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March 1, 2022

Manfred: We Have To Destroy Baseball In Order To Save It


On February 10, MLB Commissioner and Hater-of-Baseball Rob Manfred lamented the cancellation of any regular-season games because of his decision to lockout the players during negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement as "a disastrous outcome".

A mere eighteen days later, Manfred indicated his "willingness to miss up to a month of games".

MLB had set a firm, but completely artificial, deadline (March 1) for agreement with the Players Association on a new CBA without the 2022 being affected. It turns out MLB's hard deadline was, in reality, a bit flaccid. The fictional deadline was revised to Tuesday at 5:00 PM ET. That deadline, also, will come and go without an agreement because the Players Association agreed unanimously this morning not to accept MLB's final proposal. 

Manfred has announced a press conference this afternoon at 5:00 PM ET. As Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic has written: "Every time Manfred opens his mouth publicly, he only makes matters worse." Today will be no different.

It has taken a while, but the growing consensus among many baseball writers is that MLB is . . . I believe the legal term is . . . full of shit.
(Note: All bolding in quoted articles quotes is my emphasis.)

Ken Rosenthal (The Athletic) wrote last week:
If commissioner Rob Manfred truly believes missing games will be a "disastrous outcome for the industry," he sure does not appear to have convinced his bosses, the 30 major-league owners.

The players' union made moves on Saturday [February 26], moves it considered significant toward reaching a new collective-bargaining agreement. Major League Baseball responded by raising a collective middle finger.
Rosenthal wondered when MLB would finally "make the union an offer that at least appears reasonable". Manfred's actions and words in recent years have galvanized the players, "uniting them in a way the sport has not seen since the strike of 1994-95".
The owners are so intent on a zero-sum victory, so cavalier about the possibility of missing games, they do not even care how fans might interpret their actions. . . .

The league from the start has said it will not consider shortening time to free agency, expanding salary arbitration eligibility or reducing revenue sharing, equating its rigid stance in those three core areas to the players' refusal to negotiate a salary cap. The difference is that those three areas were part of past CBAs and a salary cap was not. But the players, recognizing the owners will not give, have essentially given up the fight. Their only remaining ask is in arbitration, where their requested increase in the percentage of Super Two players from 22 to 35 percent hardly is a game-changer.

Many of the league's "concessions" — a draft lottery, provisions to limit service-time manipulation, the amount of money it is willing to devote to a pre-arbitration bonus pool — are just slightly above the inclusion of floor mats by a car dealer in the purchase of a new vehicle. Heaven forbid the owners negotiate the actual price of the car. . . .

For additional fun, the league also tried to link the expanded playoffs, the union's most valuable bargaining chip, to the draft lottery, an anti-tanking measure that, without additional provisions attached, might have minimal impact. The "deal" [was] the equivalent of Mike Trout for a Triple-A reliever . . .
Rosenthal believes fans are "fairly unanimous — and aligned with the players — in their contempt for Manfred". I honestly don't know if that is true or not.

Manfred has lied continuously since inaccurately calling the owners' actions against the players a "defensive lockout" move and then laughingly saying it was done to "jumpstart" negotiations before doing fuck-all for 43 days before agreeing to do any negotiating. 

I've said before that there are disturbing similarities between Manfred and Donald Trump. The one that presently comes to mind is having convinced yourself that everyone else is dumber than you are and lying with the expectation that no one will remember anything from the past.

Craig Calcaterra, in February 28's edition of "Cup of Coffee", says MLB's latest offer is so insulting, "stonewalling would be less hostile. . . . No response to the players' offer would be preferable and more constructive than the offer they actually made." He cites Rosenthal's article (linked above) as evidence  of how obviousness MLB's bad-faith bargaining and transparent public lying has been, noting that Rosenthal "has no history whatsoever of being a union firebrand".
There is only one conclusion that can be drawn from this: that the owners are seeking to break the union and that they are willing to sacrifice a big chunk of the 2022 season in order to do it. There is no other rational interpretation. The owners, through their behavior, are essentially mocking the very notion of the players even having demands in the first place. . . . On Saturday the players made a comprehensive proposal. It was the kind of package MLB officials have insisted the players must propose if there was going to be any kind of a deal. And it was a package that made considerable movement towards the owners' position. Specifically:
The players dramatically reduced their demands regarding the number of players with two-plus years of service time who would qualify for arbitration, dropping from 75 percent of those players to 35 percent.

