While it is certainly true that all labor disputes are ultimately about money, baseball disputes have never been an easy matter of who gets what and in what proportion, or even whether management can achieve the ultimate gratification of reducing the labor force to its original state as serfs. The current baseball dispute seems to partially transcend such mundane things as cash and power and moves to an even more central matter: whether a person in power can still be shamed. . . .
It is evident that the 30 owners want baseball to be played only after the union has been either smashed or placed on the injured list. This is not in any way about what baseball fans think are their reasons for still caring about this increasingly preposterous game, and they can hear in Rob Manfred's serpentine speeches all the owners shouting their disinterest in the sport, which is nothing other than the elaborate front for a tech company and real estate grift. . . .
[T]he owners have made almost nothing of an attempt to win the hearts-and-minds battle and have instead presented their case as a matter of the divine right of oligarchs. Your opinion of them is of less importance than your inability to prevent them from being them. They're letting you see the asbestos in the attic as they install it.
Thus, the question at hand is really about whether aggressive disinterest or even open hostility toward the owners and their view of the business can eventually corrode their will. After all, if Manfred is to be believed (and only an idiot would even try to finish that sentence without bursting into either laughter or flames), baseball is a lousy investment compared to, say, fracking on public lands, slumlording, or stock manipulation. . . .
Owning a sports team is largely still an ego-driven act, as the owner almost always buys/inherits the team so that he or she can act like a lofty benefactor of local culture. . . .
Owners can indeed be shamed. It just takes perseverance from the laborers and constant venom from the audience. The answer lies in how much lost revenue and public opprobrium can match the potential benefits of bringing the union to its knees and torso. . . .
But every time Rob Manfred pops up to explain why the owners are the aggrieved party and in doing so reminds us all that the owners are the reason baseball isn't being played, the day that shame overtakes greed comes closer.
On the day Major League Baseball and the owners canceled Opening Day and the first two series of the season because it is crucially important for them to keep 56% of all baseball revenues instead of only 54%, their leader, Rob Manfred, stood in front of reporters and said "The concerns of our fans are at the very top of our consideration list." . . .
At the end of the day what the players rejected was, basically, the same CBA that existed before with some minimal cost of living increases, the elimination of the qualifying offer — but only maybe! — and a draft lottery that is more window-dressing as far as an anti-tanking measure goes as opposed to anything substantive. In exchange the owners wanted a nearly half-billion gift in the form of an expanded postseason. . . .
Rob Manfred . . . claimed that that the two sides were close to a deal, but that's not true. The players said so immediately thereafter. He also claimed that the owners' offer was a good deal, but in an age in which MLB revenues are spiraling upward such an assertion is laughable. . . .
All of this seems to be a result, however disastrous it is for baseball, that the owners were quite content to achieve. Sure, they put in a late night session for show and got the more easily-spun members of the media to say that a deal was close and that their offers were genuine, but in reality it was all a dance they did so that when the players rejected it they could claim that they were being unreasonable. Which is exactly what Manfred did right after the negotiations ended. He did not mention, of course, that the owners made none of the key terms the players said they needed in order to make a deal. Seems like a rather relevant omission.
I truly believe the owners figure that they can nuke April games and maybe some in May, without losing too much money given low early-season attendance, with the hope of making up any losses with an expanded postseason. I think they're sorely mistaken about how easy that will go for them and how little control they have over that, but I do think they believe it.
I also think that such a position, even if accurate, is offensive and immoral given how many stadium workers and people who make their livings due to the playing of baseball games will be harmed by this craven gambit and how damaging this will be to the already plummeting popularity and public profile of baseball compared to other sports and other forms of entertainment. I have long-voiced a fear that Manfred and the current crop of baseball owners are content to allow Major League Baseball go the way of horse racing and boxing, each of which once captured the popular consciousness in this country but which are both now niche pursuits that, however profitable they are due to gambling and weird TV deals that only occasionally push them in front of mainstream audiences, are afterthoughts in the American consciousness. What they are doing now is wholly consistent with that.
