In a baseball game played on May 4, 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings beat the Great Westerns of Cincinnati 45-9. That Red Stockings team was the first to take the field with a full roster of paid players, so this game is recognized as the birth of pro-team sports. Because the Great Westerns was a squad of amateurs, it is also the first game to demonstrate how money can negatively affect team sports.
Published in the anniversary month of that first pro-team sports game, K. J. Fairchild's Fair Pay-Fair Play: Getting the Pro-Team Sports We Want at Prices We Can Afford, describes the many negative effects of money on today's pro-team sports (baseball, basketball, football and hockey). These negative effects include the excessive cost to fans, non-fans and taxpayers (and the consequent redistribution of wealth), the focus on individual rewards versus team results, the disruption of game action and elongation of game times by excessive TV commercials, and on and on.
These negative effects, Fairchild writes, derive from the league's monopoly control of their sport and the owner's monopoly control of the local franchise-an entity that is not just a team to its customers, but is My Team to millions of devoted fans.
Fairchild then describes the tools society created to deal with monopolists in the past and how these tools could be used to deal with pro-team sports monopolists today.
The book's companion website, www.fairpayfairplay.org, provides fans, non-fans, and taxpayers the opportunity to speak out on the topics discussed in the book, hear from the author, and more. And, as many of these same issues exist in major college sports, the website includes these topics as well.
Provocative and well-researched, Fair Pay-Fair Play: Getting the Pro-Team Sports We Want at Prices We Can Afford, deserves the attention of fans, non-fans, taxpayers, and policymakers.
