Journeyman

In American English, a journeyman or journeywoman is an athlete who is technically competent but unable to excel. The term is used elsewhere (such as in American, British and Australian contexts) to refer to a professional sportsman who plays for numerous clubs during his career. In Britain, the term is also used derogatorily, along with mercenary, to refer to players who join various affluent clubs purely in search of higher contractual payouts rather than to further their career; usually clubs which they would likely never join otherwise. American English Journeymen often make up a significant part of the roster of even the richest clubs because of the difficulty of guaranteeing all of their star players sufficient playing time. This is especially true in the context of baseball, where journeymen often make up large parts of a team's pitching staff and contribute crucially to a team's success. Many journeymen can be highly experienced, and they often play a "utility" role to cover for injuries or tactical changes as required. Some such players can be signed and cut by multiple teams in a single season, such as NFL quarterback Josh Johnson in . Journeymen players are usually distinguished from an elite or "star" player. Quirk and Fort note that the concerns of journeymen players and superstars, with respect to contract and other negotiations, differ: Superstars are concerned with the preservation of their rights to be free agents, whilst journeymen players are concerned with issues such as league minimum salaries and player pensions. Fort observes that this leads to conflicts between journeymen and superstars, such as (Fort's example) the 1995 attempt by a group of superstar players to derail the agreement between the NBA and its players' association. Holt and Mason note that in football, golf, flat racing, snooker, cricket, and other sports there is a clear distinction in earnings between the few rich stars in each sport and the journeyman professionals. They state that snooker has "an élite of perhaps twenty players" and point to a distinction between high earning test cricketers with six figure wages and "the average county professional" (for whom they give Simon Hughes, who earned £50,000 in the whole of his twelve years in county cricket, as an example).