Today is the last day of this year’s NFL Draft. I didn’t write anything about it, but you’ll just have to trust me that I was against player drafts before it was cool. Now you have guys like Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk (who was, admittedly, a labor lawyer) calling the draft “un-American.”
Obviously, player drafts are just tools that owners use to suppress salaries and limit the bargaining power of young athletes. But it’s a tricky subject, because it’s easy to lapse into bad, capitalistic rhetoric when attacking the draft. Players should be free to choose their own employer, like workers in any industry! Seems like a pretty intuitive argument, right? Except that, in real life, workers and employers are rarely on equal footing when hiring and negotiating salaries, and we shouldn’t act like most people find jobs through an honest, good faith bargaining process.
More than that, though, there is a kind of romantic individualism expressed in this idea that reinforces capitalism. Florio, for example, criticizes the draft because it “restrains movement and flexibility and the inherent realities of self-determination.” But talk about “self-determination” is the kind of thing you hear when your employer hires a union-busting PR firm… As we saw in the in the discourse around vaccines, there are times when individual workers might have to accept restrictions on their own movement/flexibility/self-determination for the sake of their class interests.
To be clear, player drafts are NOT one of those times. They really only serve the interests of owners (the bullshit about “competitive balance” doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny). But we ought to be careful, when criticizing them, not to default to attacks that romanticize the “self-determination” of individual workers.
Anyway, here was everything from Undrafted this April:
In no business other than sports do capitalists pretend their is a fixed limit on the size of their market—and even in sports, they only do it when they want to limit player salaries. Do not believe their bullshit…
I hope you all enjoyed the “March Stories” mini-series from the Lefty Specialists. We liked recording them!
I did not like writing about A-Rod saying something dumb, but he accidentally said something revealing about Hustle Culture and the inherently exploitive nature of capitalism!
Our baseball preview podcast ep! This one was not as immediately out of date as last year’s!
Bomani Jones got mad at me on Twitter for this one, but I don’t think I really said anything unfair. Certainly this wasn’t meant as some kind of “takedown” of him or something—I just really don’t like it when people start to argue for more “merit-based” decision making.
Putting these two together because, even though I didn’t plan them together, they’re kind of about the same thing: What makes a team work? I like LeBron a lot. I like Russell Westbrook a lot. I like Kevin Durant a lot. I even like Kyrie Irving, who I’ve defended here a bunch of times. But I was not said to see any of them eliminated so unceremoniously, in part because those teams all seemed like collections of talented individuals more than coherent teams.