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?
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred laughed and smirked during Tuesday afternoon's press conference . He cracked jokes and generally looked like he was enjoying himself. He also cancelled the first two series of the 2022 season — and more games will certainly be trashed in the weeks ahead.
"You could not invent a more disastrous public face for the game of baseball if you tried."
This asshole, whose every word and action telegraphs his intense desire to kill baseball, whose annual salary is $11 fucking million, cried poverty, claiming revenue has been "difficult" for MLB over the last five years. In 2019 (the last full season before the pandemic), MLB raked in a record-setting $11 billion in revenue. That's one example of the bullshit being shoveled this afternoon.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred laughing before announcing that he will begin canceling regular season games. pic.twitter.com/icwyppeuCt
Here's Rob Manfred LAUGHING his ass off while announcing the owners' pre-planned unilateral decision to cancel the start of the 2022 season during a pandemic and war in Europe. pic.twitter.com/D0W7mBWYYg
For anyone who believes a screen grab can be deceitful, here is video of a DIFFERENT moment in the press conference of Rob Manfred laughing. On the day he cancels games. pic.twitter.com/kLfrEapm3D
Asked a player for his reaction to Rob Manfred laughing after postponing the start of the regular season: “Are you talking about the guy who cut 42 minor-league teams and called the World Series trophy a hunk of metal?”
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.
It’s fascinating MLB setting a hard deadline to play a full season for Monday. They locked us out. Had barely any contact for two months post lockout. Have yet to make a single good faith offer to even initiate real conversations to get a deal done. Just make a real offer 🤷🏻.
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 saidbeforethatthereare 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:
What MLBPA should considering doing: offer the owners *their own* 1994 salary cap proposal.
50/50 revenue split and players need just four years to become restricted FA.
It's actually far better than the system in place now and would owners would never agree to it.
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.
The head of the owners negotiating team gave $50 million away so that his team *wouldn't* have Nolan Arenado.
The owners will happily torch their finances in 2022 if it can break the MLBPA permanently. MLB would *love* to undo everything since 1976.
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. . . .
The CBT is not a salary cap. It just acts like one. Which is best-case scenario for the league. It gets all the benefits of a cap without elements like a floor or guaranteed revenue split. Not only that, the CBT hasn’t risen anywhere close to commensurate with industry revenues.
MLBs offer is a nearly hard cap, untied to revenues, that actually declines every year in real dollars. In return for by far the worst salary cap in major sports, players get the privilege of conceding 14 team playoffs.
No serious person believes that the previous CBA was anything but extremely favorable to ownership. It is still, somehow, not enough for them, and they’re willing to throw away the season unless the players fully capitulate to them on basically every major issue. https://t.co/0np91Yi5yC
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.
* * *
Of course, not all media are seeing clearly:
Max Scherzer can afford a Porsche because he can put a 97-mph fastball with movement wherever he wants. Dick Monfort can afford a Porsche because he was Kenneth Monfort's son.
This is what always makes me laugh. ‘Millionaires vs billionaires’ - except the billionaires are usually just investors who’s net worth are barely impacted and the millionaires are among the 0.01% most talented at what they do.
Max Scherzer arrives in Porsche earned by putting lead paint in nursery schools as MLB owners make magnanimous offer between their eight-hour-a-day stints cleaning up mercury poisoning in drinking water sources in Ghana.
The MLBPA's offer is *already* an extreme concession to the owners.
The *MLBPA's* offer is a CBT that hasn't kept pace with *half* of MLB's historic revenue growth over 20 years and still only grows under 3% a year during the next CBA.
Basically, MLB's the sports version of the villain of the week on an episode of The A-Team.
You can almost see Manfred in a cheap seersucker suit diving out of his brown 1982 Ford LTD Crown Victoria before it drives into a ravine and blows up for some reason.
If teams were actually in difficult financial straits, they'd officially raise that with the players so that the books would be reviewed. Their finances being much worse than commonly known would be a potent bargaining chip.
Anything teams want to leak will get leaked. There's no code of silence.
If MLB owners has hundreds of millions of dollars in legitimate secret baseball expenses that made their tales of woe and penury accurate, they'd love nothing more than to get it out there.
The Red Sox released minor leaguer Brett Netzer after he confirmed he had posted a series of racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic tweets on Friday night and Saturday morning.
Netzer last played (though not very well) in 2019 for Portland (AA). The 2020 minor league season was canceled and Netzer spent the 2021 entire season on the restricted list.
Netzer started off last night claimingit'sunnatural for human beings to have dogs and cats as pets ("more time should be spent on pursuing truth"). I suppose that's an interesting take, though it's in stark contrast to about 30,000 years of history.
Someone noted that Netzer posted "posting screenshots of his tweets [on Instagram] saying 'release me'". The Red Sox obliged him . . . but he didn't seem very thankful.