That's only 13 percent more than the number of players who qualify under the current Super Two setup;

The players decreased their demands regarding competitive balance tax thresholds by $2 million each in the second, third and fourth years of an agreement; and

The players dropped their request for a revised revenue-sharing policy that would penalize small-market teams for losing, instead focusing only on their request to reward small-market teams that increase local revenue on their own with more shared revenue.
Anyone who has followed these negotiations even remotely closely knows that this represents a significant ratcheting-back of demands on the part of the players. Indeed, given how revenues have grown and given the inflation rate, these demands, such as they are, would arguably result in a deal that is better for the owners than the 2017-2021 CBA that just expired. It promises to give the owners more in revenue than they even had before.

And the owners rejected it almost completely out-of-hand.
As Neil Weinberg tweeted: "MLBPA isn't even asking for a fair deal at this point. They're asking to be taken advantage of slightly less than during the last CBA."

So what should the union do? Calcaterra offers a suggestion:
[T]ake the owners up on their invitation. Tell them that they have made their last best offer. Tell the owners to call when they are ready to lift the lockout because they'll happily play without a CBA rather than continue to bash their heads against a brick wall. When they do that, they should tell the owners that wherever this ends up, expanded playoffs are now off the table and that the owners should not come crying to them when their debt holders and gambling partners get upset that the money isn't flowing and the action isn't happening.

In response I presume the owners would attempt to declare a formal impasse which would allow for them to legally impose their last offer, but such a move only works if they are found to have been negotiating in good faith. This is essentially what happened in 1995, remember, when the owners tried to use scab players to break the strike, at which point the matter went to court, the court found that the owners were not acting in good faith, and the players agreed to go back to work under the old deal while a new one was negotiated over the course of nearly two years.

In this case I'd love to see the owners argue that, in a time of massively-expanding revenues, that their proposal of an all-but-hard salary cap — in the form of a below-inflation tracking threshold and more draconian penalties than which previously existed — shrinking minimum salaries due to the operation of inflation, and the players giving them a half-billion dollar gift in the form of expanded playoffs is "good faith."
Or: Calcaterra explained how this shitshow developed in the first place:
I'd argue that we got here because there exists a baseline sense of entitlement on the part of the current generation of owners. They are a group of men — led by their toady, Rob Manfred — who truly and vehemently believe they should get to dictate terms in all things, be it labor, stadiums, regulation, taxes, you name it. They are the product of two to three generations of rich men who grew into adulthood and/or came into power in an environment in which labor rights are assumed to be illegitimate and no one ever -- ever -- says no to capital. They are the standard-bearers of our new Gilded Age and they are genuinely offended at the notion that they are not entitled to the maximal percentage of riches generated by the labor of the people they employ.

The owners' position here, by the way, has been telegraphed for many years. Back in 2019 Major League Baseball and the MLBPA took the unprecedented step of opening Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations over two years before the current CBA expired. Most took that as a sign that the parties were cognizant of how difficult the negotiation of the next agreement would be and considered it to be evidence that the owners took the matter seriously. Except they didn't.

As I reported at the time, Rob Manfred took an aggressive posture, telling the union that there was "not going to be a deal where we pay you in economics to get labor peace" — which is the very definition of a labor negotiation — and that "maybe Marvin Miller's financial system doesn't work anymore." Sources close to those negotiations told me at the time that the impression left by Manfred's comments were that the league planned to take a hard line with the union and was unwilling to make any concessions on the numerous pocketbook issues about which the players were concerned.

What was clear then, and is even more clear now, is that Major League Baseball and its owners do not believe that the players have the will to fight. Sources close to the players told me back in 2019 that the league was underestimating player anger, resolve and solidarity, and that, even then, the union was telling players and their agents that they needed to gear up for battle. We had a preview of that battle in 2020 when the owners misread player resolve with respect to the nature and shape of the truncated pandemic season and got more of a fight than they were expecting. We're now seeing it again. The owners believe they can run roughshod over the players and do not seem to believe that the players will do what they need to do in order to not let that happen.

