If you think Major League Baseball looked stupid handing out participation medals during the warm-and-cozy "everybody wins" ending to this year's All-Star game, you either don't know stupid, or you don't know Major League Baseball.

Two weeks ago, in the midst of labor strife that has a baseball's owners whining about inequities, the Anaheim Angels signed Darin Erstad to a four year, $32 million contract. That's right: Darin Erstad, whose statistics scream "Troy O'Leary"; Darin Erstad, whose delusional proponents apparently count dirt particles on his uniform as a substitute for things like "extra-base hits"; Darin Erstad, who is in a career-long slump that was interrupted by a single brilliant season in 2000, is going to be raking in $8 mill a year.

Don't misunderstand. We're sure Erstad is a great guy, and gosh he does seem to work hard out there in center field. Our point here is simply that Major League Baseball teams are stupid. That's all you really need to know about the current round of labor negotiations.

We're trying to simplify here. We know most Americans don't care about the particulars of baseball's labor dispute, but the average opinion seems to be based on some mistruths that we'd like to correct. For example: baseball players are already overpaid, how greedy can they be to go on strike?!

First of all, that's not fair. Sure, baseball players don't exactly contribute to society as much as teachers or social workers or diaper-changers at retirement homes, but since when was the distribution of wealth in a capitalist society based on societal worth? We don't hear any complaints when idiot-savant computer nerds who dropped out of high school end up as Silicon Valley millionaires because of their programming abilities, or when Adam Sandler essentially smears his own feces on celluloid and gets $20 million a pop.

Of course, the threatened strike is not about "greedy ballplayers," anyway. If sports reporters would stop recycling their "The Fans Are the Ones Who Will Lose" columns from 1994, you would know that by now. A painless, one-sentence synopsis: If no deal is reached, baseball owners can legally install their own labor system without player approval, and threatening a strike is the player's only defense against such a ridiculous scenario. (Could this notion of unilateral implementation be where former Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush got his ideas for foreign policy?)

As far as the bargaining goes, the owners' claim that shared revenue and spending restrictions for the Yankees will help "poor" teams compete is dubious at best. Imagine a similar scenario in Hollywood, with George Lucas and "The Guy Who Made xXx" being forced to share portions of their enormous budgets with their "small-market" counterparts. Smart directors like John Sayles and Wes Anderson would undoubtedly use the funds well, but what about Tom Green? Do you think an additional $10 million would have made Freddy Got Fingered better?

Some baseball teams have proven that they can win with small budgets, and these teams---Oakland, Minnesota, Cincinnati-could probably use some handouts from George Steinbrenner's giant bag of money. But what about the Tom Greens of the league? In their hands, more funds will only mean bigger, fatter contracts to productivity sieves like Derek Bell and Jose Lima. Our point: the Devil Rays don't suck because they have no money, they suck because they gave what money they did have to Wilson Alvarez.

Forget everything you've read. The labor strife is not about greedy ballplayers, competitive balance, market size, ticket prices, the New York Yankees, steroids or whatever else the spin-doctors would have you believe. It's about subsidizing stupidity. The national pastime indeed.

Beowulf