Rob Manfred: The Smiling Jackass Who Is Murdering Baseball
Not long after the talks ended, Rob Manfred followed through on his stated threat to cancel Opening Day. Indeed, he announced the cancelation of the first two series on the MLB calendar. Here's what he looked like as he did it:
Truly a dark and solemn day for Rob Manfred, eh? I swear, you could not invent a more disastrous public face for the game of baseball if you tried.
Players spent a lot of time retweeting that smiling Manfred pic. Many other people observed that his demeanor, like his comments in 2020 about the World Series trophy being just "a piece of metal" reveal just how tone deaf he is and just how little he appears to give a crap about baseball. It's hard to disagree. . . .
There's no evidence whatsoever that he appreciates, on any level, what baseball means to people and what its loss will mean to people. He doesn't understand or care that, for a lot of people, Opening Day, which he just wiped off the calendar, is sacred. He has marching orders from some fanatical billionaires who think employees should be thankful for the privilege of working for them and he lives to serve those jackasses. That's the alpha and omega of his existence. It's his raison d'etre. . . .
Rob Manfred can spin all he wants. He can get MLB.com — which is indistinguishable from Brezhnev-era Pravda these days — to print his speeches and he can get attaboys from every polo-and-khaki-wearing dickweed on the owners' side of things, but he can't change reality.
Reality is this: at a time when Major League Baseball is laden with more talent than it ever has been in its history, and at a time in which that talent is allowing Major League Baseball to make more money than it ever has in its existence, he and the owners decided that it was preferable to set fire to everything and to alienate everyone rather than offer the players anything approaching a fair deal. Rob Manfred and the owners believe that it is better to cancel Opening Day and piss off anyone and everyone who cares about baseball than it is to leave even one extra dime on the table for anyone else. . . .
[T]his is Rob Manfred's and the owners' lockout. The owners initiated it. The owners waited over seven weeks to come to the bargaining table. The owners barely moved off their opening offer for another month and a half after that. The owners imposed a fake deadline for a deal. The owners canceled Opening Day. The owners could end this lockout and begin the season at any time. They could do it even without an agreement on a new CBA. They could, as they did in 1995 and 1996, play baseball under the old deal while still negotiating the terms of a new deal. To the extent there is no baseball in 2022, it's 100% because the owners don't want there to be baseball.
The owners are counting on casual fans adopting a "millionaires vs. billionaires" stance, with a pox on both houses, except that's an unhelpful and incorrect way to look it.
So here's what's actually going on, as simply as I can put it.
Young players are compensated much worse than veterans . . .
For at least two seasons, a major-league player has absolutely no input on how much he makes. . . . The best players are eligible for arbitration after their second season, but most players are eligible after their third season. Even when a player is arbitration-eligible, though, he's still likely to be paid far less than his market value. . . . Players don't become free agents until they accrue six seasons of major-league service time, and that's when they can choose their team and freely negotiate their salary.
Young players are more productive than veterans
The most productive hitters in this table are in their mid-20s. They're likelier to stay healthy, and they're more likely to be in their prime. That's also when they're likely to be paid less than their market value. . . . It used to be that there was a pot of veteran gold at the end of the rainbow. Pay your dues, then cash out on the other side with a big free-agent contract in your late 20s or early 30s.
It's not like this anymore. And that's on purpose.
The salaries of veterans are artificially restricted
First, note that they're organically restricted, too. Young players are better and young players are cheaper, which means that GMs and front offices prefer young players. . . .
But even with the natural forces at work, MLB put their thumb on the scale. The best free agents are often saddled with draft-pick compensation and other penalties. . . . It's a serious deterrent. . . . The CBT was ostensibly supposed to help with competitive balance; it became a salary cap. It never forced the Pirates to spend, and it never helped them compete with the Yankees. The parity of the league is the same as it was before this tax, but salaries actually dropped last season. . . .
Baseball revenues are at an all-time high, but the salaries and CBT thresholds have plateaued
There's only one team that's legally required to open their books, [Atlanta], and they posted a whopping profit. It wasn't all — or even mostly — due to their championship. Those revenue gains are typically realized in subsequent seasons, with a larger season-ticket base and merchandise sales.
