Stee-Rike Four!: What's Wrong with the Business of Baseball?

About the Book

When major league baseball cancelled its 1994 season following a player strike, fans were shocked that the national pastime could be brought to a standstill by a collective bargaining dispute. The strike was largely responsible for bringing the economics of the game into sports discussions and raising questions about the business of baseball. Will players' rising salaries destroy baseball? How will revenue-sharing and luxury taxes affect competitive balance? Should taxpayers subsidize their local team? This volume answers the basic questions about the economics of the sport, from salary arbitration to baseball's antitrust exemption, in a clear style geared for readers with no formal background in economics.

Table of Contents:

Preface
Introduction by Daniel R. Marburger
Collective Bargaining and Baseball
Whatever Happened to the "Good Ol' Days"? by Daniel R. Marburger
Why Can't Baseball Resolve Its Differences in the Off-Season? by Daniel R. Marburger
Free Agency, Salary Arbitration, and Player Salaries
Will Rising Salaries Destroy Baseball? by James Richard Hill
Free Agency and Competitive Balance by John L. Fizel
Final Offer Salary Arbitration (FOSA)--a.k.a. Franchise Owners' Self-Annihilation by James B. Dworkin
Salary Arbitration in Major League Baseball: A Case of Dog Wags Tail! by William H. Kaempfer
Baseball's Quick-Fix Solutions
The Salary Cap and the Luxury Tax: Affirmative Action Programs for Weak-Drawing Franchises by James Quirk
Increased Revenue-sharing for Major League Baseball? by Lawrence Hadley and Elizabeth Gustafson
Whither Baseball After the Strike of 1994? by James D. Whitney
The Antitrust Issue
Why Baseball's Antitrust Exemption Must Go by Bruce Johnson
Preserve Baseball's Antitrust Exemption, or, Why the Senators are Out of Their League by William F. Shughart II
The Future of Baseball
The Stadium Mess by Rodney Fort
Baseball in the Twenty-First Century by Andrew Zimbalist
Concluding Remarks by Daniel R. Marburger
Index

About the Author :
DANIEL R. MARBURGER is Associate Professor of Economics at Arkansas State University. He has published several articles on the economics of baseball.

Review :
"[E]xcellent economic analyses of aspects of America's favorite professional sporting pastime...written in language that makes them understandable even to readers without formal training in economics. They exhibit, in this context, the power of the discipline of economics as a predictor of behavior. Regular and persistent readers of newspaper sports pages will find their understanding enlarged by the reading of this book."-Simon Rottenberg Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst ?[An] informative layman's guide to the issues which have come to dominate the Hot Stove League over the past quarter century. Stee-rike Four! should be required reading for the economic illiterates who dominate the newspaper, radio, and TV discussion of the business of baseball....As the first layman's guide to baseball economics written after the 1994-95 cataclysm, Stee-rike Four! deserves a larger audience.?-Outside the Lines ?These days a baseball fan would also do well to have a fairly strong background in economics, as luxury taxes, salary arbitration and revenue-sharing have become the new buzzwords of the bleachers. In keeping with that spirit, today's fans should consider Stee-rike Four! required reading. Subtitled What's Wrong with the Business of Baseball? this collection of essays by well-respected economists discusses topics such as free agency, baseball's antitrust exemption and the issue of rising salaries.?-Dispute Resolution Journal "ÝAn¨ informative layman's guide to the issues which have come to dominate the Hot Stove League over the past quarter century. Stee-rike Four! should be required reading for the economic illiterates who dominate the newspaper, radio, and TV discussion of the business of baseball....As the first layman's guide to baseball economics written after the 1994-95 cataclysm, Stee-rike Four! deserves a larger audience."-Outside the Lines "[An] informative layman's guide to the issues which have come to dominate the Hot Stove League over the past quarter century. Stee-rike Four! should be required reading for the economic illiterates who dominate the newspaper, radio, and TV discussion of the business of baseball....As the first layman's guide to baseball economics written after the 1994-95 cataclysm, Stee-rike Four! deserves a larger audience."-Outside the Lines "These days a baseball fan would also do well to have a fairly strong background in economics, as luxury taxes, salary arbitration and revenue-sharing have become the new buzzwords of the bleachers. In keeping with that spirit, today's fans should consider Stee-rike Four! required reading. Subtitled What's Wrong with the Business of Baseball? this collection of essays by well-respected economists discusses topics such as free agency, baseball's antitrust exemption and the issue of rising salaries."-Dispute Resolution Journal