USA TODAY International Edition
MLB labor negotiations an unsettling battle royale
Owners again show there’s a big difference between what they can, want to do.
This might go down as three lost months for Major League Baseball, a time when the league and the union rattled swords instead of holding hands, undermining the other instead of finding common ground, blowing a chance for some mythical “healing” amid “unprecedented times.” Much of this is nonsense.
The 2020 baseball season was going to be an unsettling and unsatisfying journey anyway, with a schedule cut in half, a strange silence settling over empty ballparks and games played under the constant specter that your favorite star might contract a lifethreatening disease in the service of “distracting” you from things like “the world around us.”
Just because teams weren’t able to trot out alternate jerseys on the Fourth of July in an attempt to position the game as an intrinsic part of some mythical shared American experience doesn’t mean this spring of odious negotiations was a total waste.
Sure, the league and the players would have been wiser to keep their slap fight behind closed doors, especially when the meat of the negotiations could have been performed by sliding a sheet of paper across a desk a few times, rather than tantrum- filled Zoom calls and caustic leaks and news releases.
But with the battle royale of labor negotiations still lurking when the collective bargaining agreement expires
after the 2021 season, we can’t deny the value of each side laying some of its cards on the table now.
And fans with no games to watch learned a valuable lesson about the men who own their teams: There’s a big difference between what they can do and what they want to do.
Take Athletics owner John Fisher. He penned a 500- word letter to Oakland fans on May 26, calling it a “tremendously difficult day” within “the extraordinary nature of these times.” The difficult day? Fisher, worth an estimated $ 2.2 billion, was furloughing a bevy of employees and suspending pay for all A’s minor leaguers.
Ten days later, Fisher, admitting that “our decision not to pay them was a mistake,” reversed course and said he’d pay his minor leaguers their $ 400 weekly stipends.
What changed? Shame, mostly: When 29 franchises say they can do something and you’re the lone holdout, even a billionaire can be moved to dislodge a few nickels.
Perhaps more absurd was the Nationals’ attempt to dock their minor leaguers of $ 100 a month, thinking they could save a few thousand dollars while appearing to do the right thing. And then Nationals players themselves provided the shame, saying they’d make up the difference for the minor leaguers. An ownership group worth more than $ 5 billion sheepishly decided to pay up.
Do these examples provide a direct correlation to the owners’ insistence they can’t pay players on a per- game basis this season?
Not entirely, but you can see it from there.
The only thing more pathetic than MLB and the union unable to agree on the parameters of their March agreement has been the owners’ reheating of the same basic offer. The proposals are so insulting in their similarity, the math so basic, that even a sportswriter can figure it out within a minute or two.
Little wonder, then, that a gaggle of often reticent players created a virtual layup line on Twitter to dunk on their overlords.
Forget, for a minute, that ballplayers are making an average of $ 4 million or so before taxes. The only basic difference between owners and players and business owners and employees out in the real world is the former groups’ ability to withstand COVID- 19’ s blow.
This isn’t to downplay the estimated $ 4 billion in losses owners might suffer without fans in the stands. But as Saturday’s reported agreement of a significant hike in MLB’s TV contract with Turner illustrates, those losses will be made up. An extra round of playoffs to further reduce losses is in the offing.
And besides, owners decline to open their books to even illustrate what they are losing. Unless they do, just assume this much: It is not that they can’t pay the players in full. It’s just that they don’t want to.
Worse yet for the benevolent gatekeepers of the game, fans are increasingly on to their hustle. Back in the day, the league could count on no shortage of entities to prop them up in the court of public opinion – from the news media to old- timers bellyaching about “spoiled ballplayers” getting paid millions “to play a kid’s game.”
As we all know, every frustrated exjuco benchwarmer “would play for free.”
The world’s a little different now, though. MLB has become a $ 10 billion industry on the backs of publicly funded stadiums and insane television rights fees, with the costs for both passed on to the consumer.
Yet over the past two years, as revenue continues skyrocketing, player salaries remained flat or even dropped.
We’re not about to suggest the struggle of the Amazon warehouse worker is similar to that of the journeyman ballplayer. But as the gap between corporate magnate and working- class employee has grown, so, too, has the gulf between multibillionaire owner and probably- not- a- millionaire ballplayer.
In short, with which party might the average fan see themselves?
As Hal Steinbrenner, who inherited a $ 5 billion franchise? Or Gerrit Cole, who toiled for seven seasons before becoming the greatest pitcher in the game?
As Mark Walter, Dodgers’ owner and hedge- fund kingpin with a net worth of $ 3.3 billion? Or Clayton Kershaw, who makes $ 33 million “to throw a baseball” but was raised by a single mother and methodically built himself into a Hall of Famer?
Might Cubs fans shed a tear alongside owner Tom Ricketts, whose family is worth more than $ 5 billion and claims more than 60% of team revenue is tied up in attendance? Or Javier Baez, who lost his father when he was 11 but persevered to emerge from Puerto Rico as the ninth overall pick in the draft seven years later?
Meanwhile, it seems the owners want to shrink the game and also keep your money. Contract the minor leagues? Lop the draft to five rounds this year and maybe 20 after that? Implement a 50- game season rather than pay players on a per- game basis for a longer season?
Where do we sign?
Good luck, though, on recouping cash for tickets lost to COVID- 19 cancellations. The variance in transparency from team to team and the ease, or in some cases lack thereof, with which you can get your money back speaks volumes about how the industry values its customers.
It is all so shortsighted, particularly at a time when 20 of the 30 teams haven’t played a meaningful game in nine months. The average fan might have forgotten about Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor, but he or she does know how to pronounce “pro rata,” at least.
So where do we go from here, as owners ponder whether to unilaterally implement a shortened season? Fifty- six games? Seventy- five? One hundred? It doesn’t really matter.
The season will look like no other, a fate with which fans and owners and players alike had made peace.
It’s the revelations along the way that are a lot more telling about the game’s gatekeepers and the choices they’ll face in the future.