As the kids say, the owners are fucking around. If I'm reading player sentiment correctly, they're about to find out.
Jeff Passan (ESPN) pulled no punches, stating MLB's feints towards good-faith negotiating have been a "monthslong charade". MLB is "willing to immolate the game to achieve its goals":
Major League Baseball is in a crisis of its own making, a self-inflicted wound borne of equal parts hubris, short-sightedness and stubbornness from a class of owners who run the teams and seemingly have designs on running the game into the ground. . . . It is a study in the consequences of bad behavior -- of indignities big and small, of abiding by the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit and, worst of all, of alienating those who make the sport great.

The players are angry at the trajectory of the negotiations, which have inched along for almost a year with little demonstrable progress. More than that, they're tired of the game they love saying, in ways both active and passive, it does not love them back.

Player pay has decreased for four consecutive years, even as industry revenues grew and franchise values soared and the would-be stewards of the game pleaded to anyone who would listen that owning a baseball team isn't a particularly profitable venture. Players' service time has been manipulated to keep them from free agency and salary arbitration. The luxury tax, instituted to discourage runaway spending, has morphed into a de facto salary cap, and too many teams are nowhere near it anyway, instead gutting their rosters and slashing their payrolls because the game's rules incentivize losing. The commissioner has called the World Series trophy a "piece of metal," and the league has awarded the team that did the best job curtailing arbitration salaries a replica championship belt. Any of these is a problem. In aggregate, they served as a call to action for the players . . .

Since the [Competitive Balance Tax]'s arrival in 2003, 13 MLB franchises have won the World Series and 19 have played in it. That is the exact same number of teams as in the salary-capped NFL, far better than the nine champions and 14 competitors in the salary-capped NBA and right there with the 11 Stanley Cup winners and 21 finalists in the salary-capped NHL. In the championship seasons prior to the CBT era, 14 organizations won the World Series and 20 made it. The CBT was about competitive balance like "Citizen Kane" was about a sled. . . .

MLB sold the CBT as a way to rein in so-called runaway spending by the New York Yankees. Over time, though, the real intent -- a salary cap in sheep's clothing -- revealed itself. The tax rates grew. Draft-pick penalties joined the fray. Of all the brilliant negotiating Manfred did during his time as the league's lead labor lawyer, his work on turning the CBT from carrot to stick stands out. In September 2017, he said the quiet part out loud in an interview with a San Diego TV station.

"We have tried to deal with payroll disparity by limiting, through the use of taxes, the very highest-payroll clubs," Manfred said, adding: "For the first time in the 25 years since I've been in baseball, everybody in the top quartile of clubs had payrolls that actually went down this year due to the increased penalties that were negotiated as part of this collective-bargaining agreement."

Nothing illustrates the evolution of the CBT quite as well as the 2021 season. Only the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres exceeded the $210 million threshold. Five other teams, however, came within $3.4 million of it. MLB had orchestrated the coup of financial coups in collective bargaining: getting what amounts to a salary cap without a floor or a guaranteed revenue split.

The players noticed. They saw how over the previous two collective-bargaining agreements, the CBT threshold rose about 18% while industry revenues grew by at least 40%. They saw that in 2018, long before COVID existed, their average salaries went down -- as they did again in 2019 and 2020 and 2021, even as the biggest deals in the sport were growing and $300 million-plus guaranteed contracts were no longer outliers. They saw franchise values exploding to the point that in 2021, Forbes estimated, the 30 MLB teams were worth a combined $55.28 billion. Ten years ago, only two collective-bargaining agreements earlier, their combined valuations were $15.68 billion. . . .
Passan, again:
Arbitration has always been a contentious process, and players were livid when they learned MLB celebrated tamping down salaries by awarding a championship belt to the team that did it best. During spring training in 2020, when MLB was reeling from widespread criticism by players that Manfred had been too soft on the Houston Astros for cheating during their championship run, he referred to the World Series trophy as a "piece of metal" in an interview with ESPN's Karl Ravech.