An epigraph on his Twitter page reads: "Difference of opinion is where education is found." The irony is presumably unintentional.
MLB and the Players Union have apparently agreed on the use of a Designated Hitter for both leagues, beginning in 2022.
And with that, I am pushed another step further away from a sport I have loved watching, reading about, researching and writing about for more than 45 years.
(But now that a real hitter will bat instead of pitchers who simply take three strikes and sit down, won't games drag on for even longer now?)
Not that anyone is asking, but my choice would be for no DH anywhere. I assume I'm in the minority on that point. Yes, yes, pitchers are more or less automatic outs (they batted .110/.150/.142 in 2021) and the idea of having another hitter bat for the pitcher (or having lineups of only eight men) is not new; it was bandied about as far back as 1891. I don't fucking care.
The necessity of having a pitcher throw four intentional balls should be part of the game for many reasons, one of which is the rare occurrence of when one of those soft tosses pitches sails to the backstop or gets smacked for a hit to the opposite field. Pitchers not named Shohei Ohtani collected 92 extra-base hits last season. Besides, the rules (both old and current versions) state that a game features two teams of nine players. A DH makes that 10 players per side.
Craig Calcaterra notes (in addition to logging Rob Manfred's numerous bald-faced lies in the past day or so) that the "Both sides wanted a DH" explanation being touted by writers like Buster Olney
is misleading to the point of abject disingenuousness. It was a case of the owners wanting to take the single most valuable bargaining chip away from the players [a multi-billion dollar concession of expanded playoffs] — one that they were clearly planning to use as a means of getting substantive concessions from the owners on other, far more important matters — in exchange for something that, while possibly desirable, was relatively worthless.
That's a statement of fact many people are making in reply to Olney's tweet. And Olney must know this, of course, because he is not a moron. So you have to ask yourself (as you have to do when seasoned journalists who have covered national politics for decades make disingenuous statements about either political party), why is he choosing to misinterpret the facts in that particular way? What is the reason? Because if the writer knows better, there must be a reason.
Manfred said the possibility of missing regular-season games (because of his decision to lock out the players) would be "a disastrous outcome". How many writers will point out that it was MLB's choice to lockout the players. It did not have to. MLB could have held the exact same bargaining sessions with the Players Union without instituting a lockout — and without putting the scheduled start of spring training and the regular season in jeopardy. All of the blame for any postponed games will rest on Manfred's weak shoulders.
In yet another Manfred-Trump comparison, one would think someone who lies constantly would eventually get good at it. But it turns out, when it comes to those two asshats, that is not the case.
Prosecutors in Los Angeles have decided not to bring criminal charges for sexual assault against Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer. (I posted about this case back in JulyandAugust 2021.)
In a statement provided to The Athletic, the Los Angeles County district attorney stated:
After a thorough review of the available evidence, including the civil restraining order proceedings, witness statements and the physical evidence, the People are unable to prove the relevant charges beyond a reasonable doubt.
Craig Calcaterra calls that decision "stupid and wrong", but he is not surprised. It's not that evidence against Bauer does not exist – Bauer's own lawyers admitted their client committed sexual assault while his victim was unconscious – but comments from the judge [California Superior Court Judge Dianna Gould-Saltman] overseeing the case make getting a conviction more difficult than it would normally be.
As you'll recall, at the restraining order hearing, Bauer's accuser testified under oath that Bauer struck her and sodomized her while she was unconscious. She testified that she did not consent to that. Indeed, being punched and sodomized while unconscious was never even discussed. Bauer presented no evidence to contradict that. What's more, in arguments, his lawyers admitted that that's what happened. They claimed however, with no evidentiary backing and in the face of her testimony to the contrary, that she asked for it. Like, they actually said that. That she wanted to be punched and sodomized while she unconscious. Again, these were arguments. There was no evidence presented to support such claims.
As I noted at the time, I know of no legal theory whatsoever that allows for someone to punch and sodomize an unconscious person. The judge, however, said that one can do anything one wants to an unconscious person as long as the unconscious person didn't explicitly say one could not do so beforehand. That sort of "opt-out" instead of "opt-in" consent is not the law and cannot be the law, especially when it involves an unconscious person because how can an unconscious person change their mind or say anything? When there was zero discussion about that head of time, the baseline HAS to be "you cannot punch or sodomize an unconscious person." It's preposterous to say otherwise. Unless, of course, you were the judge in the restraining order hearing.
Between that pronouncement from the bench — an unnecessary one given that the restraining order petition could've been denied without even talking about that stuff given that Bauer had had attempted no contact with the petitioner since the assault — and between several days of proceedings during which Bauer's attorneys slut-shamed the petitioner and portrayed her as a money-grubbing opportunist, it is not at all surprising that prosecutors were loathe to bring charges. Sexual assault cases are extraordinarily difficult to bring in the best of circumstances. Bringing them against the backdrop of what has already occurred in this case would be exponentially harder. Given that high-profile cases invoke political considerations for prosecutors — losing them is bad for them — not bringing a case against Bauer was always the more likely outcome, even though it seems pretty damn clear to me he committed sexual assault. . . .