So take this all in. Young players are underpaid relative to their production. They're the preferred method of building a roster by all 30 teams. That's already enough to deter teams from veterans, but just in case, there are artificial restrictions. The whole system is stacked against the youngest (read: best) players. . . .
You'll read things like, "Oh, both sides have to make concessions," but this ignores that the players are not asking for this system to be blown up. They're not asking for a revolution. Even with their most recent proposal, they're conceding that the basic framework of this system remains intact. Young players will still be underpaid relative to their production. There will still be artificial restrictions on free-agent spending. The players are asking for the young players to continue to be underpaid, just less so. They've given up on eliminating the artificial restrictions, they're just asking for them to be slightly less onerous.
The owners are saying no. Also, they want more postseason teams to make more money. They will not be sharing this extra money, either. They're willing to eat a month of the season to crush the union even more, even with revenues at an all-time high. . . .
The coverage seems one-sided because nothing I wrote up there is controversial. They're the basic facts of the case. And once you realize that, just writing the truth seems like bias. The players aren't asking for a lot because they've already lost. They've lost in the last two collective bargaining agreements, and they're trying to recoup just a fraction of those losses. Even if the owners capitulated completely and agreed to the players' last proposal, it would still be a rout.
Not enough of a rout, though. The owners have won, and now they're trying to win more. They're willing to shorten the season to do it. Maybe they're willing to cancel it.
It doesn't make sense to me, but I have experience with things not going my way. The owners don't. And if you, the players, and this silly little game called baseball are affected by this scorched earth strategy, well, that's just too bad.
As for the real culprits of this catastrophe, the owners, well, we can talk about countless things … but I think you can see it all in one chart — the "Competitive Balance Tax" threshold through the years:
2017: $195 million
2018: $197 million
2019: $206 million
2020: $208 million
2021: $210 million
2022 (proposed): $220 million
2023 (proposed): $220 million
2024 (proposed): $220 million
2025 (proposed): $224 million
2026 (proposed): $230 million
I feel pretty sure you can forget everything else. Forget the minimum salary. Forget the bonus pool they're putting together for young players who are not yet eligible for arbitration. Forget the amateur draft lottery, forget the removal of draft pick compensation for free agents, forget all that nonsense because none of that costs the owners the only thing that matters to them — real money.
No, look at that chart one more time. Or, if you prefer, look at it this way — with the percentage increase each year:
Baseball's luxury tax — which, essentially, has become a salary cap as even the richest teams strain to stay below it — has grown by just 7.6% over the last five years, which is absurd even against simple inflation but particularly so when judged against the huge rise in baseball revenues. Player salaries on the whole have actually gone down since 2017. The owners did not want to share any of their newfound riches (billionaires never do, I guess), and unsurprisingly they did not. . . .
[T]he truly galling and appalling part is the future — the owners propose to raise the tax threshold by less than 5% and keep it there OVER THE NEXT THREE YEARS. That is the whole ballgame here. Everything else is smoke and mirrors and lights shining in your eyes. All the other proposals won't cost the owners any real money. They could raise the minimum salary and put in a bonus pool for young players and pinky swear promise to not manipulate the service time of their most gifted prospects and pay for all that and more just with the extra bucks from their latest get-rich-quick expanded playoffs scheme.
But the real money, the owners know, is in the luxury tax. The owners . . . understand as long as they keep that luxury tax in place, they will keep salaries right where they are. . . . The luxury tax will stifle the free market.
And the owners will never have to pay the players more than they are already paying them. They can keep all that juicy gambling money and crypto money and rising franchise value money and advertising patch money for themselves. Also bottom-feeding teams can keep crying poor and cashing revenue sharing checks. Win-win!
Of course, they will cancel Opening Day to do that.
They will cancel as many baseball games as necessary to do that.
All of which puts Rob Manfred in exactly the worst place in the world for him: In front of a microphone.
There were any number of telling moments in Manfred's jaw-dropping performance in front of the press . . . but I'd like to point out some of them because they get at something about Manfred that baffles me.