"'Piece of metal' was the Gulf of Tonkin," one longtime baseball man said. "It was the aha moment for everyone. And then he did it again recently with everything about how owning a team isn't that profitable. Treating players like they're stupid has never worked. It's never been a great approach."

Baseball, it seems, can't help from doing it, and it's a symptom of those in ownership who regard players with disdain and struggle to stomach the notion that they warrant the salaries they receive. There are good owners, ones who prioritize winning above profits and understand baseball is wildly different from the businesses in which they made their billions.

Sports is a unique industry. Typically, workers make a product. In baseball, they are the product. The game of baseball is the framework, and in it exists two classes: players and owners. Players spend their entire lives chasing the major leagues. Just making it there is improbable. Staying long enough to make life-changing money is a miracle. Owners, on the other hand -- at least those who don't inherit their teams -- join the baseball world just as they would a country club: by buying membership.

If you went and got the next 1,200 best players in the world, the product would suffer greatly. If you handed MLB teams over to any 30 competent businesspeople, the sport would not suffer. Actually, it might improve. It doesn't take a billionaire to leverage a spot in a legalized monopoly with profound built-in revenues. . . .

The coming days will show how real the league's threat of a hard deadline actually is. . . .

In the meantime, players will do what they've been doing for months: sending one another messages about the current state of affairs and, more often than the commissioner may realize, screenshots of Manfred's golf scores at Winged Foot, as found on Reddit. Gallows humor is the only kind that plays these days, when players' lives and livelihoods are interrupted for no good reason other than that the owners can. . . .

Already this is the second-longest period of labor strife in baseball history, and though it has stopped transactions and doused the hot stove and generally cast the sport in an awful light, until today, the most tangible thing lost was spring training. Soon, that won't be the case. This is Rob Manfred's disaster, the league's disaster, the owners' disaster, and it's been a long time coming.
[Manfred's penchant for golfing during crisis is yet another Trumpism.]

On February 10, Manfred said: "I'm the same person today as I was in 1998."

Beware the man who admits he has not learned anything in 24 years.

Joe Posnanski (Joe Blogs) thinks the recent sessions have been more productive because of the issue of expanded playoffs. MLB wants nearly 50% of teams (14 of 30) to make the postseason.
I think the owners realized in a very real way that the players actually don't want the playoffs expanded. My guess is that, all along, the owners kind of thought expanded playoffs would be something they could just throw in to the deal, good for everybody, kind of like the universal DH.

But the players don't see expanded playoffs as a good thing. I also don't see expanded playoffs as a good thing, but we have different reasons. The players seem to believe that the easier it is to get in the playoffs, the less urgency there is for good teams to spend money.

They are undoubtedly right. The one thing we have seen in baseball is that there does not seem any way to incentivize small-market (and tanking) teams to spend money on players. The CBT was SUPPOSED to give those teams more money to spend on improving, but that turned out to be a joke. The added wild-card team was supposed to give those teams more reasons to try, but that turned out to be a joke too.

So, my guess, owners realized that they probably needed to be just a little more generous in their terms to secure the extra playoffs they want. They offered a somewhat better deal to the players if they would agree to a 12-team playoff (it was 10 teams last year) and a better deal still if they would agree to a 14-team playoff. The players were willing to explore a 12-team option if . . .

And that's where we are.

Now, personally, I utterly loathe the idea of expanded playoffs because I see it as yet another short-sighted, short-term money grab that makes the baseball season even less special. To play 162 games to eliminate just 60% of the teams is nonsensical, and continues that long but persistent march to eradicate what made baseball special and different in the first place. But the people who run baseball have long given fans lesser evil choices, and if forced to choose between expanded playoffs or months without baseball because of a labor war, I suppose I'll take expanded playoffs and the slower decline into the abyss.
I have been walking slowly down into the abyss for several years. I'm about ready to turn around and walk away. I do not need to see the abyss.


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Of course, not all media are seeing clearly:

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Crying Poverty All The Way To The Swiss Banks

Yeah, Jeets
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