Will McDonough Quotes

Once you've been around this business long enough, anything is a possibility. It's a business first and foremost. Guys play it because they love it, but it is a business, and if you don't understand that it's a business, you're lying to yourself.

I'd get rid of it, just get rid of the draft altogether. We'd just deal with the salary cap.

Free agency screws everybody's allegiances up. Whether it be football, baseball, hockey, basketball, whatever it may be. It's really hard.

I am dead set against free agency. It can ruin baseball.

I don't blame the players today for the money. I blame the owners. They started it. They wanna give it to 'em? More power to 'em.

To be candid with you, free agency hurts all sports. It's great for athletes making an enormous amount of money. But to say it helps the sports, I don't believe that.

Every player looks forward to free agency.

Free agency is free agency. I love when NBA players get paid.

Just because you go to free agency doesn't mean you don't want to be somewhere. It's just a part of the business.

We need a system where all of our teams have the opportunity to compete and to make a few dollars. That's not a bad desire for collective bargaining for a sports league, and it's great for our fans.

Well, everybody is trying to make this a money thing. If you send me to another team, let's see what I ask for. I won't ask for nothing. I'll play under the same terms. So it is not Gary wants more money. Gary has money. What else do I need?

The people who run the game, they are the ones who want to change it and make people believe that it's different somehow. It's not different, the only difference is that some ballplayers today have a chance for a four- or five-year contract and they can make big money.

Today, free agency takes away a lot of your heroes, they go somewhere else. Some of them don't but a lot of them do-take the higher offer to go somewhere else. And, it turns the fans off because they get attached to the players.

Our economics are not baseball's economics. Our game is not baseball's game. Our owners are not baseball's owners, with one or two exceptions. Our union is not baseball's union. What we do has to be crafted and suited to address hockey, to address the NHL, to address our 30 teams and our 700-plus players.

It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if we didn't have a salary cap.

And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball's profitability by 'running the game like a business.'

The ability of players to jump teams when their contracts are up has hurt fan loyalty.

A lot of players know I've been around 13 years and this is my second lockout. I got a lot of respect. I know what's going on both for the league and the union.

And historically the owners have used loyalty to a team or a city to hold players as opposed to always paying their worth.

It's a business. But as a player, it sucks to know you were just thrown into a trade for it to work.

I think people have to realize that - and basketball fans do, Lakers fans do - that we have to operate under the rules of the collective bargaining agreement, which means you can't just go and grab every player that you want.

You don't want to get to the point where you play out your contract and you get to those complicated situations where they can put the franchise tag on you and things like that.

In baseball, nothing surprises me. I understand this is a business.

Guys move around in free agency.

I can't speak on anybody else's free agencies, how that's going, but for myself, it helps to kind of be patient and let it happen.