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

Subjects:

• Popular Culture » Sports
• Economics » Labor Relations
• Economics » Microeconomics

Reviews:

• [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
• Writing about what he terms the "good ol' days", Marburger presents an excellent and comprehensive historical summary of the evolution of the business of baseball....The book contains fascinating sections dealing with expansion, pensions, salaries, revenue sharing, and an in-depth analysis of baseball's anti-trust exemption....[T]his book contains a wealth of information for anyone interested in baseball or labor relations. If you happen to be interested in both topics, then this book is a "home run."
  —Labor Studies Journal

• Endorsement From Simon Rottenberg
  Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst: [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.

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