I've spoken with him at times. He's certainly a smart guy. Cornell. Harvard Law. He can be engaging in the right setting. So why is he SO bad at this? Why does he say unbelievably stupid things all the time? Why does he call the World Series trophy a "piece of metal?" Why does he say owning a baseball team is not that good an investment? . . . Why does he have Ken Rosenthal, a reporter as solid as they come, fired from MLB Network because he took offense at some perfectly fair criticisms Rosenthal wrote?
Here's what I think:
He's petty. . . .
One of the questions Manfred was asked at the press conference was the most obvious set-up question imaginable: Someone asked if the players would get paid for games canceled. I don't blame the person for asking it — absolutely fair question. But it's a bait.
And Rob Manfred never saw it coming.
The guy has the worst curveball recognition of anyone I've ever seen.
Remember the circumstances here — Manfred had gathered the media together for one of the most sober announcements any commissioner can ever make: He was canceling games. He was putting the season in jeopardy. . . .
So how do you answer that question? You don't. Obviously. You say, "Right now, our entire focus is on coming to an agreement so that we can get back on the field." That's it. Remember the job, man! You're the Commissioner of Baseball! What possible good could come from answering that question?
So, of course, Manfred said that the players would definitely not get paid … because, hey, that's the best way to create a good environment for a deal. Even if you believe that, why in the hell would you say it right then and there? Even in that somber moment, he just couldn't stop himself from trying to make things just a little bit worse.
He seems to think he's only talking to the person he's talking with.
You've probably seen the memes of Manfred smiling away as he announced to the world that Opening Day was canceled.
The story behind that smile is so ridiculous, you wouldn't even believe it. He called on the New York Post's Ken Davidoff for a question — and it turns out that Tuesday was Davidoff's last day as a baseball writer, he's going to take a turn in his life. Ken's a good guy, and I wish him the best, but the point here is that Manfred and Davidoff have had their clashes through the years.
So Manfred thought this was a good time to kind of make a jokey reference to their checkered history together, a history known by approximately 11 people in the entire world. It would have been a perfectly fine thing to do if, say, they were conducting a private interview in Manfred's office or at P.F. Chang's or something.
But this was at an Armageddon press conference, ESPN had cut in live just so people could watch baseball blow itself up, and what they saw was . . . the goddamn Commissioner of Baseball yukking it up as he set fire to the sport he's supposed to be leading.
He always seems unprepared for any question that comes along.
I mentioned above Manfred's inability to read the curveball. It really goes beyond that. He seems constantly surprised by the most obvious questions. Like Tuesday he seemed surprised when someone brought up the incredible stinginess of owners who refuse to move the luxury tax threshold up even to meet inflation. His answer was something like, "Yeah, uh, but that's how we've always done it."
And it makes me wonder: Does he prepare at all for his public appearances?
How dare commissioner Rob Manfred and the baseball owners treat their players and their fans like this. Don't they recognize the impact of canceling games, the damage it will do to the sport, the idea that baseball is more than simply an industry, bigger than anyone lucky enough to be a part of it?
Oh, Manfred and the owners will object to that very premise, tell you all about their love for the game and how the other side is more to blame. Manfred said it himself Tuesday, "If it was solely within my ability or the ability of the clubs to get an agreement, we'd have an agreement." Yep, if not for those damn players that fans pay to see — if only Manfred and Co. could remove them from these negotiations the way they scrubbed them from the league's website — then everything would be all right. . . .
As Manfred listed all of the wonders in the league's "best and final" offer, it was as if he could not believe the players' ingratitude. . . .
The aspect that is truly unconscionable is the almost blithe, even reckless approach by Manfred and the owners.
It's not simply that Manfred at times smiled during his news conference Tuesday when he should have been more solemn; by now, his inadequacies as a public speaker are well-established. The bigger problem is that he and the owners have been unable to build a functional relationship with the players, and are unapologetic about it. . . .
For the union, how exactly is this going to end well? It would be one thing if players were missing games to significantly disrupt the status quo, but they withdrew requests for major changes to the game's economic system — a shorter time to free agency, expanded eligibility for salary arbitration, reductions in revenue shared between high- and low-revenue teams. . . .
