Locked Out
Why canceled games are so painful
Thirty men, all born with varying lusters of silver in their mouths, helped on by a lifeless lackey, have decided to cancel some of the Major League Baseball season.
Their last names, their luck, their ability to cheat systems better than everyone else, put each MLB owner in a place to buy or inherit their team. And now, with their clubs’ values rising exponentially, with revenues consistently healthy save a year of COVID, with legitimate financial security, they have decided it is not enough.
The numbers are, at this stage, essentially beside the point. Let’s go over them quickly, though. Between 2015 and 2019, MLB’s revenues ballooned from about $8.2 billion to a record-setting $10.7 billion, during which time the average salary for a major league player declined from $4.45 million to $4.17 million. Although MLB’s revenue took a sizable hit during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, players’ share of the league’s annual revenue has been declining for over a decade, dropping from 56 percent in 2002 to just 38 percent in 2015 (though complete data is unavailable since then, the decline has continued). If the Competitive Balance Tax, the biggest hurdle to a deal, had risen with revenues, it would be at $297 million. Players are asking for $238 million that goes to $263 million over the course of the five year deal. Owners are not budging off of $220 million.
The two sides have been far apart for a long time. So, as we approached the Monday deadline, no one who had paid much attention to the process had hope of a deal. But then, something strange happened. The players and the owners talked late into the night on Monday, blowing past their original deadline. We started hearing reports that the sides were close on a deal and that there was optimism it would get done.
This, of course, turned out to be another deeply cynical ploy from MLB in an attempt to gain control of a narrative that has slipped out of their hands, and paint the players as the ones balking on a final deal. They sent targeted leaks to stooges in the media. Hoping upon hope for baseball, we believed them, even though the leaks were coming from reporters who have been played like a fiddle for years. MLB decided that they had to twist the knife into their most adoring fans one more time.
Of course, during all of this 11th hour negotiating, MLB reps also tried to con players. As the Blue Jays’ player rep Ross Stripling said, “it got to be like 12:30 and the fine print of their CBT proposal was stuff we had never seen before. They were trying to sneak things through us, it’s like they think we’re dumb baseball players and we get sleepy after midnight or something.”
That is what they think. The owners, and their negotiators, think the players and the fans are stupid. This is a classic symptom of very-rich-guy disease—everyone who is not also a very rich guy must not be so because they are somehow deficient.
They believe that their wealth makes them right. They believe they deserve more than they already have. They will not settle until they screw the players as much as possible. A fair deal? That’s not how they got rich in the first place.
This should be a moment that MLB’s owners feel intense shame. They are, we would guess to a man, incapable of doing so. Rob Manfred, baseball’s commissioner and chief shit-eater, the same guy who called the World Series trophy a “piece of metal,” was grinning throughout the press conference where he canceled games.
Earlier in the day, an AP photographer caught him practicing his golf swing.
He will have plenty more time to work on his short game now. There will probably be games at some point this season; the sides are meeting again today to continue negotiating. The MLB Players’ Union is united (in many ways thanks to how much they all hate Manfred), but they will not want to miss their game checks for too long. At some point, the owners will begin to feel the squeeze as well, despite the fact that there are credible reports that they never wanted a deal at all and are prepared to cancel at least a month of games.
At the end of the day, the players don’t have enough leverage to get a really good deal. They will get, at best, a deeply flawed one. And herein lies the real heartbreak of this whole debacle. We want the players to stick it to the owners. If the people who own baseball clubs are incapable of any embarrassment, the least they can do is give up some more money.
This is a pipe dream. The owners, like all truly rich people in America (almost no baseball players count in this group, by the way), will never lose. They have reached a rarified air where no matter how dumb they are, how many poor decisions they make, and certainly how many games their ballclubs lose, their assets will continue to appreciate in value. If somehow they do lose money, thanks to a pandemic or a financial crisis, the government will be there to bail them out. Thanks to George Bush, sports owners can write the losses from their teams off of their taxes.
So, the lockout is just a tragedy. There are no victories except those on the margins. We support the players hunting for those marginal gains and believe in the moral righteousness of standing up to what amounts to attempted financial tyranny. We’d also like to watch some baseball this year.
The sport is meant to be rhythmic. It denotes the seasons. Watching players gather in Florida and Arizona for Spring Training brings with it the promise of warmer days ahead. Spring might still be a state of mind in early April in New York, but heading out to Citi Field to watch baseball feels warm, even if you need to bring a winter coat. It accompanies us through the longest days of the year, as anything from appointment viewing to enjoyable background noise. It does not have to serve as a source of constant, unending entertainment so much as it can conjure a feeling. And then, as the leaves change, most of our teams fall out of contention and we brace for winter, with the promise that it will start again in the spring. It might be saccharine, but it’s about life.
No matter how many games they play this year, the owners have robbed us of this. They have taken youthful exuberance and turned it into a spreadsheet. We don’t really know how we’ll forgive them.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about. . .
. . . why baseball’s owners are responsible for this? “Inside the self-inflicted crisis boiling over as MLB's lockout deadline arrives” by Jeff Passan in ESPN (February 28, 2022).
. . . why baseball’s owners are responsible for this? “Baseball’s history of selfish, shortsighted owners adds another sorry chapter” by John Feinstein in The Washington Post (March 2, 2022).
. . . why baseball’s owners are responsible for this? “MLB’s owners had every advantage, and still it wasn’t enough for them” by Ken Rosenthal in The Athletic (March 2, 2022).
. . . why baseball’s owners are responsible for this? “Opening Day Never Stood A Chance” by Tom Ley in Defector (March 1, 2022).