Life & Wisdom Quote by Will McDonough

Free agency didn’t just change rosters; it changed the emotional contract between teams and the people who buy the tickets. Will McDonough, a blunt, old-school sportswriter with Boston in his bloodstream, is mourning a world where allegiance felt reciprocal: fans stayed, and stars stayed too. When he says players “jump teams,” the verb choice is doing a lot of work. It frames movement as casual, even opportunistic, like skipping town in the middle of the night, not as labor rights finally catching up to billionaire ownership. That’s the subtext: a nostalgia for stability that quietly asks fans to identify with the franchise rather than the worker.

The intent is less to litigate economics than to name a cultural aftershock. Sports loyalty has always been partly civic identity, partly family ritual, partly religion-with-statistics. Free agency turns that into something closer to modern consumer life: subscriptions, short-term commitments, brands that retool constantly. Fans are asked to invest in a logo while the human faces rotate.

Context matters. McDonough wrote through the eras when teams sold continuity as a virtue, even as owners traded and cut players ruthlessly. His line captures the asymmetry that free agency exposed: movement was acceptable when management did it; it became a moral problem when players gained the same leverage. The power of the quote is its candor about what’s really being “hurt.” Not wins and losses, but the story fans tell themselves - that loyalty is rewarded, and that their devotion is part of something lasting.