Any gains the players ultimately achieve, if they achieve them at all, figure to be incremental, singles instead of home runs. And, if the lockout lasts long enough, the players could be looking at a net loss.
The owners know all this, and still they couldn't help themselves, couldn't resist going for the throat. They, too, could end up net losers, depending upon how much the sport's place in the entertainment landscape is diminished. But they seemingly would rather take that risk than satisfy the players who pitch and hit and make teams so valuable.
Which is the true shame in all this. The owners had the advantage. The owners, even if they had yielded to every one of the union's last requests, were always going to have the advantage. . . .
From the start, then, the players lacked leverage, were climbing uphill, had the odds stacked against them. The pandemic made their challenge that much more difficult, reducing club revenues in the past two seasons. The owners base their payrolls on those revenues, not the resale values of their franchises. . . .
The owners wanted to win in another rout. Now everyone loses.
This is a crushing moment for the league, and really for the sport in America, and it goes beyond the two sides at the negotiation table. There are many people, from stadium workers to broadcast crew members to bar and restaurant owners surrounding parks, whose lives could be upended if this goes too long, to say nothing of the fans who have dedicated decades to following this sport and now will have to wait indefinitely for it to come back. But make no mistake. There's no need to both sides this issue. This is on the owners. They simply do not care about any of that.
I think one of the issues we have in our world today is an inability to parse the difference between objective coverage and doling out equal blame. We see it in all walks of life, and here it is clear that people's first instinct will always be to blame both sides equally. It's admittedly an easier solution for both sides to be to blame for a stalemate such as this, but in this case putting anything but the vast majority of blame on the owners is simply ignoring all of the context around this whole ordeal. . . .
I'm not going to try and parse whether or not the owners have made "good faith" offers, as there are specific legal definitions for that sort of thing and I am very much not a lawyer. What I do feel comfortable saying is that the owners do not care about the game, do not care if there are no games. I don't even think it's that they don't like the fans and everything else around the game, but rather it's the old Don Draper line of not thinking about them at all.
Let's run through some of the major milestones in this entire process, starting with the start of the lockout itself. Rob Manfred and the league put the lockout into place on December 2 when the CBA expired, which was not something they had to do. . . . Manfred opted for the lockout, saying that it was necessary to jumpstart the negotiations. The ball was in their court at that point, and yet they waited 43 days before extending an offer. Manfred's response to being called on that was to say that phones work both ways, the sort of thing I would say when I'm called out on not calling my mother enough and am desperate for a response. That's not a compliment to Mr. Manfred.
That was only one of many actions from the owners that showed without a doubt they don't respect our love of the game, or even respect our intelligence. Take another quote from Manfred from the same press conference with his line about the two-way phones. Manfred indicated that owning a baseball team is less lucrative than putting money in the stock market. This is such a bald faced lie that it is hard to come up with any other explanation that he thinks the fans and everyone listening to him speak are morons. . . .
[T]he thing I keep coming back to is the fact that the owners have told us for three straight years they don't care about playing baseball games. They can say all they want about how sad this is for them, but at a certain point actions speak much louder than words. In 2020, the players were ready to get back on the field much more quickly than the owners, but the latter group pushed for marginal increases in their profits which would represent just a drop in the bucket, but they still kept pushing things back until we only got a 60-game season. Last year, they started throwing out the possibility of a shortened season in January. And now, they're doing it again. . . .
I just can't over is how little the owners care. How little they care about public perception, because at a certain point of wealth that ceases to matter. How little they care about the people whose lives are most affected by this, as evidenced by the fact that they now try to cancel games every year. How little they care about everyone and everything outside of themselves and their own profit. They're inviting the entire world to not care about their product, and unfortunately they don't care about that either.
"It takes two parties to reach an agreement," insisted Manfred, the man who represents the ownership class that instigated this lockout in December, stalled 43 days to make an initial proposal and arranged artificial deadlines in an attempt to leverage the union.
