XM MLB Chat: XM hosts encourage Yankee hatred after 2009 World Series, taking your calls

Somehow the 'discourse' materialized. Magically it appeared 24/7 across mass media platforms...I heard XM MLB hosts selling it like hotcakes for days after the series, such as "people across the country hate the Yankees more and more, how does it make you feel, give us a call" and the like.

Part of Bud Selig's arsenal to build hatred and resentment against Yankee players while deflecting attention from himself and MLB owners. Yankee management apparently fine with it.

Howard Bryant: "The post-World Series narrative...has been that the Yankees finally bought the right hardware for their $206 million investment in player payroll. ...A little more than a week earlier, during the American League Championship Series, Los Angeles Angels center fielder

Torii Hunter mentioned the Yankees' massive offseason spending spree in
seemingly every third interview..."

If the landscape is overwhelmed with talk of Yankee hatred, there is no room for topics like how teams are being run. For example, why not require an accounting of how teams spend the $150 million in revenue sharing they get from the Yankees this year, or the money they each receive from MLB.com?

Or the fact that baseball is a legal monopoly with no oversight of its books?

Thanks for the call, good point. Now a word from our sponsor.

Howard Bryant: "So before baseball tries to restrict the earning power of the players to address whatever financial woes it has -- and a salary cap surely would come couched in terms of player greed --

the game's central office needs to place more

scrutiny on how its franchises are actually run."...

It won't happen. Mr. Bryant quotes Curt Flood in 1971 about problems in the game. Nothing has changed:

(Howard Bryant): "Here's what former MLB player Curt Flood, addressing how profit rather than the quality of the game is all that concerns ownership, wrote in "The Way It Is" in 1971:

Their protestations notwithstanding, the owners measure the Good of the Game in terms of the profits that remain after expenses are subtracted from receipts.

Everything else is subordinated, including the quality of what takes place on the playing field.

The proprietors of baseball have never hesitated to adulterate the game to make an extra dollar.

Exhibit A is the profitably extended season of 162 games, plus pre-season exhibitions, plus in-season exhibitions, plus intraleague championship playoffs,

plus a World Series that has become a travesty because

the men are utterly exhausted before it starts.""...

They've even added the World Baseball Classic to the load. Including bullying of players by Gene Orza and others and pressuring players who are injured. Media types dripping with authority say "players and teams must sacrifice for the greater good," enraged if an owner has the 'selfishness' to want to protect a player.

MLB could not have kept this scam up all these years without the help of its partners in the media. Selig can confer immortality on media types and perhaps a future job, so why make waves? And who needs the nasty phone calls anyway.

Reference, Howard Bryant article from ESPN.com, ""Money Talks, but Baseball Won't Listen," 11/17/09