“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Voltaire

(Note that underlined text are links to more information to help you understand my opinion better)

Max Wilner-Giwerc, a law student at the University of Chicago makes the point in an Op-Ed published this morning in the San Jose Mercury News, that the current work stoppage in Major League Baseball could be solved with one revolutionary change in the conflict resolution process between players and owners.

Let the fans decide.

Former MLB Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, a former professor of Renaissance Literature and the Seventh Commissioner of MLB for way too short a time, said during the

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

― A. Bartlett Giamatti, Take Time For Paradise: Americans And Their Games

1981 Baseball strike in a statement directed at both players and owners: “Remember that you are custodians of an enduring public trust.” He was suggesting that the public, the fans should be the arbitrator in resolving the “mercantile spats,” and “squalid little squabbles” that stood in the way of getting on the field and playing the game.

Wilner-Gewerc disagreed with Giamatti in that we, the fans of the game, do care about the “mercantile spats” and “squalid little squabbles” because they are about fairness, equity and justice and we deeply care about those things in baseball and in the wider world outside baseball (what? world outside baseball? Absurd notion).

The way baseball arbitration works is that in certain salary disputes where a player and a team cannot agree on a salary, both sides can submit their proposals to a third party arbitrator who must choose one of the two proposals as the final solution to the standoff. There is no splitting the difference, it is either this one or that one. Their choice will be made between the two proposals.

Wilner-Gewerc suggests that applying this concept to the current MLB lockout might stand to benefit from this system of baseball arbitration as a way to moderate the proposals from each side and facilitate a faster resolution to the issues standing in the way of starting Spring Training this year. Wilner-Gewerc suggests that the arbitrator assigned to decide on which proposals are to be implemented should be…drum roll please…THE FANS!

I agree with Mr. Wilner-Gewerc. We, the public, should be the final arbiters of the public trust.

Dammit, “Play ball!”