None of this particularly surprised the players. Over the weekend, as talks dragged and the clock ticked, several predicted this exact scenario would unfold. MLB would suggest, as its representatives did after a marathon Monday session, that progress was being made, despite refusing to make the concessions needed for the MLBPA to take the deal. And then, when the union rejected the offer, Manfred would go on television and explain that, hey, he tried. Which is what happened. . . .
The players were not fooled. An MLBPA statement suggested the owners wanted to break the union. The fight will not end soon. MLBPA negotiator Bruce Meyer insisted Tuesday the players should be paid the full 162-game freight. You better believe the owners will balk at that. Whenever talks resume, the bitterness only figures to bloom.
At this point, the goals of the owners — whether it's to crush the players, to install expanded playoffs at a discount rate, or to curb spending and further prop up the billionaires unwilling to open their wallets — almost don't matter. Whatever victory they presume to celebrate will be Pyrrhic. . . .
Manfred has already told the public he considers the World Series trophy a "piece of metal." Now he has made clear what his 30 bosses believe, that the sanctity of Opening Day, that ritual of renewal for fans, doesn't really matter. The sport keeps daring its fans to stop following along. . . .
MLB's leadership responded to [Tony] Clark's vision [for the Players Association] . . . as a golden opportunity to finally break the union. There have been whispers for the past several years that Clark was in over his head. Ownership brazenly gloated over what they saw as a rout vs. the players during Clark's first negotiation. But that, in turn, cemented the resolve of the players, who have been saying for the past two years that ownership was going to see a different adversary on the other side of the table. . . .
The conflicts for anyone who has been watching the game beyond the final score must know money is only one of the most obvious elements of a broken game. Several areas of contention have been building for years.
Unlike its younger counterparts, baseball has always been defined by crankiness, a curmudgeonly edge that in good times can be massaged into an old-school virtue. These are not good times. The fight over money is a capitalist constant. Over-avenging past grievances is the nature of defeat. But this current labor struggle represents a cynical manipulation that already has been felt on the field, unarticulated until now as part of a larger owner/front-office strategy. . . .
Today's gaps are philosophical questions of how the future game is going to look, how it's going to be played, and why. Previous manifestations of owner greed, while no more attractive, did not as directly threaten the actual play on the field. Owners have been trying to break baseball's union since the Johnson administration by trying to not pay players or by seeking to wrest back free agency. . . . Baseball owners have been trying to kill free agency ever since its inception in December 1975.
Manfred's current lockout, however, more directly impacts the game on the field -- the current rules, already far in favor of owners, aren't enough. Ownership is squeezing the orange without the goal of making the juice taste better. A new breed of personnel now runs baseball, bent on treating it as a Fortune 500 company rather than as a sport, finding loopholes to exert even more control without much thought or interest in its consequences. Today's baseball people are manipulating the sport not to improve it aesthetically but to lessen the import of the players. . . .
The sport has taken on an impersonal, assembly-line characteristic; teams play for outs, but the players play for competition, pride, professionalism. That, combined with Manfred calling the World Series trophy a "piece of metal," told the players the commissioner of the game took no pride in what they did. They were just high-paid widgets.
The sides have met every day this week, which could have been a good thing—hey, they're talking—but instead appears to have hammered home just how far apart they are and how little one side is willing to move. . . . At least there's no question of who's to blame. . . .
The players made a large concession in the changes they're seeking on arbitration; the owners did not counter at all, and refuse to countenance any changes to that team-friendly status quo. The players dropped the size of a reduction they're seeking in revenue sharing; the owners refused to consider any reduction whatsoever. The players made a small but real concession on the competitive balance tax, which has been one of the big sticking points in negotiations; owners responded by "only" demanding that the first-tier tax rate be raised from 20 percent to 45 percent, instead of the 50 percent they had previously sought.
In the places MLB was willing to cede some ground to the players, they did so only in exchange for much bigger concessions the other way—including stuff they are just now bringing to the table for the first time. . . . Only one side is responsible for this lockout in the first place, and only the other side seems keen on ending it.
So what to make of MLB's obstinacy? It could very well be that the owners are more than willing to lose as many games as it takes to crack the players. They can afford to; almost all the owners are billionaires, while roughly half the players make less than a million and get on average less than six years of earning power. That strategy would look an awful lot like what's happening: a refusal to concede a damn thing as they sit back and let the other side grow more desperate. . . .
