It’s always about the money.
When anyone says any different in modern professional sports, their noses not only start to grow, but readers, viewers and listeners scoff.
Instead of playing what have become farcical games in talking about the money, it’s time to make open — and correct — references to contract numbers as a part of the process, from the instant an agreement is reached … or even sooner.
As it stands now, initial reports of contracts often include a reference to the numbers followed by a disclaimer along one of several lines.
One version is that those figures come from a source close to the negotiations who didn’t want to be identified because that person isn’t authorized to disclose them (which usually is, at best, disingenuous because the person actually is doing his or her job).
Another version is that contract figures came from a nebulously described “source” or “(fill in name of league) source,” which tells consumers very little and makes the report no more credible than simply stating what the writer knows to be fact.
Those sorts of disclosures often are included in coverage of major impact on pressing issues in the “real” world, but there it makes much more sense.
But in sports, it is a sad reality of the business now that both in contract issues and such things as hirings, unprincipled members of national media outlets often simply appropriate reports of others, slap on a variation of the term “according to a source” and claim it as their own.
That also involves the often silly notion that disclosing something, even the mundane, roughly eight seconds before anyone else on Twitter is unearthing the Pentagon Papers.
But in the specific case of contracts, the figures soon are out there, including on web sites that chart such things, and it’s obvious that figures in the chain have gone along with the disclosure and confirmation of the numbers.
Teams might as well release the numbers, openly, including them in press releases, media guides, website bios and rosters, programs — in everything. Height, weight, age … contract numbers. Currently, some sports and teams list contract “status,” as in how long a player is under contract, but it’s time to be completely transparent and list all the pertinent numbers because talk about money is such an integral part of following modern pro sports.
End the games.
Terry Frei: frei@denverpost.com or twitter.com/TFrei
