No Sushi For You, Mr. Selig

Edit: Oh good, the idiocy has been resolved. Early drinking is still on!

Through fortuitous circumstances, I have next week off, so I was planning on reliving my college years by drinking my breakfast and watching baseball from Japan at six in the morning in a bar (note that only one of those things actually happened in college) when the Sox start the season against the A's on Tuesday. Except now that might not be happening, because Major League Baseball isn't going to be paying the coaches the $40,000 stipend they'd allegedly promised them for making the trip, and the players are threatening to boycott the trip. Two thoughts about this choice PR fiasco:

1. Major League Baseball is in super awesome profit mode right now, as a quick news search will reveal. Are they really going to screw a fairly small group of people out of a comparatively small amount of money, especially when they're forcing those people to go on a trip that really only benefits Major League Baseball and - hopefully - Japanese fans? I mean, come on now, MLB: the players and staffs of two teams flying thousands of miles to act as ambassadors for major league American baseball - you know, the institution you control with an iron fist covered with hundred dollar bills - going on a trip that will inconvenience many of their fans and quite possibly throw the entire first part of their season out of whack, and you don't have the courtesy to make it worth their while? That's corporate asshattery of the worst kind, and hats off to the players for calling it for what it is.
2. To the numerous douchebags who are calling the coaches selfish for wanting the money and the players idiots for backing them: are you serious? You're really going to tell the people who have the toughest jobs in the sport - and make far less money than everyone else - that they don't deserve the money from a corporate parent who can afford that small monetary drop in the bucket many times over? Yes, these guys still make far more than the average joe, but saying they're being whiny over money is retard logic; adjust the relative pay scales in your head so it fits your position and you'll hopefully get why not paying them to go - especially after you've promised to do so - makes Major League Baseball the selfish ones.