Bauer's accuser swore under oath in documents and then testified under oath in open court to the following:
Bauer choked her until she was unconscious;
She did not consent to being beaten or sodomized before she was rendered unconscious (note: as a matter of law, and contrary to the non-germane comments of the judge from the bench last August, an unconscious person cannot legally consent to anything and a conscious person cannot consent to having serious bodily harm inflicted upon them); and
Bauer beat and sodomized her while she was unconscious.
Bauer presented no evidence to contradict those assertions. Indeed, Bauer took the Fifth and Bauer's attorney conceded in argument during the hearing that Bauer choked his accuser until she was unconscious and was violent towards her while she was unconscious. To the extent Bauer's attorneys impeached the accuser's credibility, it pertained to matters surrounding her petition for a restraining order, primarily in connection with calls and texts between the two of them after the incidents at issue. There was no apparent impeachment of her credibility as it related to what occurred between the two of them at Bauer's home.
Major League Baseball's investigation into Bauer's actions is ongoing. For MLB to issue a suspension under its Joint Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Policy, an arrest, criminal charges, or a criminal conviction is not necessary.
On this date in 1895, George Herman Ruth was born.
The dates of Babe Ruth's first and final major league home runs are May 6, 1915 and May 25, 1935.
Over that span of 20 years and 19 days, Ruth hit 714 official home runs.
Ruth out-homered two teams over that time period: the Red Sox (653) and Reds (672). Ruth nearly out-homered two additional teams: the White Sox (720) and Senators (724).
He also led both leagues in showing off his big bat to the ladies.
MLB quickly reneged on its promise (from only two days ago) to present a counteroffer to the Players Association. Instead, it requested federal mediation, which is nothing but a lame public relations stunt.
Giants pitcher Alex Wood asked: "How can MLB request for there to be a mediator from the Federal Government to help with negotiations when they literally haven't even done any negotiating up to this point?"
That seems like a reasonable question. After MLB imposed the lockout on December 2, 2021, it spent six weeks refusing to negotiate. Over the past three months, an unimpressive total of five hours has been spent discussing the issues. And now, rather than honor its promise to continue to negotiate, MLB is pretending it has done everything it can and —what other choice do we have?— must now call in a mediator.
Twins catcher Mitch Garver sees through the bullshit, calling it "a ploy . . . to show they are bargaining in good faith. . . . The league wants the public to think they are doing everything they can."
As Craig Calcaterra put it, MLB is acting "like a kid pouring a whole box of soap into the washing machine, watching bubbles go all over the house, and then yelling for his mom to help".
MLB Steps to Negotiating: 1. Commit to making a counter 2. Refuse to make that counter 3. Say they need a mediator
The Players Association rejected MLB's mediation stunt. Several players pointed out to MLB that in order to agree on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, both sides must . . . umm . . . bargain.
Chris Halicke (Sports Illustrated) quotes a source with knowledge of Tuesday's collective bargaining session between Major League Baseball and the Players Association saying the 90-minute meeting devolved into a "yelling match".
Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich (The Athletic) reported on Monday:
Anyone sensing momentum in baseball's collective bargaining negotiations needs to take a deep breath. League and player representatives continue to hold much different views of the game's economics. The scheduled start of spring training in mid-February is clearly in jeopardy. In another few weeks, Opening Day on March 31 would be a longshot, too.
As the owners' lockout drags into its third month, the essence of the problem is this: Major League Baseball contends it is proposing a better deal for players than the one they had under the most recent collective bargaining agreement. And the Players Association contends that the deal is worse. . . .
A breakdown of the most contentious issues in the negotiations reveals just how far apart the two sides are . . .
The players want significant change, and the owners largely want to maintain the status quo. . . .
A new CBA is not close.
Drellich characterizes Tuesday's meeting as "heated" and writes "the sides remain very far apart with the normal report time for pitchers and catchers about two weeks away".
Since the next bargaining session has not been scheduled, it is highly unlikely that spring training will begin on time later this month.
The MLBPA made a pair of proposals: one that modifies its pre-arbitration bonus pool, the other on service-time manipulation.
The union, which is trying to get more money to younger players not yet eligible for arbitration, changed its pre-arbitration bonus pool proposal to $100 million. That is a $5 million decrease from its original proposal. The league's most recent offer was $10 million.
Regarding service-time manipulation, the union has proposed a system where a player who might not normally get a year of service time would be credited with one year if they reach certain thresholds and levels of performance. . . .
The union also incorporated and modified an element of MLB's proposal on service-time manipulation, dangling a draft pick to teams as an incentive for not holding a player in the minor leaguers.
