WELL II: All due respect to Ben on the MLBPA question, but I think he's getting it wrong. The collective bargaining agreement says that players can't restructure their contracts to accept drastically smaller amounts of money. This is what the MLBPA is worried about:
1. A-Rod signs with the Red Sox and cuts out, oh, $30 million or so from his contract, because that's the only way the owners are willing to make the trade.
2. Some other team asks a slightly smaller star to take a slightly smaller paycut. e.g. Ichiro in Seattle, in midseason, so that the Mariners can go out and get themselves (whatever it is they need that year). Under pressure from the owners, and the fans (why should Ichiro be so selfish?), he relents.
3. Prospects are asked to restructure their contracts to help make swaps of big players (Kevin Brown for Jeff Weaver plus prospects, for example) more financially viable. Since these people have virtually no leverage, and owners can screw up their entire careers if the players don't go along, they will.
So what you end up with is the reality that any contract a player signs will be virtually meaningless, since the owners will just put on pressure to restructure whenever they want (whether for a good reason or no reason at all). And the people who'd really end up getting hurt by this aren't the big stars, they're the guys in AAA who are trying to scrape together a living.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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