that essentially bound a player to a single team until he was released or traded--and owners and sportswriters again insisted that the competitive balance of the game was threatened by player greed. The rhetoric from the baseball establishment did not match the on-field reality. From 1981 to 1993, the first significant era of free agency in the sport's history, all 12 of the National League's teams finished first at least once, as did 11 American League teams. From 1994 through 2001, however, there was a pronounced separation in strength between the haves and have-nots, as the local revenue streams of major markets such as New York and Boston overwhelmed the capabilities of small market franchises in such cities as Tampa, Montreal, and Milwaukee. This work examines how the sport has prospered and suffered during the free agency era, based in large part on how the game's various revenue streams are allocated. It further examines the revenue sharing plan in baseball's current collective bargaining agreement, identifying flaws that may well undermine its long-term effectiveness. It also explores how the baseball expertise of some organizations has allowed them to flourish despite the lack of revenue.




Handbook of Sports Economics Research


Book Description

The wealth of data available on sports makes the industry a singular laboratory for observing economic and business behavior and theory. This unique reference on sports economics research provides a detailed perspective on the current state of the discipline. Covering both team and individual sports that include tennis, golf, and motor racing, the handbook explores what we know, what we do not know, what is stable, what is changing, what is certain, and what is controversial in sports economics. The expert contributors address issues in particular sports or comparisons among sports along major topics such as revenue and costs, labor markets, market structure, market outcomes, and public policy.







The Business of Sports


Book Description

The Business of Sports provides a comprehensive foundation of the economic, organizational, legal and political components of the sports industry. Geared for journalism, communication and business students, but also an excellent resource for those working in sports, this text introduces readers to the ever-increasing complexity of an industry that is in constant flux. Now in its third edition, the volume continues to offer a wealth of statistics and case studies, up to date with the newest developments in sports business and focused on cutting-edge issues and topics, including the many changes in international sports and the role of analytics in decision-making and tax rules that have a major effect on athletes and teams.