DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet:Salary caps, base-year contracts and no-trade clauses tranform sports page into business section
By:Hank Kalet
Kenyon Martin is not worth $92.5 million. Few basketball players are and only one of them Kobe Bryant was on the market this summer.
But that’s what the Denver Nuggets were willing to pony up to the University of Cincinnati product and K-Mart will now be showing off his rugged game in the Mile-High City.
NBA owners have been flashing a lot of cash over the last month, very little of it wisely spent. Carlos Boozer, a nice, up-and-coming power forward entering his third season, signed an obscene contract with the Utah Jazz that will net him $68 million over six seasons, while a perfectly useless big man like Adonal Foyle nice guy, politically committed, but no offensive skills to speak of and meat hooks for hands will earn $41.6 million over the next five.
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That’s a lot of cheese, as they say.
But this is what it’s come to in sports. Money has become the dominant topic, turning the sports pages into a bad imitation of the business section and forcing the average fan to delve into the painful minutiae of salary caps, base-year contracts and no-trade clauses.
In football, a complicated set of cap rules limit the amount teams spend, impose bizarre contracts on teams’ best players and allow teams to terminate at will. This has led to an annual merry-go-round of talent, with players changing teams almost as frequently as they change their socks.
In baseball, the merry-go-round turns even faster thanks to free agency and the growing chasm in resources that separate teams like the Yankees and Red Sox from the Kansas City Royals and Montreal Expos. So far, Carlos Beltran a graceful, power-hitting centerfielder who is just 27 has moved from the Royals, who know they cannot pay him when he goes free agent in the winter, to the Astros. Beltran is rumored to be back on the trading block because the Astros are underachieving and about to fall into pennant race oblivion.
The average fan tends to blame our overpaid heroes for this mess, but let’s be honest. Few of us would be willing to leave $10 million to $20 million on the table just to demonstrate how loyal we are. And, really, it’s not like Carlos Boozer held a gun to the head of Kevin O’Connor, vice president for basketball operations. The Jazz didn’t need to hand out that kind of cash. That they did and that the rest of the NBA ownership has been acting like it has an unlimited credit line speaks much about why fans can be turned off so easily these days.
This is a far cry from the simple pleasures of fandom I experienced as a kid, when my friends and I would engineer fictional trades based on what players could do and not what they might be paid. We would draft players and create leagues using APBA Baseball and Basketball or Strat-O-Matic baseball and then turn around and wheel and deal.
Scoring forward Billy Knight for guard Paul Westphal? Only if you throw in swingman Ron Lee. Keith Hernandez for Bill Madlock or maybe Dave Parker? It was all speculative, our teams constructed based on our favorite players and the dice determining everything.
We had no restrictions on player movement, no salary caps or free-agent issues to worry about. But we were kids.
But this was never a realistic view of how the sports world worked. While the players seem to have the leverage these days except in the National Football League that is still a relatively recent phenomenon.
Historically, it is the owners who have controlled the purse strings, paying players whatever it is they felt like paying, moving teams from city to city, holding up local governments for the best deal possible.
The first time I came to understand this was in the summer of 1976 when the Mets traded Tom Seaver to the Reds for four forgettable players rather than pony up and pay him what he would have been worth as one of the three best starting pitchers of his time.
I learned it again when the Knicks sent Walt Frazier, the catalyst to the team’s two titles, to the Cavaliers as compensation for the Knicks’ misguided signing of Jim Cleamons in 1977.
Sports, as I learned then and have come to understand all too well, is really just a part of the massive American entertainment complex, a business whose product is the creation of a false fan loyalty and drama.
And yet, there are few things as thrilling as a well-orchestrated fastbreak or a shortstop going deep in the hole to rob a batter of a hit.
I guess that’s why, when all is said and done, I remain a fan.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected].