SPORTS ZONE 2: Possible Baseball Strike by Grayson Age 9

The Major League Baseball Players and the baseball team owners are in the process of negotiating a new work contract. These negotiations have been going on for the past 18 months. The players are dissatisfied with the progress of the negotiations so they set a strike date of August 30th. If an agreement hasn't been reached by that time, the players will go on strike and that means no more baseball.

There are two major issues blocking an agreement. The first one deals with a luxury tax. The luxury tax issue has to do with how large the tax will be and when the tax will kick in. The owners want a luxury tax of 50% on any team payroll over $100 million dollars. The players want a luxury tax of 15% on any team payroll over $135 million dollars. Any tax collected will be redistributed to teams with smaller payrolls. The players are afraid that the tax will affect the owners' ability to pay them as much money as they want.

The second issue is revenue sharing. It is a little different from the luxury tax because it deals with sharing money between all the teams. The revenue sharing issue is based on the transfer of money from larger market teams (like New York) to smaller market teams (like Tampa Bay). This is necessary for the smaller market teams to be able to compete with the large salaries being offered to premiere players by the large market teams.

If the players go on strike, the big losers will be the sport of Baseball and baseball's true fans. Baseball is called "America's Sport". If the players and owners can't reach an agreement and the players go on strike, the fans might get so disgusted they might not want to go to any more baseball games.

Click here to tell us what you think about this story!

Read SPORTS ZONE 1: Beem is Beaming