[W]hile it's going to suck when April arrives and there's no baseball on, you can do your part by remembering two things. First, whose fault that is, and second, that your frustration with a lack of baseball to watch pales in importance when compared to getting a fair deal for the people who play it.
So that's it. MLB's owners, who decided to mark the expiration of the league's most recent CBA by locking out the players, then spent most of the winter refusing to even negotiate the terms of a new CBA, then set and reset several arbitrary deadlines for when a new CBA needed to be ratified in order to prevent the cancelation of games, then spent the last week "negotiating" with the players while conceding almost nothing to the people who make the game that enriches them, have finally decided that the 2022 baseball season will not feature 162 games. . . .
The owners got right to work trying to spin today's outcome as a result of the players acting in bad faith.
MLB official: "The MLBPA has a decidedly different tone today and made proposals inconsistent with the prior discussions. We will be making our best offer before the 5 p.m. deadline for the MLBPA that’s a fair deal for players and clubs.” 2/2
If that smells like bullshit, that's because it is. Something that many of the people who observe and even participate in these labor negotiations are perhaps loathe to admit is that an outcome like today's was guaranteed a long time ago. . . . The more the owners can make the whole thing feel like a TV show, the less likely fans are to remember that every decision that has put the 2022 season at risk was made by them, and nobody else.
The much more depressing reality is that the management side in any CBA negotiation is almost always making decisions based on its calculation of a relatively simple math problem. Instead of conceiving of these negotiations as a complex and ever-shifting dialogue guided by various personalities and priorities, imagine instead the owners sitting at one end of the table with a big bucket full of money at their feet. Nobody but them has any idea how much money is in the bucket, and they know precisely how much any proposal the players make would take out of the bucket. They also know exactly how much each canceled game will subtract from the bucket. All they care about is finishing this process, whether that be today or months into a lockout-shortened season, with their desired amount of money in the bucket. . . .
[W]hy even bother negotiating in good faith before canceling some games? Why surrender the extra leverage that comes from players missing paychecks just for the sake of maintaining a 162-game schedule? What, you think these guys actually give a shit about the sport they lord over?
Games are going to be canceled because the owners want them to be canceled. The only way the players could have prevented this from happening was not by negotiating, but by surrendering in full. To find a path to victory now, the players will have to demonstrate a great deal of resolve. Every game that falls off the schedule will hurt them more than it hurts the owners, but if they wait long enough that bucket will eventually start leaking. Only then will anything resembling a true good-faith negotiation be able to take place.
[I]t's very important for Rob Manfred to remember, every minute of every day, that he owns whatever happens next.
When your sport begins to tumble down the Canyon of Disastrous Outcomes, it isn't enough to blame those canceled games on the calendar or the MLB Players Association – even though the commissioner did both Tuesday. All that matters now is for the leader of this sport to recognize what disaster looks like and to devote every waking second to averting any more disastrous outcomes. . . .
What happened Tuesday will unleash forces baseball should never want to see unleashed. I can't calculate how many thousands of fans had to cancel their annual spring-training vacations in the last three weeks or the last 24 hours. But there will be a significant percentage of those fans who will be angry enough and scarred enough never to schedule those vacations again. And I don't blame them.
What happened Tuesday was also an open invitation to every TV host, radio guest, podcaster, columnizer, blogger or tweeter in America to unload on baseball . . . to tell you everything that's wrong with baseball, whether it's wrong in actuality or just wrong in their imagination. And I don't blame them either.
Face it. Never in history have narratives been a more powerful force in American life than they are right now, in 2022, because there have never been more platforms to launch those narratives. So look out. Here they come. . . .
[B]aseball has no ammunition against those narratives at the moment. None.
MLB has graciously agreed to extend your MLBTV subscription AT NO ADDITIONAL COST during the time when there are exactly zero games to watch. (The additional cost, of course, will come when games resume . . whenever the hell that will be.)
They have to be doing shit like this on purpose, right?
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